Joe Loewenstein, director of the Humanities Digital Workshop (HDW), never set out to be a digital humanities scholar, nor could he have predicted what the HDW would become. When it launched in 2006, before large language models and generative artificial intelligence, “digital projects” often meant little more than transferring materials online.

Now, on its 20th anniversary, Loewenstein reflects on how a few early, “naive” projects — including his own — grew into a lab that redefined humanities research, expanded the canon, and produced graduates who push the boundaries of digital scholarship.

“We set out to support faculty research ideas,” Loewenstein said. “But since that research depended on student labor, we quickly realized it also had deep pedagogical value. We discovered new ways to train students in the humanities.” 

The HDW adopted a lab culture more common in the sciences, where professors and students learned from one another and collaboration flowed across the entire team.

Over the years, the workshop has expanded significantly, both in the number of projects it supports and in the students who participate. The research teams have also grown to include an increasing number of WashU Libraries staff, whose expertise has strengthened the workshop’s collaborative work. Assistant director Douglas Knox and digital humanities specialist Tumaini Ussiri bring deep coding knowledge and extensive experience with humanities-based digital projects. Each summer, the HDW now hosts more than a dozen faculty projects and about 30 research fellows, contributing to nearly 400 fellows over the years. Its impact speaks for itself: digital archives, research tools, published papers, and alumni who have gone on to distinguished careers. 

To celebrate, we’re highlighting 20 milestones from the workshop’s 20 years.

Project: The Virality of Racial Terror

David Cunningham, a professor of sociology, and Geoff Ward, a professor of African and African American studies and director of the WashU & Slavery Project, are part of a research team examining how reports of anti-Black violence circulated through historical newspapers. Their three-year, Mellon Foundation–funded project uses data mining to explore how these reports contributed to the spread of racist ideology and racial terror across time and place. The work also seeks to draw connections to modern viral media and to foster public reckoning through research, teaching, exhibitions, and accessible digital resources. 

Student: Jen McLish

As a linguistics undergraduate and HDW summer intern, Jen McLish helped build professor of classics Tim Moore’s groundbreaking online database of dramatic meters. She later co-authored a paper with Moore, the John and Penelope Biggs Distinguished Professor of Classics, and now pursues a PhD in archaeology at Brown University.

Project: AI Humanities Lab

Founded by Gabi Kirilloff, an assistant professor of English, and Claudia Carroll, TRIADS postdoctoral research associate, the AI Humanities Lab grew out of the  HDW as an interdisciplinary research group. Its work is bidirectional: applying AI to study literature, media, history, and film, and examining AI itself — its development, biases, and cultural impact. Earlier this year, the lab published a paper in the Harvard Data Science Review, using computational stylometry to evaluate how GPT mimics the style of 19th-century authors like Mark Twain, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens.

Tool: Gender Violence Database 

The Gender Violence Database is a searchable archive of more than 15,000 citations for anyone studying violence against women. Developed by Jami Ake, a teaching professor of comparative literature and thought and women, gender, and sexuality studies, the database draws on contributions from over 70 students and scholars, and continues to grow. Researchers, practitioners, and the public use it to find and apply evidence-based practices.

Support: Securing funding for the digital humanities 

The HDW has attracted national recognition and millions of dollars in grants over 20 years, fueling ambitious scholarship. A recent highlight: a $798,000 Human Networks and Data Science award from the National Science Foundation. Backed by major funders like the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Council for Learned Societies, the HDW has collaborated widely in a way that leverages both local investments and external grants to keep bold ideas moving forward.

Student: Harper Tooch

While completing her M.A. in Art History and Archaeology, Harper Tooch led the 3D modeling component of Professor Seth Graebner’s “Describing Paris in the 19th Century” project. Using Blender, 3D creation software, she helped Graebner, an associate professor of French and global studies​, create a prototype model of the landmark “Fontaine des Innocents” from historical sources in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France’s “Gallica” archive. The experience informs her current role as a 3D visualization specialist at WashU Libraries, where she advances humanities-driven uses of emerging visualization technologies. 

Project: What is a novel?: Novel™

Matt Erlin, a professor of German and comparative literature, led a major branch of this seven-year, multi-institutional project, which brought together literary scholars, text-mining experts, and digital content partners to rethink the history of the novel from a computational perspective. The resulting conferences and publications shed new light on questions ranging from character networks to fictional geographies and helped reshape debates on literary text mining and cultural heritage.

New minor and certificate: Data Science in the Humanities (DASH)

In 2016, the university launched an undergraduate minor and a graduate certificate program to support the growing number of students involved in HDW projects. By combining traditional humanities inquiry with computational methods, the programs strengthen analytical skills and prepare students to contribute thoughtfully across the humanities.

Project: ‘F.B. Eyes’

Ever wondered what the FBI knew about James Baldwin, Katherine Dunham, or W.E.B. Du Bois? HDW fellows teamed with Olin Library’s Digital Library Services to scan thousands of pages and create a digital archive complementing “F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature,” by William J. Maxwell, the Fannie Hurst Professor of Creative Literature in English and African and African American studies. The archive exposes five decades of the FBI’s scrutiny of African American poems, plays, essays, and novels.

Student: Melanie Walsh

First a WashU undergraduate and then an English graduate student, Melanie Walsh sharpened her data science and network analysis skills as an HDW fellow. After earning her PhD in English in 2019, she joined Cornell University as a postdoctoral fellow and visiting lecturer in information science. Now an assistant professor at the University of Washington, she developed the free online textbook “Introduction to Cultural Analytics & Python” and is co-director of the “AI for Humanists” project, which develops resources to help humanities scholars use large language models (LLMs) creatively in their work.

Tool: Westergaard Species Counterpoint Online (WSCO) 

Developed by Robert Snarrenberg, an associate professor of theory and composition, this web-based tool helps students learn species counterpoint — one of classical European music’s foundational disciplines. The tool evaluates compositions for adherence to musical rules while allowing users to hear and annotate their work. WSCO provides an interactive way to learn core principles of Western classical music and explore how listeners perceive musical structure.

Student: Tuma Ussiri 

Tuma Ussiri discovered digital humanities in his first year as an English PhD student studying 19th- and 20th-century African American literature. As an HDW fellow, he embraced the intersection of technology and the humanities, gaining skills in data visualization, Python-based NLP, web scraping, XML, and web development on projects including “City on a Hill”, St. Louis Integrated Database of Enslavement (SLIDE), and the Henry Hampton collection. After completing coursework for his PhD, he joined the HDW full-time as a full-stack developer. Loewenstein called him one of their “star students” and now, a colleague.

Project: Creating a Federal Government 

At a moment when Americans are engaged in a fierce debate about the role and purpose of government, this project reconstructs that early federal bureaucracy. Developed by Peter Kastor, the Samuel K. Eddy Endowed Professor, Creating a Federal Government compiles career profiles of more than 38,000 early federal employees, generates an interactive map of their locations, and analyzes the emerging federal system. The project uses digital history to reveal how the Founders envisioned and built the machinery of government. 

Student: Vedul Palavajjhala 

As an undergraduate, Vedul Palavajjhala joined the EarlyPrint Project with no prior background in English literature. Using the 53,000-text EEBO-TCP collection, he applied computational and machine learning methods to classify early modern works by genre, transforming the archive into a searchable resource for studying genre evolution, stylistic differences, and the spread of ideas in early modern England. This experience sparked a passion for Early Modern English textual data, which he now pursues in the statistics and data science PhD program. 

Project: West River Inscriptions

Commercial networks undergirded the global diaspora of Cantonese migrants from China’s Pearl River delta in early modern and modern times. Led by Steven B. Miles, a professor of history and director of Global Studies, the project created a database of stone inscriptions to trace commercial networks supporting one important Cantonese migration trajectory, along southern China's West River (Xijiang 西江) basin. 

Project: Muncie Library Investigation

Lynne Tatlock, the Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities, led studies over a decade using the “What Middletown Reads” digital archive of 1891–1902 Muncie, Indiana, Public Library records. Linking borrowers’ reading histories to census data, the project explored gendered preferences, family reading habits, repeated engagement, and interactions with popular and translated fiction, including works by German author E. Marlitt. Tatlock’s research provides a data-driven view of how literature shaped identity, taste, and cultural exchange in turn-of-the-century America.

Event: Spenser Symposium 

Joe Loewenstein, who is also a professor of English, collaborated with students to create the “Spenser Archive,” the digital foundation and complement to Oxford University Press’s forthcoming “Collected Works of Edmund Spenser.” The archive includes scanned images of original editions, annotated texts, editorial commentary, and comparisons of textual variants, all displayed through an interactive digital interface. In 2014, contributors from across the country returned to WashU’s campus to present their work at a Spenser research conference.

Project: Race and Community Art on the U.S.-Mexico Border 

Ila Sheren documents community-based art addressing race, ethnicity, migration, and border life. The project maps 21st-century artworks from the U.S. and Mexico alongside demographic and geographic data, creating a bilingual, web-based platform. Focusing on grassroots creativity often overlooked in scholarship, it fosters cross-border connections, supports research, and allows crowdsourced contributions to capture the region’s rich cultural legacy. 

Project: ‘City on a Hill’

Over several years, Abram Van Engen, the Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities, worked with students to track invocations of America as a “city on a hill.” The website offers interactive visualizations and informed Van Engen’s 2020 award-winning book on American exceptionalism.

Tool: St. Louis Integrated Database of Enslavement 

Created by philosophy and philosophy-neuroscience-psychology professor Carl Craver, in collaboration with many undergraduates, graduate students, and the WashU & Slavery Project, the St. Louis Integrated Database of Enslavement (SLIDE) unifies historical records on enslavement, enslaved people, and enslavers that were previously scattered across archives. Reparative Public Historian Kelly Schmidt now runs the searchable database, which lets researchers trace individual and family connections, explore the histories behind local place names and landmarks, and gain a deeper understanding of St. Louis’s complex social and legal past.

Header image: Student researchers work with David Cunningham and Geoff Ward on The Virality of Racial Terror, a project examining how archival newspaper coverage of anti-Black violence spread racist ideology across time and place. (Credit: Josh Valeri)