Wired Humanities Projects
Knight Library
1299 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-1299
Wired Humanities Projects (WHP), a digital humanities research center, was founded in 1997 within the Center for the Study of Women in Society at University of Oregon. It currently resides within the Center at Oregon for Research in Education at the same university. Stephanie Wood, a history professor with a specialization in early Latin America, has directed WHP since 2009, and before that she served as Associate Director.
While WHP has developed and supported a wide range of projects over the years, its strength has always been and continues to be Early Mesoamerica. It has received more than one million dollars in grants for Mesoamerican digital collections since 2006, largely from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities.
WHP’s most widely consulted digital project is its trilingual online Nahuatl Dictionary, developed with collaboration from James Lockhart, Frances Karttunen, Joe Campbell, John Sullivan, and John’s team of native speakers at the Institute for Teaching and Ethnological Research in Zacatecas, Mexico. Additional scholars of Nahuatl have kindly allowed us to harvest examples from their published research. As of June 2013, the online dictionary had more than 77,000 regular users, and many more occasional visitors.
WHP has cloned this dictionary and is re-purposing it for additional indigenous languages of Mexico, including Zapotec, Mixtec, P’urhépecha, and Yucatec Maya. But these are still in their infancy and dependent upon volunteer labor.
WHP has another grant-funded project of significance, the Mapas Project. This is a digital collection of pictorial, indigenous-authored manuscripts and maps from New Spain, atomized for added description, analysis, transcriptions, and translations. As with many of our projects, we have cloned and re-purposed this project, making grant funds extend as far as possible. One of the spinoffs is our Age of Exploration digital map collection, which includes a number of the earliest maps of the Americas, annotated in their detail by cartographic scholar Dr. James Walker.
Our newest project is the Early Nahuatl Library, a digital collection of primarily alphabetic manuscripts in Nahuatl from the first half of the sixteenth century into the nineteenth. We will have input from our colleagues in Zacatecas and Warsaw on this project, along with scholars from across the United States.
WHP has also hosted a number of NEH summer institutes for schoolteachers, in the U.S. and in Oaxaca, Mexico. These institutes have as their focus Mesoamerican cultures and their histories. Participating teachers have utilized WHP’s Virtual Mesoamerican Archive, a portal site built by WHP, as well as WHP’s digital collections and have helped to develop a growing list of open source curricular materials.
