We are very pleased to announce the launch of the digital projects, Mapping the Neponset: A Digital Tour of the River's History and The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth: A Digital Annotated Edition.

Mapping the Neponset is a collaborative effort led by BC History Professor Conevery Bolton Valencius and the Neponset River Lab of undergraduate and graduate students at BC. It is an interactive GIS-based map with mini-historical narratives that unveil the past, present, and future of places along the Lower Neponset River. 

Inspired by local stories and environmental history, the project was launched in the Fall of 2024 with support from the Schiller Institute and partnerships with the Neponset River Watershed Association (NepRWA) and the Institute for New England Native American Studies at UMass Boston. The DSG provided technical guidance and support. (learn more)

Led by Deanna Malvesti Danforth, The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth digital edition is the result of multiple contributors’ efforts, including BC graduate students and faculty, BC Libraries, and faculty from other universities. The project boasts several unique features, including high-resolution images of the original book, a searchable and faithful transcription of the text; prefatory historical material; thoroughly researched annotations; a detailed glossary of terms covering food history and political history, and more.

The Court & Kitchin of Elizabeth, Commonly called Joan Cromwel, the Wife of the Late Usurper (1664) is a seventeenth century English cookbook framed as a satire about Oliver Cromwell's wife and his family but which actually features 101 real recipes from the period, "lifted" (i.e., plagiarized) from contemporaneous texts.

Julia Garcia, a senior biology student who worked on our 3D birds project, is graduating. (Congratulations, Julia!) Her commitment to this project was instrumental in laying its foundation, as she helped establish best practices—an endeavor that took hours of trial and error—and complete phase one, which involved scanning all of the Biology department’s ornithology collection. Through her work on the project, Julia gained advanced skills in several scanning techniques that will serve her well in her post-graduation career.

Julia Garcia presenting a poster about her work on the birds project at the 2025 Undergraduate Research Day

This April, the DSG and BC students made a big showing at the Greater Boston Digital Research and Pedagogy Symposium, a one-day gathering of digital humanities practitioners from the New England area. Our roundtable and presentations discussed DH curricula, our Catholic Almanacs project, and our 3D model hosting platform in development.

Three students presented alongside Ashlyn Stewart and Joanna Schroeder: English Master's student Yuchen Xiong discussed the database she is building for the Almanacs project data, undergraduate History major Kaitlyn Bell shared her intensive research efforts to improve that data, and undergraduate Math major Nathanael Choi spoke about his contributions to managing and standardizing it. We were also happy to see BC History PhD student, Munir Paviwala, present on Visualising East India Company Trade Data (1660-1834), the project he created in last spring’s DH capstone course. Munir’s work stood out as a top project, and we were pleased to see how well it was received by symposium attendees.

Nathanael Choi, Kaitlyn Bell, and Ashlyn Stewart (from left to right) presenting about their work on the Catholic almanacs

Antonio LoPiano and Dave Thomas led workshops at the Digital Medieval Studies Institute, a full day of programming on digital scholarly methods for medievalists and pre-modernists, hosted by Harvard and BC’s McMullen Museum. Dave’s workshop explored the origins of network analysis, its application to historical studies, and visualized and analyzed a dataset of over 2,500 individuals from Old English kingdoms. Through this visualization, participants were able to explore the various hubs and local communities that constituted hierarchies of power from the 7th to 10th centuries AD.

Antonio’s workshop covered photogrammetry, a powerful and flexible technology for capturing, digitizing, and visualizing 3D artifacts, using nothing but a standard DSLR camera and a computer. The resulting models are particularly useful in virtual exhibits or repositories for scholars to access. Participants learned how to capture images of several artifacts at the Ricci Institute, process them in specialized software, and export the resulting models for use in virtual environments. (Read this blog post for more details on Antonio's workshop.)

The courses the DSG worked with this Spring varied considerably from the complex Problem & Enduring Question course, Just A City, to the graduate digital humanities capstone, to Music and Social Justice, to offering a research clinic for economic and business classes. A few standouts include:

This year’s graduate DH capstone students have developed a range of especially fascinating projects. They built a 3D model of the Temple Mount that visualizes the different hypothetical configurations of the structures there, a digital archive of writing produced by American Civil War soldiers who later served in the Egyptian military, and a mapping project analysing native habitation patterns reported by George Vancouver in his exploration of the Puget Sound, to name only a few. The student's work will be made available through the DH certificate website soon after the semester ends.

This semester, we collaborated with classes in Messina College and Lynch School’s data science programs to create instruction grounded in real-world skills for professional data scientists. At Messina, which offers a data science minor, Lester Carver and Joanna taught about careers in the field. After providing an overview of various data science career pathways, the students took a career interest quiz and explored the skills and competencies required for different jobs. At Lynch, which has a new MS in data science program, Joanna taught best practices for working on data science project teams. The students learned about standards in data management and file organization, and explored GitHub repositories to gain exposure to open-source collaboration. We are excited to be working with these programs and hope to increase our support for data science courses in the near future.

Building off a pilot from the fall semester, Lester and Joanna partnered with subject liaisons Sophie Leveque (economics and political science) and Doug Olsen (business) on a research clinic that served the economics course, Economic Theory in the Practice of Law, and the business course, Law & Economics. The intent was to address the high volume of consultation needs for assignments with complex requirements, such as combining relevant policy and literature with statistical evidence to demonstrate the economic impact of laws. Consultations were highly personalized, with most students using the time to decide on their topic and find relevant data. There was a great turnout, and students appeared more comfortable and confident after attending. (What more could we ask for?!) Next semester, we’re aiming to offer two dates to reach more students and hope to offer similar clinics for other courses and disciplines in the future. For faculty interested in offering a clinic, please email your subject liaison or digitalscholarship@bc.edu.

Our many projects in development include the Jesuit catalogs, the Catholic Almanacs project, the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers Digital Collection, Diego de Bruceña’s Lost Choir Book digital edition, the development of Open Model Interface, a 3D modeling hosting and viewing platform, and more. Some updates and highlights include:

Fourteen students have contributed to our ongoing project to extract and structure data from nineteenth-century Catholic almanacs this academic year. Due to their efforts and Ashlyn’s project management, we have now encoded 8396 unique institutions and created IDs for 5504 unique individuals in almanacs spanning from 1864-70. We hope to spend the summer rounding out our dataset to include all the remaining institutions in 1864-67 and then make our first batch of data available on our site.

A map visualization of Catholic institutions such as churches, schools, and hospitals based on extracted data from an 1870 Catholic Almanac

All of the birds scanned for phase one of the 3D birds project are now available online, making it possible for BC’s biology students to reference them while completing lab reports and studying for exams. Prof. Jeff Da Costa, the project lead, is hoping the next phase of the project will include collaborating with other universities in the area to build a repository of all the bird species endemic to Massachusetts for use by ornithological researchers.

With Sketchfab, the go-to platform for hosting 3D models, transitioning to commercial-only, universities, museums, and similar institutions are urgently seeking alternatives. This is where the DSG steps in. We are developing the Open Model Interface (OMI), an open-source, free, and flexible tool for hosting and sharing 3D models that will be available to everyone on GitHub. Currently, Dave, the project designer and developer, is seeking feedback on the working prototype and is aiming to have a shareable version ready by early fall. (learn more)

In an effort to make data concepts more accessible to humanities scholars, Joanna created the learning module, Working with Data in the Humanities. The module takes a dataset extracted from a Burns Library-housed map, The English Terror in Ireland (1920), to demonstrate how the same data can be used in different ways. It showcases various methods, including combining the data with other datasets to contextualize and tell a story.

The English terror in Ireland: list of Irish towns and villages ravaged by British troops or police during the past twelve months. (view full map)

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