Here are some of the innovative final projects that students have completed for the DH Certificate.
Following “The North Star”: Exploring an Abolitionist Newspaper
Alex Bice, Spring 2021
Following “The North Star” is a digital history project focusing on the abolitionist newspaper The North Star. The North Star was one of the most well know abolitionist papers of its era. Edited by Frederick Douglass, and briefly co-edited by M.R. Delany, it served as a major mouthpiece for the abolitionist movement. The paper called for an end to the oppression of African Americans in the United States, and used the language of the Declaration of Independence and other sources to argue that equality was an important but unfulfilled part of the American political tradition that began with the Revolution. This project attempts to look at how Douglass and Delany engaged in this task, including what rhetorical tools and arguments they employed.
View the full project here.
The Cold War and Word Embeddings: Exploring Gender in the FRUS Series, 1945-1968
Cassandra Cloutier, Spring 2021
This project explores the language used by State Department officials during the Cold War. By isolating the documents concerning Latin American nations during the early years of the Cold War, this project seeks to examine how the State Department regarded gender within the Western hemisphere between 1945-1968.
View the full project here.
The Women of the OSS and SOE: Counter Archives, War Intelligence, and Narrative Building
Anjelica Oswald, Spring 2021
This project aims to showcase different ways that archival research can be presented digitally. It presents new ways to understand history by engaging with archiving and narrative storytelling. This project specifically features research on the women of both the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Britain’s espionage organization, and the United State’s Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor organization to the CIA. The historical implications of women in intelligence roles are not always apparent. Though this project is not all-encompassing, this site shows examples of how widespread these espionage organizations were throughout the world and just how active women were involved, both in the office and in the field.
View the full project here.
Riots or Rebellions: Teaching Boston’s Racial Unrest
Danielle Rose, Spring 2021
Americans have protested against injustice for centuries. When the protests turn violent, different terms are often used to classify them: civil unrest, riots, disorders, and rebellions, to name a few. What determines which term is used? Oftentimes, it is the race of those protesting. According to historian Jack Schneider, history has shown that white citizens who rise up against tyranny or inequality are honored as heroes or patriots. Conversely, when people of color do the same, they are usually labeled as rioters or troublemakers. These misnomers are generally perpetuated through mainstream media coverage that tends to focus more on the protest tactics and violence, rather than the underlying issues of the social movements themselves. Furthermore, scholars cite lack of diversity in news organizations, as well as biases against protests that do not follow the status quo, as some of the main reasons for inadequate—and at times, inaccurate—coverage of race-related protests. This, in turn, contributes to the delegitimization of the larger movements. The main goal of this project is to contribute to the larger discussion of how race-related protests are covered in newspapers and perceived by the general public.
View the full project here.
Stone Journal Text Analysis Project
Alicia Svenson, Spring 2021
The goal of this project is to explore the use of text analysis tools on scanned primary source journals that have been processed with optical character recognition (OCR) to see what kind of useful information can be obtained through these methods and how helpful this process can be as a research tool. This project is driven by questions of how employers within the stone industry approached workplace safety, health, and environmental issues. Are changes visible within the written record of the stone industry’s general publications? Was it a serious concern that was discussed between multiple employers within the industry or did these discussions not get a lot of attention in the general record?
View the full project here.
Meg Szydlik, Spring 2021
This archive was particularly inspired by the controversy over Bryan Cranston taking the role of a disabled person in a film. As a disabled person, Meg was actively against this decision and was seeing a lot of articles with wildly different opinions. However, Meg also noticed that a lot of these articles were not written by disabled people, but still purported to speak for them. Therefore, Meg decided to explore content that was written by disabled people about representation of disability in the media.
View the full project here.
Topic Modeling Headline News About the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, 1964-1966
Adam Tomasi, Spring 2021
This project is a topic model of headline news coverage about the anti-Vietnam War movement between 1964 and 1966. Headline news shaped how a reading public understood the anti-Vietnam War movement at this time. Unlike editorials or advertisements that have a more obvious bent, headline news is ostensibly an imminent, neutral recounting of past events. But headline news is not neutral; journalists have to make choices about the selection, arrangement, and prioritization of data, which shapes the topics represented in the corpus.
View the full project here.
Avery Blankenship, Spring 2020
Coding the Bechdel Test is a comprehensive tutorial for developing a computational version of the Bechdel Test for nineteenth-century novels. Because this tutorial is invested in feminist coding practices, it does not assume that this code or this version of the test is the only solution that works, or works in the best way. As a result, users are invited to edit the code and try different methods for improving on this test. The code for this tutorial will be available as a Jupyter Notebook on Github and if any improvements are made to the code, users are encouraged to submit their improvements. This tutorial is deeply invested in feminist practice and inclusivity and welcomes feedback on the language of the tutorial as well as accessibility of material.
View the full project here.
remiXML: Incorporating XML in First Year Writing
Cara Marta Messina, Spring 2020
This project merges interest in fan studies, critical pedagogy, and DH by building an XML (extensible mark-up language) schema that asks student writers to remix shared readings and their peers’ texts. This schema, called the remiXML, is broken up into three sections: the metadata (descriptions of the file, author, remixer, and title), the original text (either the shared reading or a student writers’ assignment), and the play section (where the student writers create their interventions about the text).
View the full project here.
Mahala Nyberg, Spring 2020
Behind the Blue Line is a collection of exploratory maps that investigates the experiences of conservation workers in the Adirondack region of New York State in the mid to late twentieth century. Through a survey of worker experiences and stories from conservation efforts in the region, an understanding of the impact of individuals on the landscape of the Adirondacks can be gained. This project also showcases the execution of conservation efforts behind the legislative decisions that have determined environmental policy in the Adirondacks and brings attention to the current environmental concerns faced by the region.
View the full project here.
Hailey Philbin, Spring 2020
The goal of this digital platform is to function as an exhibit space for some of the greatest American political cartoons. By analyzing how the interpretation of themes like racism and ethnicity, Presidential politics, gender roles, and symbols have evolved throughout modern political cartoon history, visitors to the site can learn how to decode cartoons from the past as well as today. As a demonstration of the evolution of political cartooning, this digital exhibit can function as a guide to gaining the skills it takes to understand generations of historical hilarity. This digital space will also serve to explore and describe a comprehensive evolution of modern American political cartooning by comparing the periods of work between three prolific cartoonists: Thomas Nast, Clifford Berryman, and Herbert Block.
View the full project here.
Carly Quinn, Spring 2020
Cold War Confidential is a public history project featuring an interactive, digital, text adventure gaming experience. Acting as the US President, students will analyze top-secret documents and attempt to resolve a Cold War crisis in real-time using the gaming platform, Quest. Cold War Confidential was created to be used in conjunction with high school and college-level history curricula. A basic understanding of the Cold War is required for this project to be utilized successfully.
View the full project here.
Histories or Stories? The Power of Historical Narratives
Shannon Webber, Spring 2020
Histories or Stories? is a project centered around stories included in the works of the famous New England storyteller Edward Rowe Snow. The stories are a mix of both historically verifiable and non-verifiable accounts. Each possesses extreme historical value and are worthwhile tools for the teaching of history.
View the full project here.
Megan Barney, Spring 2019
History Needs New Heroes seeks to reveal who gets presented as a “hero” in high school American history textbooks from 1945 to the present. Through close reading and content analysis of three recently published textbooks, this project identifies missing voices. As a result, this project will write new narratives on American heroes that can inspire students to find stories that they can relate to in the present day.
View the full project here.
DEV 3D: A Historic Project Toolkit
Lauren Bergnes Sell, Spring 2019
Downtown Boston is brimming with historic sites and artifacts, but many of them remain inaccessible for a litany of reasons. 3D Modeling and digitization of spaces and artifacts allow greater accessibility to these spaces and artifacts that may lie behind geographical, financial, and physical barriers. This project utilizes the 18th-century tombs located beneath The King’s Chapel as a case study for exploring the role of these new technologies within exhibits and interpretive themes.
With a theoretical foundation nested in Yi-Fu Tuan’s “Space and Place: Humanistic Perspective” and 3D modeling and Public History theory, Dev 3D hopes to provide early blueprints and case studies for creating and implementing 3D models in a variety of ways within a historic/cultural space. The prototype toolkit contains a list of software, tools, and methods for constructing simple 3D artifacts that can be used to create 3D printed models, Augmented Reality apps, or digital exhibits.
View the full project here.
Rat(io)s in the Walls (of Text): An H.P. Lovecraft Digital Humanities Portfolio
Kenneth Haley, Spring 2019
In recent years there has been a renewed interest in the work of H.P. Lovecraft, and a reassessment of his place in American literary history. Once relegated to the pulp magazines of the early 20th century, the past 20 years has seen Lovecraft’s work added to publishing lines such as The Library of America, Oxford World’s Classics, and the Penguin Classics line. Meanwhile, numerous “omnibus,” “definitive,” and “annotated” editions of his work have been released from various publishers. How and why has work that was published in a cheap, disposable format survived to this day and garnered such attention?
Rat(ios) in the Walls (of Text) attempts to examine the “how” portion of that question through the application of various tools developed as part of the growing field of the Digital Humanities.
View the full project here.
Molly Nebiolo, Spring 2019
It has been difficult to visualize Boston’s early history prior to the first map of the city in 1722. In the late nineteenth-century, Boston cartographer Samuel Chester Clough attempted to remedy this problem by crafting maps of Boston using inhabitant data found in The Book of Possessions, but never completed the project. “The Birth of Boston” is a twenty-first century attempt at reviving Clough’s venture into discerning what Boston looked like and who lived there during its settlement.
“The Birth of Boston” is an interactive webmap of colonial Boston that allows users to click on land parcels to learn about each inhabitant that lived there in 1648. Clough’s maps are the basis for the geographic information we have on the land ownership of settlers, but the second resource for this digital project comes from the Annie Haven Thwing collection. At the turn of the twentieth century, Thwing researched and created a corpus detailing the lives of over 50,000 Boston inhabitants from 1630 to 1822. This database of citizen information was used to give a “face” to the names that Clough has depicted on his map.
View the full project here.
Colleen Nugent, Spring 2019
This project provides a new layer of context to the study of Muslims in France, through digital maps of the three French cities with at least 10% Muslim population. The laws regarding secularism in France, however, provided an immediate barrier to information, with a law from the late nineteenth century banning the collection of any data regarding race or religion. Therefore this project uses Islamic institutions, such as mosques, private Islamic schools, and halal restaurants and markets as a metric of potentially determining levels of assimilation. These maps also include the locations of public transportation stops, both buses and metro, with an assumption that accessibility to public transport can serve as an indicator of assimilation. For comparison, there is a comprehensive map that also depicts the locations of Catholic churches and Jewish synagogues.
View the full project here.
Katie and Megan Woods, Spring 2019
From Grateful Friends explores public memory, the ways in which a collective group remembers its past. This project’s central focus is a prototype of a map that shows the physical forms of public memory (memorials, markers, museums, and a cemetery) of World War II in Luxembourg. Luxembourgers and Americans have worked to record and preserve the stories of their shared history from this time, with their mutual feelings of gratitude still present today.
A work in progress, the map will continue to grow with the addition of new stories and sites of memory. The map is joined by other tools visitors may explore: a historical timeline, blog, and resources. Through these elements, From Grateful Friends celebrates the coming together of two countries in war and reminds us of the richness of international friendship and camaraderie.
View the full project here.
The Digital Atlas of Southern Memory
Caroline Klibanoff, Spring 2018
In an era of fervent memorialization and contentious debates about who and what should be commemorated in the public sphere, the conversation has largely been limited to physical monuments such as statues, plaques, and landmarks. These structures advance narrow cultural narratives about the past, require significant capital to establish, and allow for no interaction or annotation by the public. As a result, there is little opportunity for most Americans to participate in what gets remembered – and yet the hunger is there, visible in heated debates, defaced statues, and renamed spaces cropping up in communities across the nation.
With a theoretical underpinning in collected memory studies and public history, the Digital Atlas of Southern Memory (DASM) presents a prototype for a platform that can enable broader participation in the commemoration process. It aims to be an engine for doing what public history, at its best, should do: meet modern, digital audiences where they are; help them connect with their own history, and awaken a curiosity — and usually, an opinion — about what they hope will be remembered.
View the full project here.
Angelenos Incarcerated: The LA County Jail Oral History Project
Joanne DeCaro, Spring 2017
The LA County Jail Oral History Project aims to document the conditions, culture, and recent history of the LA County jail system through the oral histories of former and current inmates. The project wishes to create an opportunity to grant an authoritative voice to the literally disenfranchised minority of the former and current local inmate population in Los Angeles County. Five oral histories have been gathered from those who were incarcerated in one of the LA County jails from the 1980s to the present day. The project’s long-term goal is to collect 80 to 100 oral histories to form a representative sample of former and current inmates, taking into account factors such as race, gender, and sexual orientation.
The underlying philosophical goals of the project are to provide an opportunity for inmates and former inmates to create authoritative narratives of their experiences in the LA County jail system in a manner that supports inmates regaining and reimagining ownership of their life stories surrounding incarceration and to foster dialogue and understanding with the inmate community and the general public.
View the full project here.
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Type of Program
- Graduate Certificate
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