Frequently Asked Questions

The Institute of Digital Arts and Humanities or IDAH is a research center under OVPR. As a member of this institution, we work to support faculty and students with their research and pedagogical plans that have a digital humanities or arts component.

Digital humanities is an area of study that deals with the intersection of digital methods with humanities topics. This definition is expansive and includes a wide range of digital methods and research topics. We have supported projects in arts, economics, and history using methods like 3D printing, text analysis, and network analysis. Check out some of those projects here and some digital methods here.

Digital methods are useful for creating visualizations, analyzing large amounts of information, and following new routes of publishing findings online. More about these digital methods can be found here.

Consultations! During consultations, you get to tell us about your project, its digital components, and your questions or concerns. We’ll be happy to provide resources, suggestions, and guidance. You can schedule a consultation here.

Sydney Stutsman - Black, White, and Gay All Over 

Sydney studied the gay rights movement at IU in the 1970s using the Indiana Daily Student.  

Eric Ware - Papal Letters, Networks, and Geographies, 844-1032

Eric created a geographical and network visualization of the letters sent by late medieval popes. 

Jazma Sutton - Susan and Margaret Wilkerson: Mapping the Escape of Two Self-Liberated Girls on the Midwestern Fronteir

Jazma created a digital map and presentation combining oral interviews, physical spaces, and a historic records of the Wilkersons. 

Sarah Edmands Martin: When All Things Could Speak

With her project, "When All Things Speak", Sarah has been working on the artistic work that blends archival research, digital design, and folklore specific to the central and Southern central regions of Indiana.

Seth Adam Cook: Âme Memoriale (Soul Memorial)

Seth made flower petals and a memorial box with images of a family of Italian immigrants who immigrated in 1910 to explore the fragility of identity against assimilation. 

Puffy Zhao:  3D Printed and Enameled Ring Series

Puffy combined 3D printing and enameling to make rings inspired by microscopic lifeforms and the limits of human perception. 

Cordula Grewe: Reconstructing the Past, Teaching the Present: Virtual Reality, Cultural Heritage, and Primary Source Education

Cordula created a protype of a system that creates an immersive and self-directed environment for students to explore the context of a piece of art. 

Devon Fisher: Identity and Sound

Devon studied the way social norms and our expectations for a space can influence our experience within it by recording and playing audio submitted by passerbys. 

Sarah Duke: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story: Topic Modeling Alexander Hamilton

Sarah topic modeled text from Alexander Hamilton's letters and lyrics from the hit musical to study their influence on the lyrics and how the musical changed perceptions of Hamilton. 

Heather Sloan: Mapping Deforestation and Afro-Caribbean Drum-making Traditions

Heather mapped deforestation and interviewed traditional Afro-Caribbean drum-makers to show how the environmental changes impacted their traditions. 

Amelia López López: Making Sense of the Archives: A Digital Exhibit on the Hemispheric Work of Delia, Manuel, and George

Amelia aims to unbury, understand, and amplify the voices of Afro-Colombian artists, activists, and scholars, Delia and Manuel Zapata Olivella through the collaborations between these Afro-Colombian siblings and the U.S. ethnomusicologist George List - former faculty and director of the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University.

Allie Martin: Musical and Sonic Dimensions of Gentrification

Allie recorded audio at a DC intersection to study the noise markers of gentrification. 

Kate Mullen: Archives Speaking for Themselves: Modeling Discourse in Traditional and Community Archives

Kate data-mined mission statements of community and institutional music archives and traced different language usage with mapping. 

SPANISH & PORTUGUESE

Kane Ferguson: Savored Memories and the Cuban Culinary Imaginary: Digital Archive & Analysis

Kane  investigates the origins of the Cuban cuisine memorialized in the recent nostalgic writing of Cuban exiles.

José Luis Suárez Morales: Monumentalizing Memory: Symbolic Struggles and Urban Landscapes in San Salvador

José's project maps the monuments erected during the Salvadoran Civil War (1979-1992) and especially after the peace process in San Salvador (1992-1993) related to this conflict.

Patricia Amaral: The Company Words Keep: Tracing Semantic Change With Distributional Methods

Patricia cleaned archived texts to create a dataset allowing investigation of how the meaning of words has shifted over time based on the contexts in which words are used. 

Daryl Spurlock: Reading the World in Territorial New Mexico

Daryl analyzed El Independiente, a Spanish-language weekly newspaper publish in New Mexico during its late Territorial and early Statehood periods. He used these aper to argue that the weekly publications played a role in the development of the Neomexicano. 

Guillermo Lopez-Prieto: A Discourse Analysis of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666

Guillermo studied the frequency of the word 'death' in Bolaño's post-mortem novel 2666. His study focused on chapter 4, which has a unique perspective, to detemine how it compares to the rest of the book.  

FRENCH & ITALIAN

Nicolas Valazza: Banned Books and Prints in Europe and the United States, 17th-20th C. 

Nicolas Valazza, a previous IDAH Faculty Fellow, worked with IDAH to create an online exhibit of banned books and printed materials from the Lilly Libraries and the Kinsey Institute using Omeka.

Lino Mioni: Mapping Culinary and Gustatory Taste through Time

Lino Mioni used network analysis to assess the novelty of Italian-language culinary recipe collections from the 14th and 15th centuries. 

Massimo Ossi: Musicians among Venetians: Kinship Networks, 1600-1650

Massimo Ossi used network analysis to examine relationships between Venetian musicians and their patrons in the 1600s.

Brandon Stokes - Forming a Community: Heartbreak and Triumph in Making Black Chicago

Brandon examines the interviews conducted in his research on housing and the making of Black Chicago.

Borns Jewish Studies Program

Sarah Imhoff: Women and Citations in Jewish Studies 

Sarah uses bibliometric analyses of gender and Jewish studies scholarship to investigate why although women make up about half of Jewish Studies scholars, and 42% of tenure-track faculty at R1 universities, they make up only about a quarter of cited authors in peer reviewed journals.

Jillian Rogers - Sonic Constellations in Process: Challenges and Outcomes of a Multi-Faceted DH Project

Jillian's project is focused on making research on music, sound, and trauma in France in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century widely available to scholarly and non-scholarly publics.

Giovanni Zanovello - New Isaac Edition Website: Companion site to critical musical edition

Giovanni and the members of the editorial team are developing a set of online tools to complement the edition of Renaissance composer Heinrich Isaac’s works. While the modern score of Isaac’s works will be published in physical format, a companion website will contain the critical notes.

Zuoyu Tian - Automatically Dating Classical Chinese Texts: Preliminary Study on Biji and Buddhist Texts

Zuoyu approaches the issue of how language changes across time and across genres by using classification tasks.

Drew Heiderscheidt - Policing, Punishment, Property, Control: A Brief History of Policing and the Prison Industrial Complex in Colorado’s Front Range, 1850s–Present

Through a story map, Drew seeks to expand the geographical focus of the prison industrial complex's (PIC) history by briefly illuminating the PIC’s historical development in Colorado’s Front Range region, with a particular emphasis on policing, starting in the mid-1850s and concluding in the early 21st century.

Sean McKinnon: Las Voces de Indiana

Sean worked with a class of Spanish heritage speakers, who were raised in a Spanish speaking household, to create a website of narrative articles about Latino life and organizations in Indiana.

Kalani Craig: History Harvest

Kalani's class ran a History Harvest where participants were invited to bring in personally sentimental objects and describe how they came to own them, their meaning, and how they reflected their connection to Indiana university.