Digital Humanities projects affiliated with Willson DigiLab attract notice

US News MapTwo projects of eHistory, an initiative founded by Stephen Berry and Claudio Saunt of the UGA department of history and affiliated with the Willson Center Digital Humanities Lab, have launched websites in recent weeks and been written up in the national media.

CSI Dixie is headed by Berry, Gregory Professor of the Civil War Era in the department of history and Willson Center associate academic director for digital humanities. The web-based project uses 19th-century coroners’ records from South Carolina to create a detailed picture of how ordinary people died in the Victorian-era South, providing rare glimpses into suicide, homicide, infanticide, abortion, child abuse, spousal abuse, master-slave murder, and slave on slave violence.

The US News Map is a collaborative project by Berry and Saunt, Russell Professor of American History and chair of the department of history, with the Georgia Tech Research Institute. The interactive map allows users to see how awareness of key historical events and ideas spread across the country using data from nearly 2,000 U.S. newspapers – about 10 million pages – published between 1836 and 1924.

The GTRI’s informative article on the US News Map is here. The project has also been written about in the Washington Post, as well as in Slate and Mental Floss.

Slate has also published a piece on CSI Dixie, and the project was mentioned in The New York Times as well.