Digital Scholarship Projects

Special Collections partners with various departments and individual faculty on campus to foster and advance digital scholarship using our collections.

These projects are often assignments that students in classes visiting Special Collections create, and which are developed in collaboration between teaching faculty and librarians in Special Collections.
Please find below a few examples of projects we recently worked on. If you have any questions about the projects, or if you are interested in bringing your class to Special Collections and starting a project in the Digital Humanities or Digital Scholarship arena, please contact us at specol@usc.edu.

BRITAIN & THE BLACK EXPERIENCE

This website digs deep into the holdings of the USC Archives & Special Collections to find references to books and images that help illuminate the relationship between the black experience and Great Britain.
It is constructed by students in Dr. Lindsay O'Neill's Spring 2016 General Education Seminar "Being Black in Britain, 1500-2000."


MAPPING THE NUREMBERG CHRONICLE

In the fall of 2014 undergraduates at USC examined one of our two copies of the Nuremberg Chronicle, or Liber Chronicarum, and saw in it new possibilities. The students knew that the work itself reflected the advancements Europeans had made in print and cartography during the period, but, with the help of modern day technology, they thought it could do even more. They wanted to see what happened when they used new technologies to explore the old. First, they wished to see how older conceptions of the globe matched our own. They located the cities spoken of in the chronicle on a map of today’s globe. Each node marks the location of a place mentioned in the chronicle and, when accessed, reveals the woodcut of the city and a transcription of its history with links to additional information. Second, they sought to make this information more widely available and so they developed this website. To enrich the website, they have also included additional information such as historical background on the Nuremberg Chronicle and interviews with faculty involved in the project.
Every year new students are adding more information to this website until we have a complete view of how the world presented in the Nuremberg Chronicle compares with our own. 

Faculty involved: Lindsay O'Neill (History), Michaela Ullmann (USC Libraries, Special Collections), Andy Rutkowski (former USC Libraries Interdisciplinary GIS Fellow)

 

GERMAN EXILES IN LOS ANGELES (1930's ONWARD)

The digital map "German Exiles in Los Angeles" was conceived as part of a student project in a special topics course at USC on the "German Exile Experience" (Spring of 2015). There were three objectives for the student project: 1) to select a German exile or exile organization and to conduct biographical research 2) to add the information gathered during research to a digital map and to give a presentation based on that material 3) to find a research topic related to the research subject and to write a paper.

On the interactive digital map you can look up information about exiles in Southern California. The following pages are each devoted to an individual exile, his/her biography and the student research paper.
 
Faculty involved: Britta Bothe (German), Michaela Ullmann (USC Libraries, Special Collections), Andy Rutkowski (former USC Libraries Interdisciplinary GIS Fellow)
 
 
Works by Luther, Henry VIII, Locke, Hobbes, and Voltaire...what other early modern treasures lay nestled in Doheny Memorial Library at the University of Southern California? That is the question this website seeks to answer.

This website is a joint project between the USC department of Special Collections and Archives and the USC Department of History, in particular, students taking Hist 103: The Emergence of Modern Europe. The library has kindly opened its doors to students who search out the treasures of the Early Modern period hidden in their stacks. After finding a work from the period, the students then explore the text and tell us about their favorite page.

Faculty involved: Lindsay O'Neill (History), Michaela Ullmann (USC Libraries, Special Collections)

 

RUBEN SALAZAR PROJECT
This project is from an USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism directed research course, with the goal of reviewing the personal archive of Ruben Salazar, the most famous Latino journalist in the United States.
Through a generous donation from Salazar’s children – Lisa Salazar Johnson, Stephanie Salazar Cook and John Salazar – his archive, comprised of personal and professional documents, was given to the USC Libraries.

Throughout the entire 2012 Spring semester, graduate and undergrad students meticulously when through the boxes of items, cataloging, digitalizing and exploring the private life of a public figure. Other students have continued the work since. The students’ findings lead to the creation of the timeline and a collection of articles written by each student from the project.

Faculty involved: Felix Gutierrez (Journalism, Communication and American Studies & Ethnicity), Robert Hernandez (Professional Practice), Barbara Robinson (USC Libraries, Boeckmann Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies, Special Collections).