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Digital Humanities

Reading manuscripts in the digital space with handwritten text recognition
An old handwritten ledger from 1892.

Image: Johner Images via Getty Images

Reading manuscripts in the digital space with handwritten text recognition

Penn Libraries staff are using the platform eScriptorium to build machine-learning models that can transcribe handwritten manuscripts from across the world.

From Penn Libraries

2 min. read

Championing the humanities

Championing the humanities

Humanities Works is one piece of a new, larger, and broader umbrella hub for the humanities,  raising the visibility of humanities scholarship through shared spaces and events including faculty lightning talks.

Looking to the past to understand the impacts of human land use in South Asia
R. Ramesh adjusts measuring tape at archaeological site.

R. Ramesh, assisting superintending archaeologist at the Archaeological Survey of India, adjusted a measuring tape at an archaeological site in India before he and Penn's Kathleen Morrison took samples for paleoenvironmental analysis from a Neolithic (3000-1200 BCE) deposit. 

(Image: Courtesy of Kathleen Morrison)

Looking to the past to understand the impacts of human land use in South Asia

An international group of scholars, including archaeologists from the School of Arts & Sciences, synthesized archaeological evidence in South Asia from 12,000 and 6,000 years ago.

5 min. read

An online resource for learners across the Italian language community
Blurred figures of people walk across a public square in Milano, Italy.

The Italian language learning tool PRIMA was developed by faculty at Penn to help show students the diversity in Italian language and culture.

(Image: iStock/LeoPatrizi)

An online resource for learners across the Italian language community

The Pedagogical Repository for Italian Media Activities, or PRIMA, helps students and faculty explore Italian language and culture by using voices and imagery that better represent the culture.
An updated Database of Early English Playbooks: DEEP 2.0
William Shakespeare.

Image: Adobe Stock/Tony Baggett

An updated Database of Early English Playbooks: DEEP 2.0

The 20-year-old Database of Early English Playbooks has become an invaluable resource for research on Shakespeare and many other playwrights of his time. The catalogue has been revised and relaunched as DEEP 2.0, with support from Penn’s Price Lab for Digital Humanities.

From Omnia

Redlining and rentals
An aerial view of the Park Forest housing development outside of Chicago in the 1950s.

Aerial view of a Park Forest neighborhood in 1952 that captures the neat rows of homes that characterized the post-World War II housing boom in the planned community.

(Image: Owen Kent via the Chicago Historical Society)

Redlining and rentals

Historian Brent Cebul in the School of Arts & Sciences is working on a new digital mapping project looking at the impact of Federal Housing Administration policies on the availability of affordable rental housing post-World War II. 

Kristen de Groot

Measuring readers of romance
two people looking at laptop computers

James English (left) and J.D. Porter have been collaborating on the research project for more than three years. 

(nocred)

Measuring readers of romance

Researchers at Penn's Price Lab for Digital Humanities conducted a quantitative analysis of the romance genre, studying thousands of avid readers and the hundreds of thousands of books in their collections in Goodreads

Louisa Shepard