Digital Projects

The Saint Louis Story: Learning & Living Racial Justice is a public digital humanities project that joins community-based learning and scholarship with interdisciplinary work by collaborators from various institutions and neighborhoods in the St. Louis area. We have undertaken this project envisioning a more just and equitable city achieved by raising awareness of systemic racism and working to address inequity through research and activism. As such, The Saint Louis Story contains historical information and educational resources.

The Saint Louis Story is a living collaboration — the project is never complete. Community partners, undergraduate and graduate students, faculty members and administrators are constantly collaborating to expand the information and resources on the site. The Saint Louis Story is also more than a website. The project forms a hub of activity to unite people to form sustained and transformational relationships.

The Saint Louis Story also acts as the cornerstone of the OngCDH's' publicly engaged initiatives that complement the other digital humanities platforms available through the site.

If you are interested in working on or contributing to this project, please contact OngCDH Director Allen Brizee, Ph.D., at digitalhumanities@slu.edu.

Broken Books is a web-based application that allows for the digital reconstruction of dismembered books that were taken apart, "broken" into pieces and dispersed at some time in their history. Broken Books enables a project administrator to collect, organize, and order digital images and related metadata to virtually reconstruct the original codex. It also permits users to contribute crowd-sourced images, information and descriptive metadata to a project.

The test-case manuscript for the Broken Books project was the Llangattock Breviary, a lavishly decorated illuminated manuscript made in the 15th century. Deriving its nickname from a later owner, John Allan Rolls, the first baron Llangattock, the breviary was sold at Christie's, London, in 1958. After the sale, this manuscript was broken apart and many of the separated leaves were sold on the American market by Goodspeeds, a book dealer from Boston. Saint Louis University owns seven leaves from this manuscript.

Working with collaborative partners, including many members of Digital Scriptorium, digital images of this book's leaves have been assembled from institutions and private collections all over the world, including the American Academy in Rome; Dartmouth College; Harvard University; the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library in Collegeville, Minnesota; the Louvre Museum; Michigan State University; the Museo Schifanoia in Ferrara, Italy; the Royal Library in Copenhagen, Denmark; University of California, Berkeley; University of South Carolina; and University of Washington.

DigiSig is a digital resource for studying sigillography, particularly medieval seals from the British Isles. Hundreds of thousands of seals survive from medieval Europe, and they provide unique and important information. A seal is "a mark of authority or ownership, pressed in relief upon a plastic material by the impact of a matrix or die-engraved intaglio." Men and women from all levels of society used seals to validate documents and to make statements about their family connections, social aspirations, and personal values. Seals incorporate text and images, so they are powerful tools for communication and expression. Seals offer insight into identity and expose regional and local cultural variations in a period starved of evidence concerning the individual.

Developed by the Associate Director of the Ong Center John McEwan, DigiSig fosters sigillographic research by linking and matching sigillographic datasets and making that information available. DigiSig brings together a number of major datasets, produced by the archives, museums and the higher education sectors, that are publicly accessible and used extensively by the public and academic researchers. These datasets have been reconfigured, enhanced and integrated, so that they can be searched in concert, and photographs added, where available. The system enables users to access sigillographic information in traditional ways, but in a novel format.

RERUM provides digital humanities software solutions for increased interoperability and access to ensure free and open sharing of data. The RERUM space already provides a free and open annotation store to support the open democratization of the IIIF standard as a working platform for scholarship and research.

Other tools include Manifest creator, Transcription reader, Manifest editor and a variety of IIIF community-developed tools. RERUM is being built to be a creative suite of research tools to allow any scholar or researcher to assemble, manipulate and publish through the IIIF material making their work more discoverable and usable by other scholars, all while building on the attribution and citation model inherent in the standard to allow users to know who the work originated from and contribute to it.

The latest addition is the LDN Toolbox, which facilitates better discovery, an open feedback loop, and the constant enhancement of scholarly resources.

T-PEN is an online transcription environment for digitized images of texts in many forms, from personal letters to charters to manuscripts. T-PEN has recently enabled "Right Left" text and supports XML encoding as well as a number of dedicated transcription tools and resources. It uses the IIIF standard to create line-by-line transcriptions of texts with the freedom to upload and transcribe their images. T-PEN is on version 2.8, and 3.0 is under development. Generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation makes this project possible.

Tradamus is a web-based application that assists scholars in the creation and publication of scholarly digital editions. It builds upon the successful transcription tool, T-PEN, and provides tools for use in the five main editing methods used in the scholarly editing of pre-modern texts. It permits scholars to create transcriptions on the fly, import existing transcriptions of manuscripts, collate those witnesses, create an apparatus criticus or other apparatus, attach annotations or commentary (and even translations) to the edition, and assist in proofreading the final product.

The publishing component supports static e-editions for both e-readers and web pages, enables dynamic web-based editions and serialization of the edition, and assists in peer review of print publications.