Visualizing Oral Histories of Bengal using Digital Humanities Tools

FAIN: RZ-51225-10

Tufts University (Somerville, MA 02144-2401)
Kris K. Manjapra (Project Director: November 2009 to July 2013)

An interactive web archive of primary sources for studying the collective biography of West Bengal and Bangladesh intellectuals born between ca. 1920-1950.

We are creating a publicly available interactive web archive of primary sources for studying the collective biography of West Bengal and Bangladesh intellectuals in the post-colonial era. The architecture of our web archive is of great significance for advancing the digital humanities. We are developing new web-based tools to visualize and research oral history texts. We plan to enhance the visualization and search capabilities we already have developed during a one-year pilot study. These tools will revolutionize the way oral histories are curated and disseminated on the web. Our team is linking keyterms in the oral histories to explanatory information online, geo-referencing place names to dynamic online maps, creating the ability for students and researchers to derive personalized collections of excerpts from the oral history archive, and developing the ability to represent relationships between keyterms with dynamic concept maps.