DH Research
These are examples of recent and ongoing digital humanities research by Baylor researchers.
The Book of Deuteronomy often lives in the shadow of the book of Exodus. Slavery provides the first period of interpretation of African American of the Book of Deuteronomy. Another source of African American interpretation comes out of the music of African American communities. A third source of interpretation is the preaching of the civil rights era culminating in the “Mountain Top” speech of Martin Luther King Jr. The assumption that African and African American interpretation began with the twentieth century turns a blind eye to pre-critical interpretation by Africana people, namely people from African and the African Diaspora. This research will partially remedy that deficit. Often North American interpreters forget the size and scope of Africa in antiquity and the present. For instance, early biblical interpreters Augustine and Tertullian were important African theologians using biblical material. The Arab conquest of Africa stand between the early African Christianity and the Middle Passage/Maafa. The relatively new appreciation of academic biblical scholars and theologians reading Scriptures with so-called regular readers provides a backdrop for this research.
Researchers:
Mapping the Du Bois Seventh Ward
Interactive Map developed by Baylor University Libraries: Data & Digital Scholarship using the ArcGIS Online dashboard framework.
The ward and individual-level data are from the 1900 U.S. Decennial Census. After 72 years, the Census Bureau makes individual-level data publicly available 72 years (the "72-Year Rule"). This rule protected the privacy of individuals for the typical life expectancy when the rule was created in the 1970s.
Student research assistants inputted the individual-level census data from microfilm. These data are now available as scanned, downloadable files through Ancestry.com. There is a discrepancy between the number of residents of the Seventh Ward based on the 1900 ward-level data and the individual-level census data because some of our research assistants were unable to find data for some Seventh Ward addresses. These are shown as "no data available." The error could be with our data collection, the cataloging of the census records, or the original census data collection.
Researchers:
- Dr. Stephanie Boddie
- Dr. Amy Hillier (University of Pennsylvania)
- Joshua Been
- Sinai Wood
Syllabi Information Literacy Miner
Automatically mine academic syllabi for information literacy (IL) components in order to identify opportunities for liaison librarians to engage with courses. While this Jupyter Notebook can be used as a standalone tool, Baylor University Libraries also maintains a Power BI report that also identifies which courses liaison libraries are already providing instruction. This allows liaison librarians to to identify new IL opportunities with some measure of precision.
Researchers:
Fundamentals of Data Research (FDR) Summer Fellows Research Highlights