Category Archives: Read Hot and Digitized

Read, Hot and Digitized: Country of Words | بلد من كلام

One of the more complex questions we encounter in area studies is how we define a nation. Is it lines on a political map? A shared territory? For Palestinians, traditional maps can often feel inadequate, showing borders and divisions but failing to capture the full, lived reality of a people. The remarkable digital-born project, Country of Words | بلد من كلام : A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature, by Refqa Abu-Remaileh (Freie Universität Berlin) rethinks the very idea of a map. Instead of depicting political boundaries, it offers a form of literary cartography.

Screenshot of literature under British occupation essay title
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Screenshot of Literary Diasporas essay title
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At its heart, Country of Words is an interactive, web-based atlas that visualizes the vast geography of Palestinian literature. When you visit the site, you are met with a world map dotted with points and featuring an accompanying timeline. Each dot represents a location—Gaza, Jerusalem, Beirut, but also Paris, Santiago, and Iowa City—that appears in a work of Palestinian fiction or poetry. Clicking on a dot reveals an excerpt from the literary work set in that place, presented in both its original Arabic and in English translation.

The accompanying timeline summarizes essential events in Palestinian history and allows you to read essays on how these historical moments influenced and were shaped by key works of Palestinian literature. Additionally, you can look at an overall network visualization; a variety of visualizations of biographies, historical events, publishing histories, and publishing networks; and audio interviews with key current and recent Palestinian literary figures.

The project is the work of Prof. Dr. Refqa Abu-Remaileh and her team at Freie Universität Berlin. It grew not from a desire to create a simple database, but rather from a potent intellectual argument. The project contends that for a people so often defined by exile and displacement, literature itself has created a “country”—a homeland of memory, imagination, and shared experience that transcends physical borders. This atlas makes that homeland visible.

As a librarian, I see this as a powerful tool for teaching and research. It allows students to literally see the global reach of the Palestinian experience. For scholars, it is a dynamic data visualization that can spark new questions about place, identity, and literary networks. It is a beautiful, poignant, and profoundly human entry point into a rich literary tradition. It invites you to wander through this country of words and discover the stories that connect a people, wherever they may be.

To dive deeper into the literary world mapped by the project, here are a few key works from the UT Libraries’ collections that speak to the themes of place, exile, and memory:

  • غسان الكنفاني، الأثار الكاملة. The complete collection of a foundational writer of modern Palestinian literature, Ghassan Kanafani. Included is his novella, Men in the Sun, about Palestinian men seeking to cross a border in a water tanker. It is a searing allegory of the search for life and dignity in the face of statelessness.
  • After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives by Edward Said. A landmark book of essays and reflections paired with photographs by Jean Mohr. Said, a major figure in postcolonial studies, meditates on the nature of Palestinian identity in exile.
  • Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad. Isabella Hammad’s second novel centers on Sonia, an actress who journeys back to Palestine and joins a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Enter Ghost offers a vivid portrait of contemporary Palestine and explores themes of exile, belonging, and the deep bonds formed through family and collective struggle.

Read, Hot and Digitized: Digital Benin

Launched in November 2022, Digital Benin isn’t necessarily a new digital project, but it is an important one that continues to shift how we understand and access African cultural heritage, in this case cultural objects from the Kingdom of Benin (present-day Nigeria).

At first glance, it’s an aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly interface that showcases more than 5,000 artifacts looted from Benin during a notorious 1897 British military campaign, an enduring symbol of colonial violence and theft. While this alone would make the project a valuable resource, a great strength of the project lies in how it highlights connections: between museum-held objects and their places of origin, between Western classifications and indigenous Edo terminology, between archival documents and the Benin objects themselves. It’s not just a database, but a dynamic tool for recontextualizing history.

Digital Benin connects the global locations of Benin artifacts across 130 institutions in 21 countries, most of which were looted during the colonial period and are now located in Western museums. Each object record includes high-resolution images, metadata, provenance information and translations in both English and Edo. Notably, you can trace how looted items moved from British soldiers in 1897, through art dealers and collectors, and into major museum collections.

Above is a screenshot of the Network Explorer tool, which allows users to explore connections between people, entities, objects and archival documents.

One of the most powerful aspects of the project is the “Ẹyo Otọ” section that highlights the Edo object classification system. Instead of relying on Western museum categories (like “pottery” or “bronze”), Digital Benin introduces a controlled vocabulary based on Edo knowledge systems. For example, you’ll notice distinct categories like Akhẹ Amẹ (water pot) or Akhẹ Osun (Osun shrine pot). These designations reflect the original, indigenous understanding and use of the object.

Object records are organized by the Edo object classification system under the “Ẹyo Otọ section. Here are all the records for Iyeọkhọkhọ hen figures used on female altars.

The design of the site is equally impressive, with extensive documentation on the project development, data acquisition and management, and the Edo controlled vocabulary. The Italian studio Calibro, known for projects like the open source data visualization tool RAWGraphs and The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive, built custom visual tools and interfaces for the site.

Good design intersects with dynamic function in the “Paper Trails” section of the project, which connects the individual Benin objects to archival documents like letters, catalogues, photographs and newspaper clippings that mention them. You can click through the documents, read transcriptions and follow specific objects as they are referenced over time.

The Archival Documents database shows a flyer for a demonstration advocating for the return of the Benin Bronzes. The archival record links to the specific Uhunmwu-Elao, or commemorative head, mentioned in the document.

A unique strength of Digital Benin is its overall approach to this work. The project is led by Nigerian and international scholars, deeply grounded in local knowledge, oral traditions and indigenous frameworks. It models a powerful kind of digital restitution by not just returning information to descendant communities, but empowering them to define how that knowledge is structured and shared. This value is embedded into the project as a whole, shaping everything from the site’s design and data organization to its commitment to centering Edo perspectives and reclaiming cultural authority.


See more resources in our library catalog:

Abungu, George Okello, and Webber Ndoro. Cultural Heritage Management in Africa: The Heritage of the Colonized. London: Routledge, 2022.

Coombes, Annie E. Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. Yale University Press, 1994.

Falola, Toyin. Britain and Nigeria: Exploitation or Development? London ; Zed, 1987.

Hicks, Dan. The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. London: Pluto Press, 2020.

Ogbechie, Sylvester Okwunodu. Making History: African Collectors and the Canon of African Art : The Femi Akinsanya African Art Collection. Milan, Italy: 5 Continents Editions, 2011.

Phillipe, Nora. Restitution?: Africa’s Fight for its Art. Paris: Cinétévé, 2021.

Phillips, Barnaby. Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes. London: Oneworld, 2021.

Troelenberg, Eva-Maria, Damiana Oțoiu, and Felicity Bodenstein. Contested Holdings: Museum Collections in Political, Epistemic and Artistic Processes of Return. New York: Berghahn Books, 2022.

Read, Hot and Digitized: A Digital Survey of the Scottish Witch Trials

The witch trials of Europe in the early modern period, from about 1400 to 1775, resulted in the prosecution, often violent, of over 100,000 people. Studying this history and understanding its causes—which were multifaceted, and incorporated elements of religious persecution of alleged heresy, superstition, and religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants—is an important way we can understand the motivations of past atrocities and learn from them to avoid similar violence and intolerance in the future. The Witches: Survey of Scottish Witchcraft project at the University of Edinburgh is one project that makes this history more broadly accessible and understandable both to scholars and the general public.

The site itself contains an excellent introduction to the history of witch trials in Scotland. It states:

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Scotland went through a series of changes to the state and church which fuelled the Scottish witch hunt. As a result of the Reformation, when Scotland broke away from the Catholic Church and moved towards Protestantism, the church went through an upheaval of religious belief and became much more interested in what ordinary people did and believed. 

This concern led to great concern from Church and state about people’s religious beliefs and practices, deviations from behavior expected by the Church and society (such as not attending Church on a Sunday), and witchcraft. More than 4,000 people were prosecuted for witchcraft in Scotland between 1563 and 1736, and confessions were often evinced using torture. Of people accused of being witches it is estimated that around 2,500, or roughly two-thirds, were executed, with the majority of those executed (about 85%) being women.

The main map on the site’s landing page, showing locations where witches in the database lived.
The main map on the site’s landing page, showing locations where witches in the database lived.

The site’s most striking feature is a map showing accused witches’ residences and details about their case and personal lives, including their occupations. This provides an intuitive and visually appealing way to explore the dataset, and allows for free exploration of the data without digging into the spreadsheets and metadata underlying the map. Users can also search the complete dataset used to make the map, exploring the same by searching for an accused’s name. In addition to these exploratory tools, the site also features a very helpful introduction that explains many details of the dataset and provides further background information, as well as a number of additional visualizations. Particularly affecting is the Story of Isobel Young visualization, which chronicles the life and death of one woman who was accused of witchcraft and executed.

The Story of Isobel Young visualization, showing a map of places where Isobel lived and background information on the Scottish Witchcraft Act of 1563.
The Story of Isobel Young visualization.

The site also provides a host of references that provide scholarly background on the history of witch trials in Scotland. There are also a number of resources, including a GitHub repository for the project’s website and the CSV files used to make the map. It also provides lists of accused witches, trials, people involved, and memorials and sites of interest within Scotland that users may wish to visit.

The Witches: Survey of Scottish Witchcraft site offers a robust but inviting introduction to this period of European history. I encourage you to explore the site for yourself and find out what it has to offer.

Related resources at the UT Libraries:

Witch Hunts in Europe and America: An Encyclopedia

Demonology and Witch-hunting in Early Modern Europe

Witch Hunts: A history of the Witch Persecutions in Europe and North America

Read, Hot and Digitized: The Mixtape Museum

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship.  Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.


Before we had Spotify playlists, we had the mixtape. Scrawled handwritten track lists; the precise practice of hitting PLAY and REC at the same time; the dread of ejecting the cassette from the player to find the tape had been pulled into a tangled mess and using a pencil to carefully respool it.

A definition of the word mixtape. Noun: Traditionally recorded on to a compact cassette, a mixtape is a compilation of songs from various sources arranged in specific order.
A screenshot from the About section of The Mixtape Museum.

The Mixtape Museum (MXM) is a digital archive project and educational initiative committed to the collection, preservation, and celebration of mixtape history. The project seeks to both further mixtape scholarship and foster public dialogue, raising awareness of the artistry and far-reaching impact of mixtapes as a cultural form.

An image of a handwritten track list on a mixtape
Stephen J. Tyson Sr. Collection.

The Mixtape Memory Collection is the heart of the MXM, bringing together interviews, anecdotes, photographs, and reflections from a mix of contributors. There are tributes to mixtape pioneers, reminiscences about childhood introductions to Hip Hop, and laments for tapes not saved. I appreciated this brief recollection of a “mixtape correspondence” as it underscores the richness of the form as a mode of communication.

While mixtapes are the anchor point, these memories are also about people and places, relationships and phases, marking connections between a cultural era and the personal eras of our lives. The Collection reveals how music indexes experiences and moments in time, and also attests to the way particular objects can become imbued with layers of meaning and cultural significance. Even in the digital space of the MXM, I am struck by the affective resonance of the physical cassettes themselves, each containing a story that stretches beyond the tape wound inside it.

An image of eight cassettes with handwritten labels
DJ Red Alert, Ismael Telly Collection.

In addition to the Memory Collection, the MXM includes a News section of related articles and public events, and a Mixtape Scholarship Library featuring key texts in the field. Appropriately, there is also a Listen section, which takes visitors to the Mixtape Museum Soundcloud page, where today’s creators might upload their tracks instead of passing out their tapes.

Aligned in a sense with the ethos of the format it highlights, the MXM operates from a simple WordPress site—a platform with a relatively low barrier of entry for producing digital content. The project was founded by scholar, arts administrator, and community archivist Regan Sommer McCoy, who serves as Chief Curator, supported by a group of advisors and institutional collaborators.

As I browse the collection my own mixtape memories surface—a tape gifted to me by a former best friend that I played on repeat during my freshman year of high school; my painstaking efforts to create the perfect mix to let a crush know the way I really felt about him. Does the MXM spark a mixtape memory for you? The project welcomes submissions to the archival collection and invites a variety of formats. Contributors have the option to make memories public or keep them password protected, respecting the boundaries of each offering.


Want to learn more about mixtape culture and history? Several of the titles featured in the MXM are available from the UT Libraries:

Auerbach, Evan, and Daniel Isenberg. Do Remember! : The Golden Era of NYC Hip-Hop Mixtapes / Evan Auerbach, Daniel Isenberg. New York, NY: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2023. 

Burns, Jehnie I. Mixtape Nostalgia : Culture, Memory, and Representation / Jehnie I. Burns. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2021.

Moore, Thurston. Mix Tape : The Art of Cassette Culture / Edited by Thurston Moore.1st ed. New York, NY: Universe Pub., 2004

Taylor, Zack, Georg Petzold, and LLC Seagull and Birch. Cassette : A Documentary Mixtape / a Film by Zack Taylor ; Directed, Produced, and Filmed by Zack Taylor ; Edited, Produced, and Additional Camera by Georg Petzold ; Seagull and Birch, LLC. El Segund

Walker, Lance Scott. DJ Screw : A Life in Slow Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2022. 

Read, Hot and Digitized: The Library of Lost Books

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship.  Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.


In 2019 I have written about Footprints, a project that aims to track the circulation of printed ‘Jewish books’ around the world as it is evidenced through provenance research.[1] The Library of Lost Books is a “citizen science” (aka crowd sourcing) international project that similarly to Footprints, aims to trace books looted by the Nazis from the library of the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies in Berlin (Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums) and track their journey around the world through provenance data. Operating from 1872 until it was closed down by the Nazis in 1942, the Higher Institute was dedicated to the study of Jewish history and culture, as well as rabbinical studies in Liberal Judaism.[2] The original library is reported to have around 60,000 volumes, but only around 5,000 of them have been rediscovered since the war. The Leo Baeck Institute for the Study of German-Jewish History and Culture in Jerusalem, with support from the German Foundation for Remembrance, Responsibility and Future (EVZ) and the German Ministry of Finance (BMF), has created this platform not only for the purpose of tracing the lost books, but also to commemorate and educate about the Higher Institute for Jewish Studies in Berlin, its scholars, and its students.

The Library of Lost Books website features a database, an interactive map, and an online exhibition detailing the history and legacy of the Higher Institute. A great place to begin is with “The story of the missing books” and its three chapters (with optional narration). Chapter one gives the background story of the Higher Institute, its founders, and its academic landscape. The Higher Institute represented a modern current within Judaism, namely Liberal Judaism, that emphasizes universal values — personal freedom, individuality, and social responsibility. Chapter two describes the last years of the Higher Institute before it was shut down. It shows a chronology of systematic discrimination according to the Nazi ideology, explains why and how the books were moved out of the library, and brings detailed biographies of students and employees, some of whom kept working at the library as forced laborers until their deportation to concentration camps, while others managed to escape. This chapter also details the rescue efforts of part of the books before 1942. Chapter three details the fate of the books after the war; it explains how they were transferred to [nowadays] the Czech Republic, or were scattered in various libraries in Berlin. Yet, some books were relocated to the United States or Russia.  

The project owners are using “citizen science” (aka crowd sourcing) in their quest to identify the missing books. Users are encouraged to look at books in their local libraries or second-hand bookstores, cross-reference their findings with the virtual library, and share their findings through the platform, using a “lost and found” form. In order to support this provenance research, the project offers ‘hunting supplies’, including a detailed checklist that includes stamps, accession numbers, call numbers, and paper labels that might be found in or on the books. The goal is to virtually reunite the found books through the Library of Lost Books; the project owners specifically state that “physical copies will remain in their places where they were discovered, as that is also a part of their story.”[3]

The platform is also a teaching tool for educators. It includes learning units for students about pre-war Jewish life in Berlin, Nazi looting practices, provenance research, the importance of cultural heritage, and the roll of libraries in the pre-internet era. Besides English, all content on the platform has versions in German and Czech, as it is suspected that most of the books ended up in either Germany or the Czech Republic (although some were already located also in the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel).

From the database view, one could browse the few thousands of books that were already identified so far. Browsing options are by book titles/authors/publication year, by owners (past and present), and by individuals or institutions that found the books. Clicking on a book entry, one gets full tracing information: gallery of associated images, supportive provenance evidence, and a timeline of related events, showing how the book traveled through time and various owners. See for example the eventful life of the title Zekhor le-Avraham : sheʼelot u-teshuvot – through interactive map. This book was published in 1837 in Istanbul, acquired by the Higher Institute (year unknown), looted in 1942, salvaged after the war, resurfaced in Jerusalem (year unknown), acquired by a private donor for UCLA in 1963, and currently held by UCLA. Similarly, thousands of books that were looted from the Higher Institute resurfaced years after the war and are now reunited again in the virtual library of lost books.   


Related resources:

Glickman, Mark, and Rachel Gould. Stolen Words : The Nazi Plunder of Jewish Books / Mark Glickman ; Designed by Rachel Gould. 1st ed. Philadelphia, [Pennsylvania: The Jewish Publication Society, 2016. Digital. https://search.lib.utexas.edu/permalink/01UTAU_INST/9e1640/alma991058395754406011

Rydell, Anders. The Book Thieves : The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance / Anders Rydell ; Translated by Henning Koch. Trans. by Henning Koch. New York, New York: Viking, 2017. Print. https://search.lib.utexas.edu/permalink/01UTAU_INST/9e1640/alma991046059239706011

Peiss, Kathy Lee. Information Hunters : When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe / Kathy Peiss. New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Digital. https://search.lib.utexas.edu/permalink/01UTAU_INST/9e1640/alma991058667683006011


[1] https://texlibris.lib.utexas.edu/2019/04/read-hot-and-digitized-footprints-the-chronotope-of-the-jewish-book/

[2] https://wienerholocaustlibrary.org/exhibition/the-library-of-lost-books/

[3] Citizen Science – Leo Baeck Institute

Read, Hot and Digitized: The Complex History of Bananas Depicted in Artistic Works

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship.  Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.


The banana has been used in many forms of art, ranging from paintings to sculpture, and demonstrated its popularity in iconography throughout the years. Why are bananas so popular, both as a fruit and as a modern emoji? One digital exhibit seeks to spread context behind the banana by organizing visual depictions of the fruit through Latin American artworks.

Banana Craze, a bilingual digital research project created by Juanita and Blanca Solano and translated by Banana Link, showcases the dark past and present of the banana industry, and how it has shaped the regions affected by the plantations. The database is available for viewing in both Spanish and English.

Before the globalization of the banana, the fruit itself was hardly eaten outside of its native regions. As the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita) established plantations throughout Latin American countries and the Caribbean, bananas became a monoculture industry in itself, now being the number one sold fruit around the world.

The Banana Craze website itself is not only a visual spectacle, but it also features organizational tools so that the viewer can dive deeper into individual artists as well as explore the art on a timeline to provide historical context. For example, the images of this gold leafed banana plant can be found in Mariá José Argerenzio’s entry in the alphabetized index. Maria is an Ecuadorian artist who created the installation to emphasize the extraction of two major resources from Ecuador, bananas and gold, linking Spanish empire colonialism to more modern day practices that exacerbate the region’s environmental health and disparities in wealth.

The viewer can also explore the artworks by other subcategories, such as violences, ecosystems, and country location. Violences is one of the three thematic ways to view the website through the curatorial lenses of the exhibit creators. This framework exercises the function of a digital art exhibit, allowing viewers to explore the history of banana culture with selected artworks.

Building such an interactive online exhibit requires the use of a digital tool that is catered to accessible viewership. The meticulous metadata for each artwork blends seamlessly with each page, allowing me to search and view specific content, while keeping me immersed in the overall project. The multipage exhibits provide context and can function either as a digital archive or art database, depending on how I chose to begin my journey. I appreciated that I can view all the images and documents on the site without downloading any attachments. This provided for a seamless viewing experience.

The exhibit was a visual feast for the eyes. Its contrasting colors are electrifying, almost bordering on jarring, and produces an effective look as I went on to view the art and how they symbolize the practices that have affected the people, the land, and the traditions of Latin America and beyond.

Want to learn more about the history of bananas or protest art? Check out these resources from the UT Libraries:

D’Souza, A., Bright, P., & Lumumba, P. (2018). Whitewalling : art, race & protest in 3 acts. Badlands Unlimited.

Fassio, D., Seuret, F., & Abita, V. (2010). Banana wars: A presentation of Films for the Humanities & Sciences. Films for the Humanities and Sciences.

Koeppel, D. (2008). Banana : The fate of the fruit that changed the world. Hudson Street Press.

Mercurio, G., & Banksy. (2020). A visual protest : the art of Banksy. (English edition.). Prestel.

Portillo Villeda, S. G. (2021). Roots of resistance : A story of gender, race, and labor on the north coast of Honduras. (1st Ed.). University of Texas Press.

Tags: art, history, food

[1] 


This is a fun blog post and a quirky yet incredible important interventional art project. Great work bringing it to everyone’s attention through this post, Tina!

Read, Hot and Digitized: The Global Jukebox

Meagan O’Neal, Graduate Student in Library Science from the University of North Texas

The Association for Cultural Equity features a project called The Global Jukebox.  Building off the research of musicologist and folklorist Alan Lomax (1915-2002), The Global Jukebox is a database of traditional folk, indigenous, and popular songs from cultures around the world. The folk and indigenous music samples were recorded on site between 1900-1980 by researchers committed to expanding musical documentation and preservation. With over 6000 songs from 1200 different cultures, this project is intended for anyone to use to understand the working of a community by listening to its music. The project is open access and free without an account, however setting up a free account allows you to save your research on musical roots and provide feedback.

Screenshot of The Global Jukebox main page.

There is something for everyone to enjoy in this project. For the curious, there is “Explore” mode, where you can drag a 3-D globe around to discover music from anywhere in the world. Clicking on any dot on the globe, listeners can be instantly transported to a playlist of that area’s music and song. There is also an option to use preset “Journeys,” which allows listeners to discover music by theme.

The “Learn” mode is an interesting tool for K-12 educators, offering lesson plans and thematic units that help to diversify the music curriculum. There is also an option to “find your musical roots” and build a playlist of your own family’s musical heritage. This tool is a great opportunity to connect students to their cultural backgrounds through music.

Screenshot of cultural ”nodes” that can be found while in ”Explore” mode.

What I found the most interesting is cantometrics. Cantometrics is the analysis of patterns in music. The Global Jukebox is a relational database, and each song has datasets marking characteristics like instrumentation; phonating and phrasing; melodic form; and many more. These data points highlight connections across regions, with visual clusters showing relational patterns.

Screenshot of Education landing page.

I found this especially interesting because it is similar to how university music students are trained to compare characteristics in different eras of music. The Global Jukebox strives to provide a picture of characteristics from around the world, yet many cultures have only a handful of music samples to listen to, and there are some dots on the globe that do not have any associated content. This is an ongoing project, and I would like to see more samples added. A few songs from an area can’t accurately represent the entire cultural context for that people, let alone for an entire geographic region, and expanding their selections will help improve overall representation.

Screenshot of cultural clusters by song styles.

In the “Analyze” section it shows their coding for any culture and song in the jukebox, and when you click on the i next to the song tracker you have the option to see the coding sheet for any song in their database. The 37 musical features were selected during months of listening of recordings of music from across the world and then standardized with assigned ranges so their variations could be coded. Their coding guide goes into more detail about each line. While there are legitimate critiques in the field of musicology about the cantometric coding, it is still an interesting lens for viewing music.

Screenshot of the cantometrics dataset for Drums For Girl’s Dances.

As a former music undergraduate student, I would have loved to have had a resource like this available to expand my knowledge beyond the classical canon. I highly recommend musicologists, educators, and the casually curious to make use of this database. This is a great tool to use with other resources to achieve a more equitable balance of music from around the world.

Want to learn more about world music and cantometrics? Check out these resources from the UT Libraries:

Lomax, A. (1962). Song Structure and Social Structure. Ethnology, 1(4), 425–451. https://doi.org/10.2307/3772850 

Wood, A. L., Rudd, R., & Lomax, A. (2021). Songs of earth : aesthetic and social codes in music : based upon Alan Lomax’s Cantometrics : an approach to the anthropology of music / by Anna Lomax Wood ; with Stella Silbert, Karen Claman, Kiki Smith-Archiapatti, & Violet Baron ; foreword by Robert Garfias ; introduction by Victor Grauer ; musical selections by Roswell Rudd ; Cantometrics coding manual by Alan Lomax & Victor Grauer. University Press of Mississippi.

Smithsonian Global Sound for Libraries | Alexander Street, part of Clarivate

Music Online: Listening | Alexander Street, part of Clarivate

Read, Hot and Digitized: Following the Archives to Know Shanghai (Gen zhe dang an guan Shanghai 跟著檔案觀上海)”

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship.  Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.


Among the candidates for the Best Data Visualization category in the 2023 Digital Humanities Award, I found this recent project from the Shanghai Archives (Shanghai dang an guan 上海檔案館, Following the Archives to Know Shanghai). The project beautifully takes viewers on a tour through Shanghai’s most significant historical sites. It is built on archival materials about over 100 city landmarks in Shanghai. All the sites are plotted onto georeferenced historical maps. Viewers can choose from 13 base historical maps ranging from 1855 to 2024 (The following screenshot features a base map from 1923). Currently, the site only supports Chinese as the interface language, but Google Translate does a sufficient job of making it navigable in English.

Figure 1. Screenshot of all landmarks referenced on a 1923 map.

Shanghai, one of the first treaty ports that China opened to the West in the 1840s, grew into one of Asia’s biggest international metropolises and financial centers by the late nineteenth century. The city was home to many of modern China’s political, economic, and cultural elites, and its foreign concessions hosted thousands of foreign merchants, colonial officials, missionaries, and adventurers. Since the nineteenth century, the city also saw many major historical events that shaped modern China. For example, as the hub of China’s emerging modern/Westernized educational institutions, Shanghai was one of the centers of the May Fourth movement in 1919 that popularized Western political and scientific values to new generations of Chinese youth. Soon after, the Chinese Communist Party convened its national congress in the city in 1921. The city was also home to many international banks and manufacturing enterprises, which incubated the labor movements of the 1920s and 1930s. Beyond all these, the battles between the Chinese soldiers and invading Japanese forces in 1931 and 1937 were fought on the city’s streets while spies serving various regimes hustled throughout the city ruled by both Chinese and foreign authorities.

This project by the Shanghai Archives aims to present this complex and exciting history to the users. Sites are categorized into five categories: famous people’s residences (mingren guju 名人故居), revolutionary landmarks (hongse dibiao 红色地标), youth movements sites (qingnian yundong 青年运动), transportation infrastructures (jiaotong 交通), and ships and shipyards (lun chuan 轮船).

To explore a location, you click on it on the map, and a new window opens up on the right side, showing a timeline with documents related to the landmark. The following example shows eleven items related to the HSBC Bank building on the bund (waitan 外灘). Most items are historical photographs of the building, but the collection also contains a digitized copy of the bank’s stock certificate from 1894. The site also provides 3D models of the buildings for users to explore.

Figure 2. A Stock Certificate of the HSBC Bank from 1894.

Figure 3. 3D model of the HSBC Bank Building.

The project also provides audiovisual materials for some storied sites. For example, among the items related to the racecourse (Pao Ma Chang 跑馬場), there is a short documentary showing historical clips of events held there.

Figure 4. A documentary clip featuring the Shanghai horse racecourse.

The project is commendable in making archival materials available to the public in an interactive and engaging way, although it does have a pronounced emphasis on the communists’ activities in presenting the story map. As metadata is the foundation of all digital humanities projects, I am compelled to comment that the metadata of presented archival items leaves much to be desired. In the map view, items are only provided with title, source, and year, without any identifying numbers linking back to the  Archives or its partner institutions. The browse view features a waterfall layout like Pinterest, which may be compelling to some but unfortunately does not provide more metadata than the story map view.

Figure 5. A waterfall view of archival materials available through the project.

Overall, the site offers an engaging journey through Shanghai’s recent past. It is exciting to see more locations and archival materials being added. I hope the quality of metadata can be enhanced one day. It would also be great if the textual documents could be OCRed and searched in full text.

Learn more about Shanghai and its history:

Dian Shi Zhai hua bao: A Major Shanghai-based pictorial magazine (1884–1898).

Liang You: Shanghai-based popular magazine published from 1926 to 1945.

Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: the Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Harvard University Press, 1999).

Jin Jiang, Women Playing Men: Yue Opera and Social Change in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009)

Frederick Wakeman, Policing Shanghai 1927-1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

Read, Hot and Digitized: The SF Nexus Project

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the Libraries’ Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship.  Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.


One of my favorite digitization projects is the SF Nexus from Temple University Libraries’ Duckworth Scholars Studio. It’s a digital corpus of 403 Science Fiction (SF) works, mostly novels, anthologies, and single-author short story collections published between 1945 and 1990 in the United States. It was created from scans of physical books in Temple’s Paskow Science Fiction Collection. It’s a notable project because SF has long been sidelined in literary studies, even though research on the genre can bring to light topics well worthy of study – race, gender, politics, futurism, climate change, and technology. This genre bias has carried over to digital humanities (DH), even though computational DH methods can accelerate this research beyond traditional methods like close reading one text at a time.

The project’s first step was to digitize the print books from the Paskow Collection. The team at Temple made the bold decision to physically disassemble the books. Most were cheaply-made paperbacks already in various states of decay and would sustain irreparable damage from digitization. They intentionally chose books that were not already part of the HathiTrust Digital Library, and after the digitization process, HathiTrust ingested these works, preserving them far longer than the physical items might have survived while also making them available to a much wider audience of researchers.

After scanning, the team created the Omeka exhibit Digitizing the New Wave, which highlights mid-twentieth century SF book covers. (Omeka is a commonly-used platform for scholarly online exhibits.) I thoroughly enjoy browsing Digitizing the New Wave, mostly for the entertaining cover art. But it’s also a great work of scholarship in its own right. It sheds light on lesser-known SF novels and writers from the New Wave Era, roughly from 1960-1990. I appreciate how the team structured the exhibit – it’s organized by sub-genre. Visitors can browse early “cli-fi” books (SF discussing climate catastrophe) and find examples of the subversive sub-genre Cyberpunk beyond well-known authors like Philip K. Dick and Neal Stephenson. 

A screenshot of the Cyberpunk section from the Digitizing the New Wave Omeka exhibit.

Digitizing the New Wave is a great entry point for anyone interested in DH covering SF (and cover art). But in terms of research potential, the current iteration of the project – the aforementioned SF Nexus – offers a great deal more for computational DH, such as text mining and topic modeling visualizations. To facilitate such projects, the SF Nexus offers several datasets, including one organized by book chapters and discrete sections of books (what they call “chunks”) and CSV files with metadata associated with the corpus, including one of “named entities” (proper names associated with real-world objects, such as place names or author names). These datasets are available through a HuggingFace repository linked from the SF Nexus website.

One aspect of the SF Nexus that I find most interesting is the approach to copyright. All of the works in the corpus were published after 1928, the current cutoff date for materials to enter the public domain, and so are still in copyright. The SF Nexus is pretty small as far as digitized corpora go, with only 403 works. This was an intentional choice, partly due to copyright concerns. Many of the books are orphan works (works in which the rightsholder is difficult or impossible to identify or contact), and the subsequent datasets are designed for non-consumptive use. “Non-consumptive” means the digitized versions of the text are not meant to be read as ebooks, but rather studied at an aggregate level in a quantitative way. Additionally, the website includes a copyright Take Down Notice with contact information for a potential rightsholder to request removal.

A screenshot of the SF Nexus’ Take Down Notice, at the bottom of their Data webpage

Currently, the team at Temple is looking to expand the corpus and find partner institutions with substantial SF print collections to contribute. Temple has also been the home institution for most of the current research generated from the project, so the team is also spreading the word to researchers elsewhere with hopes of seeing more research and publications.

And if all this discussion of digitizing old Science Fiction novels has you curious to actually read some, head over to the PCL! UT Libraries has a collection strength in late twentieth century SF that we continue to build on by collecting new SF novels, short story collections, and anthologies! Learn more about our SF collection on our Science Fiction LibGuide!

READ, HOT AND DIGITIZED: Digitizing, Repatriating, and Promoting Sound

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from UTL’s Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship.  Our hope is that these monthly reviews will inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.


Financially supported by the Indian Ministry of Culture, the Virtual Museum of Images and Sound is an online platform drawing upon and digitally presenting the amazingly rich resources held in the American Institute of Indian Studies’ (AIIS) collections.  While the open access museum highlights a vast range of artistic expression that I encourage everyone to explore, this brief post highlights the audio recordings from the Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE). 

Grab your headphones, settle into your comfortable chair, and join in to listen and learn!

For those new to South Asian music traditions, the ARCE’s Music in Context section provides a great introductory overview as it organizes recordings thematically.  While one might expect a section on ragas, the ARCE site encourages one to listen to songs associated with life cycle events, with work, or with ritual traditions.  If curated thematic journeys aren’t your style, rest assured that the site also operationalizes a number of digital humanities methods to delve into the dizzying array of musical types.  For example, one can use the Mapping Music or the Music Timeline interfaces to discover recordings by geographical location or in their chronological context.  There are so many fascinating things to find here—for example, did you know that the American jazz artist Teddy Weatherford lived in Kolkata (the city then known as Calcutta) and was featured on India’s First Jazz Record in 1944?  Or that the 1978 “Jazz Yatra” brought the likes of saxophonist Sonny Rollins and sitarist Ustad Vilayat Khan together?  One loses oneself in the midst of such resources.

Beyond the fun to be had on the site from wherever you are, it is important to remember ARCE’s compelling vision to support the study of ethnomusicology in India.  The original goals for the AIIS analog collection were to protect and preserve recordings made by foreign scholars in the course of their research which were subsequently deposited in archives around the world.  Troublingly, it was obvious that such recordings were rarely available in India itself.  Addressing this problem head on, ARCE declares that “repatriation of collections has remained a major aim of the ARCE, which houses collections… which were not [previously] available in India. Scholars and collectors from all over the world, as well as India, continue to deposit collections of their recordings regularly at ARCE.”  In addition, they see the collection and the wide array of associated programs and events anchored in the collection as a way to stimulate new ethnomusicological research worldwide.  Knowing this driving mission, it is no surprise that ARCE has made so many collections freely available online.  I commend them on this important work.

I further applaud ARCE on their partnerships to collaboratively digitize and make recordings openly available.  To cite one recent and impactful success, ARCE worked with grant funding from the Modern Endangered Archives Program (MEAP) to preserve, robustly describe, and offer access to the “Recordings of Hereditary Musicians of Western Rajasthan.”  A scholarly collection formerly only on audio cassettes, the new online open access through ARCE and MEAP allows listeners worldwide to celebrate and enjoy Rajasthani music, culture and history.   

Learn more with these databases (restricted to UT affiliates):

Saarey Music provides streaming access to over 60 years of South Asian classical music including genres like Dhurpad, Thumri, Kafi, Tarana, and Ghazal.

Smithsonian Global Sound is a virtual encyclopedia of the world’s musical and aural traditions and includes material from the Archive Research Centre for Ethnomusicology (ARCE).

Ethnomusicology: Global Field Recordings presents content from across the globe, including thousands of audio field recordings.

Music Online: Listening provides access to over 7 million streaming audio tracks, see in particular the “World Music” section.