Center for Digital Research in the Humanities

William G. Thomas’s “The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America” (Yale) was selected as a finalist for the 2012 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. The book, an outgrowth of the “Railroads and the Making of Modern America” digital archive project, “illuminates the critical impact of railroad construction, railroad management and the boost railroads provided to regional development during and after the Civil War era.” Read more here.

Will Thomas, John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities and Chair of History at UNL, wrote an article on slavery and the railroads for the New York Times. You can read the full article here.

On Feb. 1, 2012 Dr. Robert Cargill, Assistant Professor of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Iowa, will present a digital model of the archaeological site of Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. Cargill will guide the audience through the site using digital “fly through” technology, enabling the audience to get “up close and personal” with Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Full information can be found at the Classics and Religious Studies site.

CDRH Faculty Fellow Doug Seefeldt will share some of the findings from “Mapping Buffalo Bill’s Great Plains,” a digital history research project that examines and displays multiple perspectives on Great Plains history via the lens of the early life and times of William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. This event will be at 3:30pm on Jan. 18, 2012 in the Center for Great Plains Studies, 1155 Q St., Lincoln, NE. For complete details visit here.

Linguists and others interested in more in-depth information about the Omaha language may view the working database behind the Omaha Ponca Digital Dictionary.

Brian Pytlik Zillig and Stephen Ramsay of the CDRH recently received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to further their work on textual analysis through a program called Abbot. You can read the full announcement from UNL communications here.

Every Week Magazine, published from 1915-1918, was a significant magazine phenomenon of its day, with a weekly circulation of 600,000 copies. The contents provide a rich cultural resource for those interested in the World War I home front, popular fiction, advertising, and constructions of race and gender during this period. Until the development of this digital edition, the magazine could be accessed by scholars and readers only with great difficulty due to its embrittled condition and rarity. Magazines provided courtesy of the University of Wisconsin.

UNL Communications has put together a new video available here highlighting just a couple of the Center’s more than 30 projects.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) announces a cluster hire in digital humanities: over the next three years the university intends to hire six tenure-line faculty members across a number of departments (and additional staff) to further propel this signature program. For more information, please visit the CDRH announcement.

William G. Thomas, III, University of Nebraska-Lincoln History Department Chair and Author of “The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America” will be part of a discussion about the presidential election of 1896 and explore the life of William Jennings Bryan. This program will air on C-SPAN at 7pm central time.