Growing a Digital Humanities Culture

Katherine Walter started at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries before electronic journals even existed. That was forty-five years ago, just a flicker of time in the history of human knowledge. But it was an era that today’s students might find hard to imagine—before laptops, smartphones, or websites. 

The internet was a frontier at the time, and universities claimed early virtual plots in what was often called “cyberspace.” University researchers invented the internet in the 1960s, and by the mid 1990s when a researcher in Switzerland dreamed up a more user-friendly version called the World Wide Web, campuses were one of the few places with widespread access. So during the dot-com boom, while entrepreneurs tried overhyped online pet stores and short-lived delivery services, looking for what to do with this new tech, scholars began harnessing computers and networks for scholarship. 

In the late 1990s, a professor at UNL, Susan J. Rosowski, had the idea to start a digital collection of the works of Willa Cather, whose elegiac prose celebrates life on the prairie (and who was an alum of the institution). Over time, Rosowski’s concept of the Cather Archive became a prototype for collaboration between scholars, technologists, librarians, and the academic press at the university. Together, they envisioned and started building an online collection that let anyone with a computer and internet connection call up primary documents that previously were available only to scholars who trekked to the physical library. 

Soon after, another literary scholar with an interest in using the web for scholarship arrived on campus. Kenneth Price brought with him an ambitious effort to gather the myriad writings and drafts of Walt Whitman into a central online collection. He jokes that he charged into the work before he knew the complexities such an undertaking would involve. “There were so many decisions, and not many models to look to,” Price remembers. “We toyed with working with commercial publishers, but I’m glad that failed because open access allowed us to have a vast audience and a big influence.” 

Price launched the project as a professor at the College of William & Mary in collaboration with scholars at the University of Virginia (UVA), which had emerged as an early leader in digital scholarship in the humanities and happened to be home to many of Whitman’s original writings. While Price was deciding whether to take the job at UNL, Walter reached out and told him that if he joined, she would make sure the library provided support from graduate students and staff members for his Whitman Archive. 

“For print scholars that was a new idea, a brand new idea,” remembers Walter, who notes that especially among literary scholars, the norm was to toil alone amid stacks of books. “We offered him people.” At the time, she says, many humanities scholars’ reaction would probably have been “What do you mean I would want a team of people working with me on this?” 

Her impression was that Price was floored by the offer—and tempted. 

“It was a bit surprising,” remembers Price. And when he decided to join the faculty at Nebraska, he took her up on it. 

Backed by that support from the Libraries, Price was able to win a substantial grant soon after he arrived on campus from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to add poetry manuscripts by Whitman to the archive. 

Meanwhile, a professor in the Department of English had another idea for a big digital project. Steve Hilliard was interim director of the University of Nebraska Press, which was the publisher of Gary Moulton’s award-winning edition The Definitive Journals of Lewis and Clark, which spans some thirteen volumes in print. What if, Hilliard wondered, the university created a free digital version of the journals that made use of multimedia, including audio and video. And it could also include supplementary material to provide context, informed by other experts at the university, about the native plants and animals mentioned in the journal entries. This proved to be an early collaboration in digital humanities that involved the Center for Great Plains Studies and Nebraska Press—and that garnered significant funding from the NEH. 

Other seeds were sprouting in different departments at Nebraska in this scholarly area that was then called “humanities computing.” At meetings, Walter remembers, a question bubbled up: “How can we make Nebraska this big thing in the humanities?” 

A few other prominent universities had already staked a claim. Perhaps the most notable research center at the time was the one Price had collaborated with to start the Whitman Archive, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, or IATH, which formed in 1992 with a grant from IBM. 

At the time, having a willingness to forge ahead seemed more important than mere prestige when it came to digital projects, as the rules of mixing computing and humanities research were still being written. In fact, many universities with greater resources lacked a critical mass of scholars willing to jump into an untested area. 

"So why couldn’t Nebraska be a world leader in the digital humanities?" 

Of course not every professor believed in the approach in the early days. Folks in the Department of History in particular “initially had suspicions—they were resistant,” says Price. “They wanted to uphold standards, you know. Skeptics thought, ‘This stuff isn’t legitimate. It isn’t proven. It isn’t sufficiently peer-reviewed. How do you know it’s sustainable?’” 

Another stumbling block was resources. Even back in 1998, the University Libraries had developed an informal effort called the E-Text Center to work with humanities faculty on campus and experiment with emerging technical standards, like the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). 

The informal approach had limits, though, as three UNL officials—Joan Giesecke, Beth McNeil, and Gina L. B. Minks—wrote in an article published in 2000 about those early efforts. “By now, you have no doubt noticed that the implementation of an E-text Center is going very slowly,” the article states. “With such limited funding, our ability to provide services is limited. However, the E-text effort has proven and is proving to be one way that we can at least slowly move forward in creating digital collections. The knowledge gained and skills learned in establishing a Center to work with faculty can benefit the rest of the Libraries.” 

Walter and Price, with the help of other colleagues, began plotting to win more formalized funding for an official center. And they saw their chance in 2003, when the university made the strategic decision to target a select list of academic initiatives for extra support, in an approach leaders called Programs of Excellence. The scholars submitted a pitch that made bold claims about the possibilities in digital humanities for Nebraska to make a name for itself by creating what they dubbed the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. 

It helped that researchers at the university kept winning big-ticket funding awards for their online experiments. In 2003, the NEH gave the university a $223,000 grant to support The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Online. 

“The central administration wasn’t used to people in the humanities bringing in these quarter-million-dollar grants, so that got their attention,” says Price. As top officials weighed which of the many proposals to accept as programs of excellence, “they wanted to fund something in the humanities,” Price says, and the digital humanities seemed like a good bet for future grants. 

The proposal to create a Center for Digital Research in the Humanities made the cut. And by 2005, Walter and Price formalized their effort as an official university center, meaning the CDRH could hire its own staff and set up an office in the university’s central library. The two became the center’s founding codirectors. 

“We were part of the second wave of digital humanities centers,” says Walter, noting that Michigan State University started its Matrix center around the same time.  

Walter says, “we were really thinking about ‘How can we involve scholars in the process? How can we create new forms of scholarship out of what we’re doing?’” 

As the center officially got underway, two donors—John and Catherine Angle—offered the university the chance to endow a new professorship, and the leaders of CDRH convinced the deans to focus the search on a scholar in the digital humanities. “I think it was the first endowed professor-level search in the digital humanities in the U.S.,” says Price. 

He saw this as an opportunity to bring in a big-league player who could advise the new center and help take it to the next level. He and Walter suggested to the deans that UNL recruit a rising star in the digital humanities from UVA, Will Thomas, who had cofounded and led the Virginia Center for Digital History there and managed a high-profile project called the Valley of the Shadow, which had been one of the first works of digital scholarship to be published by W. W. Norton. That project presented more than five thousand pages of diaries, letters, newspaper articles, photographs, and other primary documents from two counties just a couple of hundred miles apart in the Shenandoah Valley from 1857 to 1870—Franklin County, Pennsylvania, in the North, and August County, Virginia, in the South. The book came with a CD-ROM with the materials and encouraged readers to explore the messy details of history on their own to get a richer understanding of the time, especially the complicated views on slavery in both the North and the South. As a New York Times article around that time noted, the work by Thomas, and his mentor Edward Ayers, represented “a new kind of popular history genre mixing multimedia and scholarship.” 

“My sense was, it’s visible that he’s going to be a star,” Price remembers thinking about Thomas. Comparing the situation to a professional sports team snatching up a young star, he says it was a chance to score a team-changing player. “So we should do it now, when we can get him,” he remembers arguing. “If we make him this outlandish offer, they’re not going to be able to match it. We can compete with the top two or three centers in the world.” 

The offer Nebraska made Thomas: a jump to an endowed full professorship, a highly unusual chance for this young scholar to vault up the academic ladder. 

It was an offer he couldn’t turn down. “What Nebraska did was say, ‘We want you to come here,’” Thomas says, noting that the research funds that came with the position were “substantial.” “They said we are building a center, and we want you to be part of that.” 

At a time when much of the academic discipline of history was “looking askance” at digital projects, Thomas says, it was refreshing to join a department where almost everyone was at least willing to consider trying the digital humanities. 

“Our approach was, ‘We’re going to try to build the strongest, most diverse digital scholarship across the department,’” he says. And he brought in more people to the university with experience in digital humanities, including helping to recruit Stephen Ramsay from UVA (now a professor of English at Nebraska who describes himself as obsessed with computer languages and with the question of how algorithms can change the understanding of literature). 

Thomas worked in partnership with Walter and Price, the codirectors of the new CDRH. 

Perhaps their most impactful collaboration involved coordinating a “cluster hire” of faculty members with an interest in digital projects. This might have been the first time UNL used the strategy, a coordinated recruitment across departments of faculty members with a shared expertise, focus, or approach. 

“We were able to say that we had already planted a flag in this area, and we already had prominence, and if the university were to invest, we could go from being prominent to being potentially dominant in digital humanities nationally and internationally,” says Price, explaining the argument made for the cluster hire. 

Between 2009 and 2013, the cluster hire brought in seven professors with digital humanities expertise in art history, anthropology, classics, English, and history. That effectively doubled the center’s faculty at the time. 

“I was one of them,” remembers Carrie Heitman, an anthropologist who is now a professor in the School of Global Integrative Studies and serves as associate director of CDRH. “There was a lot of interdisciplinary energy,” she remembers, since there were so many new faculty involved in the center bringing different expertise. 

The cluster hire also wove digital humanities into new parts of campus, since the faculty members all served as fellows in CDRH as well as holding faculty appointments. “It was kind of like a spiderweb in a way,” says Walter, “of reaching out and pulling people in and giving them a place they could be separate from their own department.” 

"While there have been these splashy hires of outsiders, the center has mainly cultivated an ethos of growing local talent through providing training, mentorship, resources, and opportunities to collaborate."

Just ask Emily Rau. When she was choosing grad schools back in 2014, she picked Nebraska, rather than a university closer to her hometown in New Jersey, because of its commitment to digital humanities and the chance to work on the Willa Cather Archive. 

Rau’s degree was in American literature, not in library science, so she wasn’t necessarily destined for a career in the University Libraries, she says. But she started working on the Cather Archive soon after she arrived on campus, and she fell in love with the work. “I did not expect to stay here,” she says. “I expected to do my PhD and move wherever I had to go to get a job.” She did receive an offer from another university, but the University Libraries counteroffered with a tenure-track position to keep her around. “I didn’t even think that was possible,” she says. “Sometimes universities feel like they need to bring in external people to feel like they’re competitive. UNL seems more invested in the local community than other places.” 

Today, Rau serves as editor of the Willa Cather Archive, which continues to evolve, even as it stands as a model. And Rau spends plenty of time helping current graduate students develop skills and experience so they can land great jobs and spread the techniques to other projects or other institutions. And it feels like home. 

“I just bought a house on Friday, so I’m never leaving,” she says, noting that she feels deeply rooted to the university and the center. 

Even from the early days, the center’s leaders have worked to build a solid foundation for the CDRH to prepare for a day when people no longer see “digital” projects as novel and exciting. That has meant setting up an endowment for the center with the University of Nebraska Foundation. Thanks to a challenge grant from the NEH, that endowment has grown to more than $1.5 million. 

“What we basically said was it was for mentoring the next generation of humanities scholars—that was the pitch,” explains Walter. “That endowment has really helped.” 

When a teacher in Thailand submitted a photograph to accompany an article about teaching Willa Cather’s works in that country, she posed proudly in front of a projection of the Willa Cather Archive website, holding a stack of the author’s books. 

When Jewell, CDRH codirector, stumbled upon that image, he considered it proof of the power of putting curated collections out on the web where they can take on a life of their own. 

“You can see she has a sense of ownership in the website,” he says of the woman in Thailand. “It says, ‘This is our thing.’ And I love that.” 

Students and scholars in schools and colleges around the world regularly consult the Willa Cather Archive, the Walt Whitman Archive, and the dozens of other online collections produced by CDRH to write research papers or read portions assigned by their instructors. The fact that these works are free and require no password or registration bolsters their use—not just in educational settings, but for anyone with an interest in the material. 

“Wikipedia articles look really different when you have these primary documents out there,” notes Jewell, adding that works from CDRH often show up as sources in the online encyclopedia that anyone can add to and edit, provided they cite legitimate information sources. 

The center has long worked to keep its collections welcoming to both experienced researchers and anyone who might stumble upon the websites. 

Karin Dalziel remembers one meeting in developing the Civil War Washington project in particular. “We had all of these very, very detailed conversations about how exactly the navigation would be,” says Dalziel, who is an assistant director in the University Libraries and leader of the CDRH development team. She was new to the center at the time, coming in after working in public libraries, advertising, and retail, and she remembers initially feeling intimidated at a table full of folks with PhDs in various disciplines. Once she worked up the courage, though, she offered a useful critique of some of the proposed language her scholarly colleagues confidently pushed. “The word you used is too academic and people in the public are not going to know what that means,” she remembers saying. So she convinced them not to label a section of the site “realia,” even though historians know it as a category of miscellaneous artifacts. “In navigation, you need words that everyone knows.” 

Dalziel says she soon realized that her input was welcome. In fact, in design meetings at the center, planners often plot out how CDRH projects will serve various personas, imagining, say, a high school student visiting the site for a class project or a family member doing genealogical research. 

People researching their family trees turn out to be a big audience, especially for the thousands of articles from Nebraska newspapers that CDRH has published as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program. 

“People are like, ‘I want to know if my grandma was on the cheer squad,’” says Laura Weakly, the metadata specialist, who has worked on the center’s effort to put the entire archives of the university’s student newspaper, The Daily Nebraskan, online. 

And the CDRH has run plenty of public events over the years to engage the broader public in the material they explore. 

In 2018, the center’s Willa Cather Archive hosted a series of events to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the author’s signature novel, My Ántonia. That included a field trip that provided a guided tour of Cather-related sites in Nebraska, including the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie, with an emphasis on how literature can encourage people to care about the environment. And the center helped host a picnic in collaboration with a nonprofit that prioritizes working with immigrants and refugees, while participants read passages from My Ántonia in four different languages. 

“It was such a beautiful event,” remembers Emily Rau, current editor of the archive. “It was just fully open to the public. You had an older white guy who’s farmed his whole life sitting next to a Yazidi man and his family who had just moved here like five years ago, talking to each other and finding common ground.” 

The CDRH also takes on projects to expand the public’s understanding of their own community and history. 

One example is Family Letters, a project led by professor Isabel Velázquez, which digitized a trove of letters, photographs, and other personal documents from a family who immigrated from Mexico to Colorado and Nebraska during the first half of the twentieth century. That’s a time period not usually thought of as a time of migration from Mexico to the region. 

“People might know about the history of German immigrants there, or Polish, but they may not know about Hispanic people,” says Jennifer Isasi, who worked on the project when she was a graduate student. “You can see the life of a Hispanic family in Nebraska on a daily basis, a regular family trying to make a new life in the state. And it is more complicated than they might think.” 

Isasi, who is now the assistant director of the Office of Digital Pedagogies at Pennsylvania State University, remembers meeting with the woman who gave the university the collection, Jane Shanahan. “We sat down for hours and hours and hours, and she told me who was in the photos so I could write that information for the archive,” Isasi adds. The project is powerful, she says, because “it is a very good way to learn about the life of regular folks in the area and the migration experience to somewhere where you don’t speak the language and know anyone.” 

Isasi can relate, having grown up in Spain and moved to the U.S. for graduate school. She notes that most of the undergraduates who worked on the digital project were of Hispanic heritage. For the professor leading the effort, Velázquez, an associate professor of modern languages and literatures at UNL, “the entire project was about connecting students to their heritage through the archive as well.” 

The center’s projects also link users to stories of people from the past from vastly different backgrounds and experiences with a goal of revealing how much we all have in common. That was the experience for UNL undergraduate Ethan Tylski, who worked on a project for the CDRH while he was preparing to be a teacher. 

“My professor, Beth Dotan (a CDRH fellow), sent me an email one day and asked to meet up, and she had something to ask me,” he remembers. “She said, ‘We’re doing this research project to document survivors and people who actually saved people from concentration camps in WWII. Would you like to be part of it?’” The project is called Nebraska Stories of Humanity: Holocaust Survivors & WWII Veterans, Network Portal & Education Website.

He jumped at the chance. “In a lot of ways it was the dream of a lifetime for a social studies education major,” he says. 

Tylski spent a couple of hours a day over a period of years combing through the soldiers’ letters—intimate dispatches to spouses and girlfriends that mixed the mundane and the harrowing. The student felt he got to know the soldiers as he read through their personal correspondence. 

One letter by a combat medic named Clarence Williams still sticks with him. Sent to the soldier’s wife, Gretchen, on April 30, 1945, it started off talking about hard-boiled eggs (he was sick of eating them) and how his unit had just finished a boring day of making slow progress in their convoy. Then, in a sudden turn, Williams described an experience “that I will never forget as long as I live.” 

Williams wrote: “I had read a lot about concentration camps and the brutal treatment given to the prisoners but often wondered if it were all true. Now I can vouch for it. The camp covered an area of probably ten square blocks and much of it was surrounded by high cement walls with barbed wire on top and electric wires over those. A railroad runs through the camp and we saw an entire train of box cars with dead human bodies that they had no time to dispose of. Several press photographers were there so if you see any pictures in the newspaper or Life Magazine I would appreciate your letting me know and saving them for me. Some of our medics are in the pictures and they may even be shown in the movies as there was one movie camera there.” 

Sure, Tylski says, he had heard about the liberation of concentration camps. “But to spend so much time with this guy learning about his story, it really made it feel a lot more real, and it made me feel the empathetic value of studying history.” 

Today, Tylski teaches eighth-grade social studies at Goodrich Middle School in north Lincoln, and he has recommended the online archive to a colleague who teaches high school. “In history education, we’re doing a lot more reading of documents and letters—primary documents instead of textbooks,” he says. “It teaches skills of looking at primary sources and these critical thinking skills. My experience with research really helped me when I went into the teaching profession.”