Skip to Main Content

Digital Humanities

This guide provides an overview of Digital Humanities (DH) resources and tools for the SDSU community.

Sample DH Projects

Looking for inspiration? The following are a few really excellent DH projects. If you think there is a project we should add to this page, please email us at librarydh@sdsu.edu


  • American Panorama “is an historical atlas of the United States for the twenty-first century. It combines cutting-edge research with innovative interactive mapping techniques, designed to appeal to anyone with an interest in American history or a love of maps.”
  • American Prison Writers Project is a collection of “non-fiction writing by currently incarcerated Americans writing about their experience inside.” 
  • Borderlands Archives Cartography is a "project that consists of a digital map which displays a U.S.-Mexico border newspapers cartography that records geographic locations of nineteenth and mid-twentieth century periodicals. The project emerges from the constant and current aggressive, political rhetoric that displays the geographic and ideological border between the United States and Mexico as a threat. As border natives our perspectives of the border are not represented by the political discourse. We understand the borderland as a space where different cultures co-exist under strong political, economic, and social hegemonies; as well as, a space where regions influence each other, but maintain their own identities. As part of the borderlands communities we understand the importance of visualizing material from the region."
  • Black Digital Humanities Projects and Resources is a list of projects, resources, events, and anything else. 
  • Colored Conventions “endeavors to transform teaching and learning about this historic collective organizing effort—and about the many leaders and places involved in it—bringing them to digital life for a new generation of students and scholars across disciplines and for community researchers interested in the history of activist church, civil rights, educational and entrepreneurial engagement.”
  • EXPOSED "documents the spread of COVID-19, over time, inside ... prisons, jails, and detention centers, from the perspective of prisoners, detainees, and their families. Quotes, audio clips, and statistics collected from a comprehensive array of online publications and broadcasts, are assembled into an interactive timeline that, on each day, offers abundant testimony to the risk and trauma that prisoners experience under coronavirus quarantine ... EXPOSED reveals the overwhelming scope and scale of this humanitarian crisis. The monochrome, image-less, headline-styled interface, which allows viewers to step through thousands of prisoners’ statements, is designed to visualize their collective suffering, and signal that the injustices they endure are structural."
  • Library of Missing Data Sets is a repository of "blank spots that exist in spaces that are otherwise data-saturated... Unsurprisingly, this lack of data typically correlates with issues affecting those who are most vulnerable in that context." 
  • Public Secrets “reconfigures the physical, psychological, and ideological spaces of the prison, allowing us to learn about life inside the prison along several thematic pathways and from multiple points of view.”
  • #QueerDH Projects is a crowdsourced list of sites at the intersection of queer studies and digital humanities including sites developed by classes, communities, and academics/institutions, reflecting decades of preserving queer stories online.  
  • Surfacing is “a digital mapping project about the undersea network of cables that support our global network society.” 
  • Torn Apart/Separados “is a deep and radically new look at the territory and infrastructure of ICE’s financial regime in the USA. This data & visualization intervention peels back layers of culpability behind the humanitarian crisis of 2018.”
  • United Fronteras "brings together active, inactive and works in progress to document the borderlands from multiple perspectives (literature, archives, art, oral histories, music, among others) from pre-colonial times to the twenty-first century. The projects will be featured through several digital forms and registers, from exhibits to maps. Our goal is to offer audiences a unique opportunity to meaningfully engage in the multidimensional layers of border regions."

 

And check out the project registry from Reviews in Digital Humanities.

 

Digital Humanities at SDSU Projects

We're building a portfolio of DH projects at SDSU. Explore our growing collection of student and faculty projects here.