Digital Humanities

Digital approaches to literature reframe the way we have traditionally seen, understood, analyzed, published, and preserved our cultural heritage. Scholarship in digital humanities, for example, tends to be collaborative rather than solitary in nature. The team-oriented approach means that questions larger than any one person could undertake can be addressed. And because many projects are web-based, the public is invited into the creation or reconsideration of cultural knowledge through our scholarly efforts.

The Department is home to a range of cutting-edge digital work. Students in our department are immersed in digital archive building, computational text analysis, and textual scholarship to explore questions central to the study of literature across history and continents. Our composition and rhetoric faculty have expertise in digital writing environments and digital rhetoric. And our close relationship with the internationally recognized Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) allows students to engage in exciting Center-sponsored activities and to get a first-hand experience of complex digital humanities project development.

We encourage you to jump into an exciting world where code grapples with art and faculty and students work together to create digital archives out of the materials of poets, scholars, journalists, explorers, and novelists. For more on DH in the Department of English, contact the current department DH coordinator, Stephen Ramsay, at sramsay2@unl.edu.

Key Opportunities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH)

Digital humanities faculty and students in the Department of English work closely with the university's distinguished Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH). Without the staff and resources of the Center, which is a joint initiative of the University Libraries and the College of Arts & Sciences, most of the Department of English projects listed above would not have been possible. The Center works with scholars and departments across the university, sponsors various activities related to digital humanities practice, and offers undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to hone their technical skills while taking part in cutting edge digital humanities research. For more on the Center, contact its co-directors Andrew Jewell at ajewell2@unl.edu and Kenneth Price at kprice2@unl.edu.

Nebraska Forum on Digital Humanities

The Nebraska Forum on Digital Humanities is an annual thematic exploration of issues in Digital Humanities. Sponsored by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and bringing speakers from institutions around the world, the Forum has been organized around topics like Social Justice and Cultural Memory, Video Games and the Humanities, and Digital Cultural Heritage.

Digital Humanities Faculty

Brett Barney is a research associate professor in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and has been involved in the creation and maintenance of the Walt Whitman Archive since 2000. He served two terms on the technical council of the Text Encoding Initiative and is especially interested in encoding protocols that support the creation of documentary editions and the identification of various, complex relationships among documents and parts of documents.

Matt Cohen is a contributing editor at the Walt Whitman Archive, where his projects include digitizing Whitman’s marginal annotations, building a visualizable handlist of reprints of Whitman’s poetry, and improving access to translations of Whitman’s work. That work informed his book Whitman’s Drift: Imagining Literary Distribution (University of Iowa Press, 2017). He is also a co-editor of the Charles W. Chesnutt Archive.

Editor and writer Kwame Dawes is the editor of Prairie Schooner and the founder and director of the African Poetry Book Fund, the home of the African Poetry Digital Portal and several African poetry book series. Dawes’s scholarship is in post-colonial studies, African literature, Caribbean literature, and African American Literature. He won an Emmy for new approaches to news and documentary programming for LiveHopeLove.com, and has received grants from the Ford Foundation and the Mellon Foundation for digital humanities projects.

Amanda Gailey’s research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century American literature, digital editing, and the sociopolitical implications of technology.

Andy Jewell is the director of the Willa Cather Archive, a large online archive and publisher of digital resources relating to the American author (like the Complete Letters of Willa Cather, debuting in January 2018). After years of experience creating a digital research collection, he seeks to explore connections between his DH work and public humanities programming, likely through new forms like community events and short films.

Elizabeth Lorang co-directs Image Analysis for Archival Discovery, a cross-disciplinary, multi-institution project that seeks to leverage the information potential of digital images to enhance discovery and access to historic materials. She is also the co-editor of a digital edition of newspaper poetry from the Anglo-African and National Anti-Slavery Standard.

Kenneth M. Price co-directs the Walt Whitman Archive and Civil War Washington. With Ray Siemens, Elizabeth Lorang, and Dene Grigar, he co-edits Literary Studies in the Digital Age: An Evolving Anthology, the Modern Language Association’s first online only publication.

Ng’ang’a Wahu-Mũchiri teaches African and African Diaspora Literatures, as well as a course titled “Global Anti-Racism Movements from the Civil Rights Era to Now.” The class empowers students to ask profound, interesting, and creative questions that advance our understanding of social justice, activism, and literature’s role in political movements. His research in representations of African land is the subject of a current monograph project titled Land & Landscape in Literature from Eastern & Southern Africa. His contributions to edited anthologies include: “Depictions of Kenyan Lands & Landscapes by Four Women Writers” in the 2019 Routledge Handbook of African Literature. The Ardhi Initiative is an ongoing digital humanities project that encodes and curates colonial land treaties between European nations and African political entities.

Stephen Ramsay splits his time between pontificating about digital humanities, teaching humanities majors to program, designing and building text technologies for humanist scholars, and composing music using computers. He is the author of Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism (University of Illinois Press, 2011) and (with Patrick Juola) Six Septembers: Mathematics for the Humanist (Zea E-Books, 2017).

Adrian S. Wisnicki is interested in applying advanced imaging to manuscript study and developing digital archives and museums. He directs both Livingstone Online and the Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project, two collaborative international projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. "He directs both Livingstone Online and the Livingstone Spectral Imaging Project, two collaborative international projects funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is also lead developer for One More Voice, a DH project that focuses on recovering non-European contributions from nineteenth-century British imperial and colonial archives, and co-organizer of Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, a DH project that reimagines how to teach Victorian Studies through a positive, race-conscious lens.