This page provides an annotated listing of publicly available resources selected by the Library's Subject Specialists in the Humanities. We would note that because many projects in the Humanities are cross-disciplinary in nature, we have avoided applying topical headers on this page, but have instead elected to present our selection in alphabetical order, with some topical notes added to the site descriptions.
We hope that these sites will challenge your assumptions and inspire further exploration.
The British Museum has compiled this online database consisting of digital images and detailed descriptions of 5,000 artifacts and object collections in its holdings. The site links individual artifacts with related items at the British Museum, as well as providing background information, multimedia and exhibition tours that place the object into a larger context. Covers the particular strengths within the BM collections: Egyptology and Western Asia, Roman empire, ancient and medieval Britain, British empire, East Asia, and ancient ethnography world-wide.
A pan-European site that includes more than 4 million digital items, including images, text, audio and video from partner institutions (libraries, archives, museums and universities) across Europe. It includes Web 2.0 features that allow users to bookmark items and save searches.
A major undertaking by the Library of Congress to link its unparalleled collections to those of other libraries and provide access to users around the world. The site presents a variety of digital collections, including several multilingual collections produced in collaboration with the national libraries of France, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, and Brazil that cover topics of mutual interest in the United States and abroad. Also included are online exhibitions, and "portals to the world," a series of in-depth research guides organized nation by nation. A superb resource, aiming toward a broader understanding of American history, world history and area studies.
A major collaborative undertaking by the libraries at the University of Michigan and Cornell University to create public digital access to American publications of the mid-19th century. Encompassing a broad range of materials in American literature, politics and technology, this collaborative digital collection includes 35 seminal journals (10 at Michigan and 22 at Cornell), and more than 1,700 books published between 1830 and 1900. Users should note that the partners maintain separate sites for the project. The link for the Cornell site is provided above; the Michigan site has a separate interface for books and journals. Both sites allow for full-text searching.
Founded in 1976 by Lou Burnard, OTA is designed to serve the research and teaching needs of electronic text users within the scholarly community. OTA provides easy access to high quality digital resources that adhere to recognized bibliographical standards, and works to identify, collect, and preserve well-documented electronic texts and linguistic corpora, which it then makes available through its online interface. In addition to its archival function, the OTA play a vital role in educating the creators and users of digital text resources on the importance of adhering to particular standards during resource creation and documentation, and helping them to make the most effective use of the high-quality resources that are available. Current holdings comprise several thousand texts -- primarily literary and historical works -- in a wide variety of languages.
The World Digital Library (WDL) is a freely available multilingual Internet resource comprising significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world. Its principal objectives are to (a) Promote international and intercultural understanding; (b) Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet; (c) Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences; and (d) Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries. Brown is one of only four U.S. libraries to contribute its digital images to the project.
A project of the Bard Graduate Center, which focuses on the cultural history of the material world, Catena presents an archive of digital images of historic gardens and landscapes from published sources along with contemporary photographs, and is intended as an educational tool for landscape history. The initial component of Catena is built around the villa, an important landscape type in garden history. NOTE: The site uses the Luna Insight browser, and makes extensive use of pop-up windows. Pop-up blocking will need to be disabled in order to view the site properly.
A cooperative digital library for resources from and about the Caribbean and circum-Caribbean. dLOC provides access to digitized versions of Caribbean cultural, historical and research materials currently held in archives, libraries, and private collections. Includes newspapers, photographs, records of Caribbean leaders and governments, official historical documents, and historic and contemporary maps.
A joint project of the Division of Books and Reading and the Institute for the Research and History of the Text in the French Ministry of Culture, this French language site presents more than 80,000 images from 4,000 medieval manuscripts found in hundreds municipal libraries across France. One can explore pre-selected thematic presentations under "Visites Virtuelles" (where the tour can be presented in English or German, in addition to French) or search the database by author, title, type of illumination, context of the illumination, or by the libraries where the manuscripts can be found. Images can be enlarged to show detail, and are presented with a bibliographic description of the text in which they appear.
Some of the wittiest writings of John Adams were never published -- because they were scribbled into the margins of his books. In 1894, the Boston Public Library acquired the private book collection of the much-maligned 2nd President of the United States; this site is the culmination of a more recent long-term project to catalog and describe the collection, in the interest of making it more accessible. The site allows you to peruse the Adams Library collection and view Adams' pithy annotations, download the audiotour for the companion exhibition at BPL, and learn more about how Adams assembled the collection; it also includes materials for teachers and links to related collections in Boston. A must for historians and bibliophiles.
A scholarly project of the Getty Research Institute, this site presents photographs of Mexico that document the numerous social and political changes that took place over the course of the 19th century, as Mexico struggled to achieve independence from European powers. Explores the imperial legacy in Mexican history, as well as the individual histories of eight photographers, and general themes (people, events, sites and objects). Includes a chronology and a bibliography.
Created as a new Smithsonian Museum in the 1980s, the NMAA explores the resonance between tradition and contemporary trends in African art, reaching toward a broader understanding of Africa and its many cultures through examination of the commonplace. Using objects, photographs, music and text to recreate the historical and cultural contexts of African art, the NMAA's many virtual exhibitions, arranged into virtual galleries on its website, will astound you with the beauty and complexity of life in Africa.
ERIC, a scholarly project of the University of Pennsylvania's Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image, provides students, scholars and the general public with access to major texts of the English Renaissance in their original versions, drawn from the collections of Penn's Furness Shakespeare Library. The site includes tutorials on several Shakespeare plays, as well as on the history of the book, publishing and the printing trade in Renaissance England, and the editorial process in early modern times.
Launched in 1999 as a forum for practitioners of odd and experimental music, Oddmusic.com has grown into "a window to the world of odd, unique, experimental and unusual music and musical instruments." The Odd Music Gallery allows the user to see images and hear sound samples of some of the world's most unusual instruments, and provides links for further information about the instrument, including links for instrument makers, vendors and practitioners. The "featured sections" portion of the site allows users to learn more about some important path-breakers in the field of experimental music.
Developed by Prof. Nancy Jacobs (History / Africana Studies) as an instructional tool for her classes in African history and now freely available on the web, the AAAH shows economic, demographic and political change across the continent from 1879 through 2002. Toggle switches for "Political," "Conflict" and "Labels" help to reveal snapshots of Africa at any given historical moment, but the user can also see change over time by allowing the Atlas to run to its endpoint. As you watch the map change, year by year, you will be fascinated by just how much change Africa has endured over the course of the 20th century. An excellent resource for teachers.
Originally created by students of Prof. Massimo Riva (Italian Studies) as part of a course project in 1994-1995, Decameron Web has mushroomed into an immense hypermedia archive devoted to the study of Boccaccio's seminal text. Arranged by topical sections (history, literature, society, religion, the arts, and maps) that reconstruct the context of the Decameron. Work on the project is ongoing. We note that when interviewed on NPR's Studio 360 recently, author Jane Smiley confessed that she based her latest novel on an informed reading of the Decameron. Need we say more?
A searchable database of English language periodicals and books, as well as works of art, by English, Irish and American artists and writers, focused on the rise of modernism between 1890 and 1922. Begun in 1995 under the leadership of Bob Scholes (English), the project was reconceived when the University of Tulsa signed on as a partner in 2003. The project now has complete runs of six important modernist journals, and is still growing. In addition to full text of significant modernist tracts, the MJP site includes biographical sketches of important modernists and a searchable database of pertinent artists.
The official page of the University's Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice includes a wealth of resources for historians, teachers and the general public. You can download, read and print the Committee's final Report, released in October 2006, and a school curriculum for teaching the history of slavery and the slave trade in New England, explore the digital repository of historical documents used by the Committee in its deliberations, or examine the records for the 1764-1765 voyage of the slave ship Sally, which took place at the moment of the University's founding.
