Hi! I’m a PhD student (history), and in my spare time I’ve been developing Nodus with feedback from other researchers

Nodus is an open-source, local-first workspace designed to help researchers organise sources, notes, ideas, data, and teaching or study materials.

The app is organised into different vaults, each designed for a particular type of work: academic research, databases, teaching, study, and genealogy. There is a demo mode on the website belowwhere you can explore the interface of every vault without installing anything. The desktop app is also available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

In the Academic Vault, Nodus analyses documents from your Zotero and connects their main ideas while keeping every idea linked to the original source and citation. It also includes a Word add-in connected to your indexed ideas so as you write, it can suggest which sources may need to be cited based on the ideas contained in your own library.

Other vaults include genealogy, databases, study and teaching. Other vaults people have asked for include Primary Sources, Testimonies for oral history, and Worldbuilding for writers (not implemented yet)

The project is still in its early stages, and I’d like it to grow as a collaborative tool shaped by the people who use it. The more researchers try it, report issues, suggest features, and share their workflows, the better Nodus can become.

https://drakonis96.github.io/nodus

Hii! I am a fist year student majoring in history and next semester i want to pick a minor in Digital humanities.

Though recently, i have seen some movements against AI and it has gotten me a bit shaken- i don't know if it's best to go though with my decition to study digital humanities.

Please share your honest opinions and experiance!

Basically, judging from my immediate environment, and online communities to a noteworthy extent, it seems to me that digital humanists often fall into one of two camps; those who've taken on digital methods and tools to study the humanities, but are not all that interested in their intricacies and those more interested in developing and engaging with the technological part of the whole digital humanities field.

While I believe that is a somewhat logical divide to have, what has shocked me through personal experience is how these two groups seem to be so, so different; I've somewhat recently talked to a colleague working in computational linguistics (more specifically, a facet of corpus linguistics), and she had almost no understanding of even the most basic programming concepts, even things like different file formats and such. I found that highly odd for someone like her who relies on digital tools and methods for her job.

As someone far more on the development side of the digital humanities, I still feel like I understand more about the humanities part of the humanities in which I work (language) that those on the other flipside. Am I just missing something? Are the people I interacted with just a weirdly bad showing?

IMPORTANT: I do not mean to imply for even a second that any position in this situation is bad or should be worthy of scorn, just sharing something I found odd in good spirits for a genuine and good-natured discussion. I am glad for anyone who takes an interest in the digital humanities, no matter their specialization or knowledge level.

I hope you all are having a good day!

I am making this post to get feedback on my digital humanities project. I finally finished one of my pretty old projects but have no idea what the wider community will think. Basically, when I started getting into digital humanities, I decided to try and create a digital grammar of Classical Latin (in Croatian) since I felt that it was a missing resource in Croatia's academic landscape. Because it was started when I was relatively new to coding, its architecture, especially the HTML, is not something I am looking for too much focus on (even though it would be appreciated to hear your opinion regardless) because I know it is not perfect, but moreso how the package as a unified unit seems to you. I know most people here probably don't speak Croatian or a Slavic language close enough to it to understand enough of the contents and be able to make an informed judgement on that aspect of the project, so my main goal is getting your thoughts on how it all looks, how approachable it might seem to a learner, what do you think of me linking to external sources for morphology and such.

I am thankful for all feedback! Here is the link:
https://mar1n0m.github.io/latinska-gramatika/ (Github repository: https://github.com/Mar1n0M/latinska-gramatika)

TL;DR: even flagship models with large corpuses can't replicate an authors style. Across 5 authors and 25 essays, stylometry correctly identified the AI 85% of the time.

Most people have basically given up on AI detection, because the mechanics of it simply don't make sense. Attributing a small paragraph or essay to an amorphous mass of digital authors is simply impossible. What's not as impossible is detecting a single, human author.

I set up a test where I took 25 essays evenly split between five authors, then created an "assignment" out of each of them. Four different AIs rewrote the essays using a large corpus from the author that wrote it, and were instructed to match as exactly as they could. A MFW Cosine Delta similarity metric was used for similarity across a five-fold test, where four corpus essays were compared against the true essay and the AI recreation. The AI models were also given a large corpus of the author they're trying to replicate.

Across all models, the average similarity was far lower for the AI compared to the human authors. Claude Opus 4.8 and ChatGPT Sol 5.6 in particular were easily detectable in 88% of cases. Despite advances, it seems AI models simply cannot mimic an author's style to statistical significance.

I wrote a blog post about it here.

It is possible to get accepted into a certain field of humanities that you know a lot about, say German or history or philosophy - if you only have a technical background with a DH masters?

I will be presenting my work from my 6 week internship program and would like any insights from experienced people who can give me some constructive criticism of my work. I started this endeavor a week ago after my supervisors advised me to pick a more niche topic that I had already researched well. Thanks in advance to anyone willing to help!

Hi!

I'm from Brazil and I recently graduated with a BA in Visual Arts, but over time my interests shifted towards museums, archives, digital preservation, conservation, and cultural heritage. In my undergraduate thesis I cited Annet Dekker's work on the conservation of net art, and I'd love to keep working with topics like net art, digital preservation, new media and archiving.

I've already been accepted into the MA in Digital and Public Humanities at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, so I could start this September. I like the programme a lot, but I'd basically be paying for everything myself. I'll try to apply for the Italian DSU scholarship, but there's no guarantee I'll get it.

The other programme I'm seriously considering is the Archival and Information Studies (Media Studies) at the University of Amsterdam.

Here's why this only became an option recently: when I was applying for master's programmes, I had no idea my Italian citizenship would be finalized this year, so I didn't even consider Dutch universities because of the tuition fees. Now my Italian passport should be ready soon, which changes everything. As an EU citizen, tuition at UvA would be much lower. From what I've read, if I qualify as a migrant worker (by working at least 32 hours per month), I could also become eligible for Dutch student finance. If that's realistic, studying in Amsterdam could actually end up costing about the same as, or even less than, studying in Venice(?).

The downside is that applications only open next year, so I'd have to wait a full year, and of course there's no guarantee I'd get accepted.

So I'm kind of stuck and would love some opinions:

Based on my interests, does the UVA programme actually sound like a significantly better fit, or am I idealizing it? Do you think I'd have a realistic chance of being admitted? Would you choose Digital Humanities over Archival Studies today?

For people living in the Netherlands, how realistic is it for an international/EU master's student to find a small part-time job that would qualify for DUO?

If you were me, would you wait a year for a programme that seems like a better fit, or take the opportunity that's already guaranteed?

And finally, if anyone has experience with either programme, where do graduates actually end up working?

I'd really appreciate any thoughts!!!

Thanks! :)

I need to learn about Digital Humanities owing to academic reasons. First, I tried to watch some videos and PDFs about this matter. Nonetheless, they were not sufficiently basic. I know there are a lot of possible techniques, Python and R are highly recommended. Consequently, I studied Python and I have an elementary knowledge about programming. We know LLMs are a huge help for this task (indeed, junior devs are being fired at present by tech companies). It could be argued that LLMs might be the core of investigations where Digital Humanities are the quantitative method. But this does not suggest that programming is a useless ability. I understand this point and I think we agree generally speaking.

Nevertheless, if you had to start studying Digital Humanities in this new epoch, what would you do step-by-step? Because many online courses are not updated and even though we must not depend on LLMs for everything, I think that it might potentially be a fundamental part of Digital Humanities sooner rather than later.

I've been building a search engine for Revolutionary and antebellum American newspapers, starting with material from the Library of Congress's Chronicling America collection. The pages are scanned, but the transcriptions come from an earlier generation of OCR, and much of the text is too garbled to search. See it at Old News America.

I've fixed the OCR, split issues into articles that can be independently searched, extracted mentions of people, places, and events (want to know what people were saying about George Washington?) and added a research agent that answers with citations for the articles it draws on.

Two slices so far: founding-era papers from 1763 to 1792 (~350k articles from ~20 papers, Stamp Act through Washington's first administration) and 1831 to 1833 (~225k articles from six Northern and Southern papers, covering the rise of radical abolitionism and Nat Turner's rebellion). It's the search engine I thought these parts of American history deserved.

I'd love feedback, suggestions on how to make this stronger for professional historians and researchers, and suggestions on getting more archive material.

Hi to everyone! Is there anyone who knows and uses Collatex (https://collatex.net/)?

Hi everyone, I am doing some digital humanities research that combines traditional qualitative methods of analyzing literature with AI quantitative data. More specifically, I want AI to analyze patterns in character relationships across the genre of medieval chivalric romance literature. I designed evaluation criteria based on 20th-century French philosophy, and I have gathered a usable corpus that is mostly in Middle English.

I am relatively less experienced with the digital side of the humanities, so I would greatly appreciate some guidance on utilizing AI as an efficient but credible tool. What are the best AI models to use, and how do I train them? etc.

Hi all! I am a high school student deeply interested in digital humanities and comparative literature. Over the last 2ish years, I've built my literary translation archive, Language & Labor. It has my own translations as well as those submitted from others, including PhDs in comparative literature and a poet published in Adroit Journal. However, I know that the structure and organization of the site is flawed. I was wondering if I could get any feedback on the site? Thank you in advance!!

https://www.languageandlabor.com

I've been building a little open-source device (called "p3a") that, among other sources, pulls public-domain art straight from museum/library/gallery IIIF endpoints and shows it on rotation on a 4-inch screen.

The starting point for this feature was a research problem: which institutions' APIs are actually usable if you want to...

- list collections,

- paginate through them,

- jump to item X of Y,

- search by keyword?

I surveyed tens of sources (museums, libraries, aggregators), sorted them into tiers with a capability matrix, and added live-endpoint verification notes. The result is here: https://github.com/fabkury/p3a/blob/main/reference/museum-art/docs/museum-candidates.md

The kinds of things that I found:

- the Met and Cleveland have lovely CC0 APIs but expose images as plain CDN URLs, no IIIF at all.

- the recurring headache is pagination: offset/range (easy) vs. cursor-only (Rijksmuseum) vs. walk-the-collection (Getty, Bodleian, e-codices).

Normalizing things like that behind one "next/prev/jump" interface was basically the whole game.

On the upside, IIIF hands you a JPEG on-demand at whatever canvas size you ask for. This turned out to be ESSENTIAL, since the ESP32-P4 in p3a can't load large multi-megapixel originals. "Give me this artwork at 720px" is exactly the primitive I needed.

I'd love this group's comments or corrections: anything I misjudged, or capability-ready institutions that I should add?

I am sharing a manuscript-research case study, not a Voynich decipherment claim.

I have recently archived a structure-first framework for studying the Voynich Manuscript before semantic interpretation. The framework is called VMAF — Voynich Multi-Artifact Framework.

The project does not claim a plaintext, translation, language, cipher key, historical identification, or semantic solution.

The methodological question is more limited:

Can a difficult manuscript be studied structurally before interpretation, using controlled textual and visual tests, without treating an LLM as an authority?

The work uses EVA-based textual analysis, visual-only manuscript analysis, held-out validation, frozen outputs, reduction tests, failure conditions, and controlled projection. GPT/LLM assistance was disclosed and used only as a constrained procedural tool for structural modelling, comparison, documentation, and protocol checking.

The protocol separates Builder, Evaluator, and Supervisor roles. The Supervisor does not decide whether a manuscript claim is true; it only checks whether the declared procedure was followed.

The framework examines recurrence, positional stability, relational consistency, cross-context persistence, segmentation behavior, visual structure, and manuscript-scale compatibility. Terms such as CORE and Loop are used only as structural labels, not as meanings, words, phonetic values, or cipher values.

I would welcome criticism from a digital humanities perspective on whether this kind of role-separated, structure-first methodology is useful, reproducible, and clearly separated from interpretation.

Links:

Full paper:

https://zenodo.org/records/20473895

Short research summary:

https://zenodo.org/records/20623516

Methodological protocol and reproducibility note:

https://zenodo.org/records/20622484

I'm a mid-career librarian and in the past couple years I've developed an interest specifically in digital archives. I've done pretty much all the courses available on digital archives and preservation I could find in my field, and I feel like I've tapped out what's available in Information Science.

I'm primary interested in the long-term preservation (including preservation of context) of born-digital media. I see some obvious crossover with digital humanities. I'm wondering if y'all know of courses (even programs) available within this field that would be focussed specifically on this long-term perspective.

https://github.com/jebboone/deitydb

Hello! I'm a tech worker and a seminarian. Since beginning seminary, I’ve been tinkering with something that started as a personal research tool but will, I hope, gradually become a larger project that can be of use to researchers.

Most databases treat religious traditions separately and most scholars can only ever specialize in one tradition. I want to be able to track the evolution of spiritual entities through history and across traditions. With this dataset we can do things like map the evolution of a Mesopotamian protection spirit up through history and into the angelology that drives something like the Gen Z practice of venerating angel numbers.

While I am not a scholar, hopefully it's clear from the documentation that only primary source texts and peer reviewed material is allowed in the dataset. The sources for every entry are assigned a scholarly credibility score and are easily auditable.

I'd be honored if anyone found the project worthwhile enough for contributions.

Thanks y'all!

Hello Everyone,
(I’w asked mods for permission and got “go for it”. tnx :))

I would be very grateful if you could spare 3–4 minutes to help me with a small research project by filling out this anonymous survey:

“Photography – Documentation and Memories”

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdgJBs8O91Tqg91PuJK4YlIp7UWXm9pc-rcVBHDHFQS708pNA/viewform

The survey is about our relationship with photography, personal memory, documentation, and digital memory. I am interested in how photographs function for different people: as memories, documents, artworks, traces of events, or parts of a larger cultural and digital archive.

The survey is completely anonymous. I do not collect personal data that could identify respondents, and any quotations from open-ended answers will be anonymised.

This is the starting point for a broader work-in-progress research project, which I hope to present as a poster at an international conference on digital humanities and heritage later this year.

Responses from anyone – photographers, artists, cultural workers, researchers, students, and anyone interested in photography and memory would be very valuable.

Thank you very much for your time and help!
P.S. If anyone interested I can share URL of Call for Papers for DARIAH’s conference.

hi!

is anyone here starting the digital and public humanities master's at ca' foscari this year?

I run a small independent digital archive called Polmanarkivet, dedicated to the cultural history and genealogy of a Swedish noble family documented across six centuries. There's no institutional support, funding, governance infrastructure — it's just me, working on this as a passion project.

I'm developing an AI policy because I use AI in my work and felt I owed it to my readers, contributors, and the field to be honest about how and why.

I'd genuinely value feedback from digital humanities researchers and practitioners, particularly on a few things I've wrestled with:

• HTR and historical languages: I use both Transkribus and LLMs for transcription and translation of Early Modern Swedish, German, and Latin manuscripts. The accuracy gap for non-English historical material is significant and I've tried to address it honestly. How do others working with similar material approach this?
• Bias in the record: AI reproduces the gaps already present in historical sources — and description compounds this further for under-described collections. I've tried to name this honestly rather than paper over it. What am I missing?
• Working at the intersection of access and accuracy: Much of this history is only accessible because of AI. But accuracy is non-negotiable in archival work. How do others navigate that tension in practice?

I've drafted a policy that tries to engage with these questions seriously. I'd welcome honest input — what lands, what I've got wrong, what needs more consideration.

Draft here for those interested

I built a tool that places every word from a multi-genre corpus into a shared semantic space (using word embeddings), then uses topological data analysis to detect the shape of how each book's vocabulary is organized — not just which words it uses, but where the clusters and gaps are. The idea is that genre might show up as a consistent geometric signature: horror forming distinct, well-separated thematic islands (the domestic vs. the monstrous), romance distributing vocabulary more continuously across emotional registers.

Would love to hear any thoughts, questions, or recommendations for a new direction!

A part of this question stems from my lack of knowing what is considered DH, and as much as I enjoy the Wikipedia Link explaining some application, I still am a little unsure what an end product of DH can look like.

I've seen a couple of projects that have heavy practical elements of the "digital" side of DH, and most I've seen are digital collections, preservation projects, corpus linguistic projects (unsure if I should include this here), and electronic literature (unsure if I should place this here, but A Dictionary of Revolution is perhaps my favorite). I see the "humanities" side of DH in these projects, but when it comes to the programming/computer side, I don't know if that is taught, expected to be known in classes and programs, or an expected aspect of DH projects.

All of these requires some knowledge of technical knowledge of computers, but I don't know if there is an expectation that computer knowledge/programming is taught/expected in DH courses or programs. Are computer languages/programming taught? Are there programming heavy DH projects that connect to these ideas? Do you (as DH scholars) learn to program to either build DH projects or engage with the field? Thank you!

Hi everyone,
I'm working on a project involving German lemmas from the Grimm's Dictionary (Deutsches Wörterbuch). I have the list of words, but I am missing the definitions.

I’ve tried:

1. OCR (quality is too poor for Fraktur/old German).
2. Prompting LLMs (Claude/GPT-4), but they hallucinate archaic definitions constantly.
3. Contacting Woerterbuchnetz/Trier. I can search manually.

Is there a public, open-access dump (XML, TEI, JSON, or SQL) of the full DWB available somewhere? I am looking for structured data that maps lemmas to their original definitions.

Any leads on GitHub repos, university datasets (Zenodo, etc.), or hidden mirrors would be greatly appreciated!

Hello everyone,

I’m a doctoral scholar of Digital Humanities in the University of Mumbai, this survey is a part of my thesis about the Impacts of Digitisation on the Creation and Consumption of Literature.

It is something that quietly affects all of us every day — the changing place of literature in a world shaped by screens, algorithms, speed, distraction, and digital media.

The study tries to understand what is happening to deep reading, attention, reflection, emotional engagement, and our relationship with stories and language as reading increasingly moves from pages to screens.

This is a detailed and reflective survey, and all responses are completely anonymous.

If you care about reading, literature, culture, media, or simply the way our society is changing, I would sincerely value your participation.

Survey link: https://forms.gle/RpMvUC8iCc5kRSUD7

Thank you. I will be very grateful.