Humanities For All

Digital humanists are on a mission to make research accessible and interactive, especially when the original materials were created long before the Internet age. Thus, a substantial component of the digital humanities process is transforming the physical into the electronic so it can exist virtually.

Consider these examples from the University of Houston Digital Humanities Core.

“Sharing Stories From 1977” chronicles the lives of more than 150,000 participants of the 1977 National Women’s Conference. Studying Urban Relationships and Identity Over Ancient Syria, known as “SYRIOS,” highlights ancient Syrian history for modern audiences through the study of coins, some of which date as far back as Before the Common Era. Both “Sharing Stories” and “SYRIOS” are websites that host digitized materials and their associated findings, allowing anyone with an internet connection to locate and learn from them.

Many digital humanities projects begin when someone, likely a researcher, has collected physical content, studied it, and amassed important takeaways about it but doesn’t know the best way to convey the work’s significance online.

That’s when digital humanists become involved, with the goal to help those researchers “envision and produce articulations of their work to interested audiences,” says Dr. Linda García Merchant, director of the UH Digital Humanities Core.

Valeria González, doctoral student in U.S. history and graduate research assistant to Dr. García Merchant, notes it is often the researcher and their assistant who initially digitize physical items into virtual versions. Then the DH Core can generate an online space and supporting tools.

“Let’s say you’re a professor, and you have done all this research. You have taken scans of all these papers, and you’ve already looked at them closely and come to your own conclusions about what they mean,” González says. “Then you would meet with Dr. García Merchant, take her micro-credentialing class on introduction to the digital humanities, then meet with people who know how to turn something into a website.”

The DH Core currently has a new undertaking: the Black magazines archive, which is a collaboration between Dr. Lisa Volpe, head of department, curator of photography for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Dr. Rex Koontz, Moores Professor of Art History in UH’s Kathrine G. McGovern College of the Arts.

“Dr. Volpe and her team found a lot of Black magazines from the 20th century and digitized them and did metadata for them,” says González, who serves as project facilitator.

In addition to González and Drs. Volpe and Koontz, a DH Core employee specializing in data visualizations and UH students with relevant skillsets are part of the Black magazines archive working group.

In her role as facilitator, González meets with the team every couple of weeks or so to check on everyone’s progress. One of those team members is Vivian Nguyen, senior digital media major and president of UXCoogs, a club based at UH Sugar Land. Nguyen interns as a UX/UI designer for the DH Core through the 2026 Design and Development Internship Program.

Her main focus: designing the full user experience and visual identity for the Black magazines archive platform. “Think of me as an architect,” says Nguyen. “I’m building out the blueprint, the map for it, and then I give it to the developer team to construct it.”

To Nguyen, the aim of digital humanities is to close the gap between information and those who may not know how to access it. For the Black magazines archive, this entails making the publications publicly discoverable for the first time through a searchable and easily browsable medium.

“These magazines existed. They documented real communities and real culture, everyday life across the 20th century. But because they weren’t widely circulated at that time, most people today have never really seen them and probably never would,” Nguyen says.

“They’re probably sitting in archives, physically preserved but invisible to the public. Digital humanities changes that. It takes something that was locked up and opens it to researchers across the country or students or someone who just stumbled across it out of curiosity.”

The Black magazines archive is an ongoing endeavor; design and code are still taking shape. When finished, the final product will be a well of resources for professional and casual learners alike.

“The Black magazines archive would be for people who like art or Black history or Black fashion,” González says. “It could be for researchers who are studying Black history from the 20th century and maybe Civil Rights, because we made sure to choose articles and issues that touch on that.”

As seen via existing and evolving DH Core projects, digital humanities broadens the availability of knowledge by putting stationary content online and formatting it to be engaging for all visitors. Through dynamic designs, thoughtful frameworks, and comprehensive codes, digital humanists enable research to go further than ever before.