Our Research Projects
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.
Building on Hidden Histories' foundation, MDOH represents a pioneering initiative exploring oral history through multiple representational modalities. This project transcends the traditional text-centric approach by engaging with oral history artifacts as multifaceted resources—incorporating transcripts, sound, waveforms, metadata, and other modalities as analytical categories of inquiry.
MDOH advances digital oral history beyond passive digitization and online dissemination, embracing what we term the "sound as data" turn. The project investigates how data-driven methodologies can reveal new insights when applied to oral history as sonic and multimodal artifacts, both individually and at scale. Through rigorous exploration of digital tools, processes, and platforms, MDOH establishes frameworks for analyzing the rich complexity of oral testimonies in their full sensory dimensions.
Central to MDOH is a commitment to reflexive digital practice. While leveraging computational approaches, the project remains attuned to oral history as a subjective and intersubjective meaning-making process situated within specific cultural, temporal, and technological contexts. This balance enables innovative analytical methods while preserving the human-centered nature of oral historical inquiry.
By sharing research outputs, digital tools, and hosting an international seminar series, MDOH creates a collaborative environment for oral historians and digital humanists to explore new research questions and forge transdisciplinary partnerships. The project contributes valuable methodological frameworks to both oral history and digital humanities, demonstrating how multimodal analysis can enrich our understanding of historical narratives.