About Our Research
Hidden Histories
Hidden Histories is a groundbreaking research project exploring the application of computational methods to the humanities from 1949 to the present. Through conducting, collecting, and disseminating interviews with pioneering scholars and practitioners, we illuminate the foundational period of what we now know as digital humanities.
The project's origins trace back to 1949, when Roberto Busa envisioned an index variorum of approximately 11 million words of medieval Latin in Thomas Aquinas's works. While recent years have seen increased attention to the history of computing in humanities, many aspects remain unexplored.
By gathering and preserving vital sources, we investigate the social, intellectual, and cultural context that shaped early computing applications in humanities. Our interdisciplinary methodology combines oral history, digital humanities, and cultural studies to capture crucial memories and insights often absent from traditional scholarly literature.
Building upon Hidden Histories' foundational work, MeDoraH represents an innovative advancement in digital humanities research methodology. This collaborative venture between University College London and TU Darmstadt introduces cutting-edge semantic web technologies and digital methods to oral history research.
MeDoraH enriches the existing Hidden Histories interview corpus by incorporating ten new German-language interviews, broadening our understanding beyond the Anglophone world. The project pioneers a novel methodological framework combining traditional oral history approaches with advanced computational techniques, enabled by a comprehensive knowledge graph and specialized ontologies.
Through innovative natural language processing across English and German sources, MeDoraH creates structured representations of oral history interviews adhering to FAIR data principles. This technical infrastructure supports sophisticated analyses while preserving the nuanced nature of oral history research.
Our interactive portal enables researchers, digital humanists, and oral historians to explore this enhanced interview corpus, facilitating novel investigations into the formation and evolution of digital humanities as a field. Project outputs include semantically enriched interview transcriptions, a pioneering oral history ontology, and new methodological frameworks for digital oral history research.