Digital archive of a twentieth-century writer's letters and papers, hosted with Wits Historical Papers
Collaborator(s): Stanford Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, Dr. Joel Cabrita
Stanford Libraries publishes its digital collections through Spotlight, an open-source exhibit platform developed by the Libraries. For this archive, I constructed the underlying database by locating Twala's letters and documents, digitizing them, and organizing them into a searchable collection.
The digital humanities leave considerable room for work with new multimodal language models. Optical character recognition performs poorly on handwritten material, yet these models now transcribe historical handwriting more accurately than dedicated systems. Many archives also hold languages and dialects that existing tools handle poorly. Many of the writers these archives preserve were marginalized in their own time, and their work exists only in handwritten form.
If interested in the story behind this writer, you should read Dr. Cabrita's book, Written Out!