Digital Projects at UTA Libraries

This post in our Open @ UTA Libraries blog series covers the current digital project partnerships here at the University of Texas at Arlington between faculty and UTA Libraries. 

The Open Partnerships & Services Department at UTA Libraries serves as the home of our partnerships with faculty and students on a variety of digital projects. Our current projects span across the university, partnering with faculty from different disciplines. These projects would fall under the umbrella term known as digital humanities, which is generally combining technology and humanities research together. Our projects also have open access outcomes, meaning the information is available online for researchers to access and use, under a Creative Commons license (for more information on copyright considerations, see another blog post here, All's Not Fair in Love and Copyright.) Below are a few of the digital projects we are working on with faculty partners, as well as information regarding the future of digital projects with UTA Libraries. 

The CTT project was created by Dr. Ken Roemer, an Emeritus Professor of English here at UTA in 2008 with the support of UTA Libraries staff Mark Cook and Andrew Leverenz. Dr. Roemer began collecting the covers, titles, and table of contents from American literature anthologies to show the change over time of literary canons.

The archive that evolved from our humble foray into digital humanities eventually grew into a collection of tables of contents in well over 100 anthologies, many of them with multiple volumes and most of them general surveys of American literature rather than anthologies - Dr. Roemer

This collection includes works from 19th-21st century anthologies as well as information regarding the American Literacy Scholarship Annual and American Literature essays. You can search the current site by looking for recently added materials, by century, or through a keyword search. By offering this site digitally and online, this compendium of information about the changes in American Literature over time can be used by anyone, and it has. Dr. Roemer has heard from many colleagues around the United States about their use of the site and even a professor in France!

The Border Land project is a partnership between the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies and UTA Libraries,  funded in part by the UTA College of Liberal Arts Initiative of Digital Arts and Humanities (iDAH) and the Summerlee Foundation. This project is the brainchild of Dr. Sam Haynes, Professor of History and Director of the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies. Dr. Haynes’ long-time assistant, Barbara Moore, dedicated a great deal of research to the site. UTA Libraries’ cartographic archivist, Ben Huseman, and web developer, Andrew Leverenz, have been instrumental in this site’s development as well.  

This project maps sites of conflict between Native Americans and Euro-Americans in Texas from the creation of the First Mexican Republic to the outbreak of the U.S.-Mexico War (1821-1846). The data also involves interethnic conflict between the emerging Hispanic ethnicity and Euro-American (white) settlers of Texas during this period.  

Researchers can utilize a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) map to see the locations of the conflicts, as well as relevant information about each datapoint. More content is being added regularly, with work largely being done by the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies, including graduate students from the UTA Department of History. In fact, in summer 2023, Dr. Haynes worked with History grad students to add a new facet of conflict history to Borderland. The students researched and prepped data representative of the history of lynching and Euro-American violence perpetrated against African Americans in Reconstruction-era Texas. This data will be available to the public soon.  

The Tejano Voices Project is a joint project of the Center for Mexican American Studies and UTA Libraries. This project focuses on 126 oral history interviews with Tejano and Tejana leaders from across the state conducted by Dr. José Angel Gutiérrez, Associate Professor of Political Science at UTA.  The oral history interviews are recorded via VHS. These physical items are stored at the UTA Libraries’ Special Collections and were digitized to make them available online through this project. 

The interviews were conducted in 1992-2006 and emphasize the personal stories and struggles of the interviewees, many of whom are the first individuals of Mexican descent in their communities elected or appointed to government office. Each interview on the website includes the audio file and transcript of the oral history interview. UTA Libraries’ Digital Project team continues to work with the Center for Mexican American Studies to expand this site.

The Continent Divided digital project seeks to promote awareness of and scholarly activity about the U.S. - Mexico War. This is another joint project of Dr. Haynes with the Center for Greater Southwestern Studies and UTA Libraries. Continent Divided is UTA Libraries’ most viewed online digital project with hundreds of thousands of views every year! We are proud to host this important resource and expand it! 

A Continent Divided is committed to digitizing primary source materials drawn from the UTA Libraries’ Special Collections, long recognized as one of the premier repositories on the 1846-1848 conflict. The website presents materials including essays, biographies, documents, images, and maps. Importantly, the site includes a section for K-12 educators, including lesson plans and document-based questions (DBQs). Dr. Haynes has worked with K-12 educators in the DFW area to incorporate primary sources into their classrooms, using the Continent Divided digital project as the platform for engagement.  

As noted above, we have many plans for the expansion of the existing digital project partnerships! ,In fact, these projects are getting a makeover! We are beginning the process of migrating our digital projects and other digital collections onto a Bepress Digital Commons site. While we do not have a timeline in place yet for when these new sites will be public, we are excited to implement new interactive features for these digital projects and help to make them more discoverable and accessible. Check them out now from the links above and check back once we have completed our migration process. We will continue to provide information about those changes in this blog series.  

For faculty interested in partnering with UTA Libraries on a new digital project or learning more about options for open access outcomes for research and scholarship, please visit UTA Libraries Digital Scholarship for more information or send an email to librariesops@uta.edu.

The cover image for this blog post is "Mix of xuTJZ7uD7PI" by Whitney Russell, licensed CC BY 4.0. It is a derivative of "xuTJZ7uD7PI" by Sincerely Media, licensed on Unsplash, and was modified to add the "Open @ UTA Libraries" banner.