Core Projects

Projects

• Slave Societies Digital Archive (SSDA)

  Holding more than 700,000 digital images from the sixteenth century to today, the SSDA captures at-risk collections that document the lives of an estimated four to six million individuals. The project aims to preserve the records of slave societies in perpetuity, while providing scholars the opportunity to engage with them computationally. The project is led by Jane Landers and Daniel Genkins.

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• Syriaca.org

  A dialect of Aramaic, the Syriac language was widely used in the first millennium. As such, documents in Syriac hold immense value for increasing our understanding of the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Asia during key moments in the development and interaction of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Syriaca.org is a collaborative and fluid project designed as a reference hub for digitally linking research and findings in Syriac language and culture while developing tools for widely disseminating this research. The project is led locally by David A. Michelson.

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• Architectura Sinica

  Architectura Sinica is a research portal for the study of China’s traditional architecture, consisting of four parts: A site archive of historic monuments, an encyclopedic dictionary and thesaurus of technical terminology used to describe traditional Chinese architecture, a bibliography of sources, and photographs and transcriptions of epigraphic information found at a given site. The project is led by Tracy Miller.

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• The Builders and Defenders Database

  The Builders and Defenders Database is a resource for primary source information about the nearly 19,000 enslaved and free Black people who built Nashville’s Civil War defenses and fought for our nation in the Battle of Nashville (December 1864). The database is a co-creation between scholars and students at Vanderbilt University, descendants of the builders & defenders, and public historians, genealogists, and interpreters invested in the production and dissemination of inclusive and comprehensive information about the underrepresented people of this conflict and its wide-ranging legacies. The project is directed by Angela Sutton.

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• Vanderbilt University Institutional Repository (VUIR)

  VUIR is a digital repository of Open scholarship and creative works produced by the Vanderbilt community. VUIR preserves and disseminates these works, broadening access to them to anyone with an internet connection. The project is hosted by the Vanderbilt University Libraries and led by Shenmeng Xu.

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• Open Journal Publishing Program

  In collaboration with faculty and student partners, the Libraries publishes 8 open access journals. These range from undergraduate research and creative writing to scholarly fora on religious communications and American studies. The Lab is enthusiastic about launching additional publications and welcomes inquiries from interested potential partners.

• Play Nicely

  Play Nicely is an educational tool designed to prevent violence and mitigate toxic stress in children based on research conducted by physicians at Vanderbilt University Medical College (VUMC) and was made into a website in the early 2000s. The Digital Lab managed this project to create a new version of the website using the personnel and skills within the Vanderbilt Libraries combined with subcontracting out tasks. The Lab is planning on completing more projects using this digital project management process.

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