Digital Resources
Acta Sanctorum The downloads actually come from Gallica, but this site provides the ability to select rather quickly the desired volume, which cannot be done from Gallica. Some volumes can also be found on Google Books, but they tend to be of lower size and, hence, quality. If you want the actual books, you can find them at Duke. An easy way to find which volume you need is to determine the saint’s feast day and then look at this list Acta Sanctorum Table of Contents. Or visit Roger Pearce’s Volumes of the Acta Sanctorum online, which pulls the Acta Sanctorum from Google Books and from the Internet Archive.
The Aghlabids & Their Neighbors: An Interdisciplinary Workshop on Art & Material Culture in Nine-Century North Africa Organised by Glaire D. Anderson (UNC-Chapel Hill), Corisande Fenwick (Leicester University) and Mariam Rosser-Owen (Victoria & Albert Museum), this two-day conference focused on the history and material culture of the Aghlabid dynasty of Ifrīqiya and their immediate neighbors in the region. The workshop considered the region not as a peripheral frontier whose artistic production was inferior to or derivative of trends in the ‘Abbasid heartlands’ of Iraq and Egypt, but as one of the vibrant centers of the early medieval Dar al-Islam. An international group of scholars from the US, Europe, and North Africa presented research on Aghlabid history, art, architecture, archaeology, urbanism, and numismatics. The conference was held at UNC’s Winston House in London and the presentations are all available on the UNC Global Vimeo channel, which can be accessed through the individual hyperlinks in the program.
The Ancient World Mapping Center The Ancient World Mapping Center is an interdisciplinary research center that promotes cartography, historical geography, and geographic information science as essential disciplines within the field of ancient studies through innovative and collaborative research, teaching, and community outreach activities.
Art in the Age of the Caliphs This website presents student explorations of islamic art of the caliphal period (roughly 650–1250 CE, from the establishment of the Umayyad dynasty in greater historic Syria to the Mongol sack of Baghdad). Several students applied a digital humanities approach to their research, using Google Earth, Sketchup, and Fusion Tables, to combine art historical methodologies with questions and methods they bring from other areas of campus, such as Biology, Business Administration, Computer Science, Music, History, Geography, and Economics.
The Digital Munya Project: Visualizing a Medieval Islamic Villa The digital munya project is is an ongoing multidisciplinary effort to visualize this important medieval building type, its landscape setting, and its interior decoration. We are developing a fully navigable 3-D model, which uses a gaming platform to provide scholars and students with a new tool for creative visualization and analysis. Our visualization combines elements from two archaeological sites near present-day Córdoba: al-Rummaniyya and the palace city of Madinat al-Zahra’. Our aim is not to provide accurate archaeological reconstructions of either site, but to creatively suggest visual possibilities of vanished munya spaces.
Digital Scriptorium The Digital Scriptorium is a growing image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research. It bridges the gap between a diverse user community and the limited resources of libraries by means of sample imaging and extensive rather than intensive cataloguing.
Early English Books Online Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700 – from the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War.
Gallica at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France The source for most print collections of French history in general: Antiquity, Medieval, Early Modern, and Modern.
HathiTrust HathiTrust is a partnership of major research institutions and libraries working to ensure that the cultural record is preserved and accessible long into the future. There are more than sixty partners in HathiTrust, and membership is open to institutions worldwide.
Internet Archive Wayback Machine The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is a service that allows people to visit archived versions of Web sites. Visitors to the Wayback Machine can type in a URL, select a date range, and then begin surfing on an archived version of the Web. Imagine surfing circa 1999 and looking at all the Y2K hype, or revisiting an older version of your favorite Web site. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine can make all of this possible. The site includes numerous primary source collections.
The MacKinney Collection of Medieval Medical Illustrations Professor Loren C. MacKinney (1891-1963) specialized in medieval medical history, and the collection of his photographs of medieval manuscripts and images he began taking in the 1930s contains more than a thousand images.
A Medieval ‘First in Flight’: Visualizing ‘Abbas Ibn Firnas & the Art of Early Aviation This interdisciplinary project focuses on ‘Abbas Ibn Firnas (d. 887 CE), a celebrated polymath of Córdoba, the capital of early Islamic Spain, and best known for conducting an early experiment in human flight. The research group combines tools and perspectives from arts, humanities and the sciences to analyze accounts of the flight and its historical contexts. Our project is informed by the earliest Arabic texts and the material and historical evidence of the ninth century. Nevertheless, our investigation is creative and exploratory – imaginative interpretation and visualization, rather than representation, is the aim of our project. This project approaches the flight as a framework to consider artistic and social dimensions of scientific and technological experimentation in Córdoba and other early Islamic courts.
Monumenta Historiae Germanica Everything related to Germany in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. The website is in German, but the download instructions are in English. If you prefer actually holding the books, they are available in Davis Library.
Open Culture Free audio books, free online courses, free movies, free language lessons, free ebooks and other enriching content. Open Culture was founded in 2006.
Open Library Open Library is an open project: the software is open, the data are open, the documentation is open, and we welcome your contribution. Whether you fix a typo, add a book, or write a widget–it’s all welcome. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can’t do it alone! The site includes numerous primary source collections.
Virtual Paul’s Cross Project The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project commemorates the anniversary of John Donne’s Gunpowder Day sermon, Tuesday, November 5, 1622. It enables us to experience the delivery of a public sermon in early modern London as an event that unfolds over time on a particular occasion and in a specific physical location.