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Virginia Tech Publishing is committed to pushing the boundaries of academic publishing into new forms and formats, including Digital Humanities projects from faculty, staff, and students. Our work with DH projects ranges from hosted and maintained by VTP to fully published publications. If you are interested in publishing a DH project, please contact publishing@vt.edu.
To see more information on DH support from the Virginia Tech University Libraries and other projects out of Virginia Tech, visit: https://guides.lib.vt.edu/dh.
This annotated bibliography gathers a diverse set of resources on housing security issues in remote Alaska Native communities that were circulating during the pandemic. The authors organized these communications into three review sections: modular housing, housing security, and the distribution of COVID relief money in Alaska. Together, these sections provide an overview of chronic housing security issues and a critical snapshot of emergent debates and policy responses to the pandemic.
The Biographical Dictionary of the History of Paleoanthropology is dedicated to providing biographical entries primarily for those paleoanthropologists for whom either little biographical information is available in English or for whom little biographical information exists in any language. This ongoing project focuses on providing biographical entries for nineteenth-century paleoanthropologists as well as those twentieth-century paleoanthropologists that have not been the subject of extensive biographical research. The online format of the Biographical Dictionary of the History of Paleoanthropology allows these biographies to have more detail than what is typically possible in many published biographical dictionaries and to also provide more complete bibliographies of each scientist’s publications as well as scholarly literature for each individual. The plan is to continue to add new biographies each year.
“Love and Suspense in Paris Noir” is an interactive literary analysis published by Publishing Without Walls (PWW), Urbana, Ill., part of the Illinois Open Publishing Network with support from Virginia Tech Publishing. Taking readers on an itinerant journey through Jake Lamar’s novel Rendezvous Eighteenth, Tyechia Thompson, practitioner of Black Paris, explores narratives of African-American expatriates in Lamar’s life, his Paris, and his work. Unfolding in six different paths, this interactive literary analysis pulls together interviews with Jake Lamar and relevant videos, showing Lamar’s chosen setting of the Eighteenth Arrondissement and treatment of race as a departure from contemporary fiction of its type.
The American Soldier project led by Professor Ed Gitre in the Department of History allows users to browse and search over 65,000 pages of uncensored, open-ended responses handwritten by servicemembers, view and download survey data and original analyses, read topical essays by leading historians, and access additional learning resources. The project began in 2015, in 2017 it received a National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access planning grant, and a second implementation NEH grant in 2019. The project launched in 2021 with support from many collaborators, including Virginia Tech University Libraries and Virginia Tech Publishing.
In the Fall 2018 Virginia Tech Department of History course, “Introduction to History,” wondered what the Fourth of July meant for different African Americans, in different parts of the country, over the course of many decades. Did they embrace it? Ignore it? Condemn white celebration as (in Douglass’s words) “a sham”? Students searched seven historical African American newspapers, covering a range of dates and geographical regions, to explore the different meanings attached to the Fourth of July. This website is the result of their research.
The Kremlin Kronicles is a blog pertaining to various aspects of Soviet Culture. On this forum, Soviet Union literature, cinema, poster propaganda, and other cultural artifacts are used to connect history with the culture of the Soviet Union. The site was built by Jon Mark Mastakas when he was a student at Virginia Tech. The site is the winner of the 2017 Digital History Prize from the Virginia Tech History Department.
The VPI in World War One Project is dedicated to exploring and documenting the lives of Virginia Tech's World War I veterans and, through them, understanding this institution's role in that international conflict. Throughout the war over 1,000 Virginia Tech alumni and students served the United States military in some capacity and this project, a collaboration between the Virginia Tech History Department and Virginia Tech University Libraries is a database dedicated to them.
Lord Byron and his Times is a digital archive of books, pamphlets, and periodical essays illustrating the causes and controversies that preoccupied Byron and his contemporaries. The documents, large and small, ephemeral and monumental, underscore the social dimensions of publishing in the romantic era; the archive uses notes, commentary, and links to highlight relationships among their readers and writers. The data from this project has been used to create another ongoing project, Social Networks in Georgian Britain, which is a compilation of 40,000 biographical records available in HTML and the raw XML.
Redlining Virginia is a digital exhibit built using Omeka and is based on a physical exhibit that was held in the Newman Library at Virginia Tech from December 7, 2016 to February 17, 2017 and is part of a larger project, Mapping Inequality, a collaboration of three teams at four universities, including the University of Richmond, the University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, and Virginia Tech. Both Redlining Virginia and Mapping Inequality provides access to a collection of “security maps” and descriptions created by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) between 1935 and 1940. These maps and their corresponding descriptions used a color-coding system to assign risk levels to different areas within a city which were often based on racial lines. As a result, they changed the course of real-estate practice for over a century.
Roanoke Valley in the Great War is a digital project devoted to tracking, documenting, and exploring the lives of Roanoke Valley World War I veterans. Of the more than 4 million American men who served during the First World War, over 3,000 of them were from Virginia's Roanoke Valley. This project seeks to understand the place of the Roanoke area and it's residents within this international conflict. Compared to the Civil War and the Second World War, the First World War receives scant attention. This project hopes to reveal the importance of the First World War by focusing on the lives of those who fought and served in the global conflict.
An Epidemiology of Information seeks to understand how newspapers shaped public opinion during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Using data mining techniques combined with historical and rhetorical analysis to understand the flow of information about the spread and impact of disease, this project explores hundreds of newspaper titles, including those from Chronicling America at the United States Library of Congress and the Peel’s Prairie Provinces collection at the University of Alberta Library.