Skip to content

Project Examples

Relational Databases

Early African American Film

Created by UCLA undergraduate and graduate students in the Digital Humanities program, this database of early African American silent race films was an early use of Airtable in DH. Early African American Film draws on primary and secondary sources to create a relational database metadata on pre-1930 films, actors, and companies. The project uses Airtable as both a back-end and front-end database, hosting an embedded Airtable database on its website.

Publications:

  • Cifor, Marika, Hanna Girma, Shanya Norman, and Miriam Posner. “Early African-American Film Database, 1909–1930.” Journal of Open Humanities Data 4, no. 0 (January 17, 2018). https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.7.
  • Cifor, Marika, Hanna Girma, William Lam, Shanya Norman, Miriam Posner, Karla Contreras, and Aya Grace Yoshioka. “Tracing a Community of Practice: A Database of Early African American Race Film.” The Moving Image: The Journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists 17, no. 2 (2017): 101–5. https://doi.org/10.5749/movingimage.17.2.0101.

Petitioning for Freedom: Habeas Corpus in the American West, 1812-1924

As described by the project, "Petitioning for Freedom is a relational database of habeas petitions from county, state, and federal courts in Arizona, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oregon, and Washington between 1812 and 1924." Led by Dr. Katrina Jagodinsky, Petitioning for Freedom was created at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln by student researchers and faculty and staff from the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and the Department of History.

The project uses Airtable as a back-end database, using Airtable's API to incorporate the database in a larger technical stack. Using Datura, a custom API developed by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, data from Petitioning for Freedom's Airtable base is transformed into static HTML pages, creating the project website (see GitHub Repository).

Publications:

Digital Exhibitions

Swarthmore College Libraries Digital Exhibitions

Swarthmore College Libraries host digital exhibitions using Airtable. Employing Airtable's "Gallery" view, each record in the database is represented as a card with an image header and associated metadata. Users can click cards to expand the record and see more images and details.

Selected Exhibitions:

Interactive Catalogs

Early U.S. Cinema Compendium

The Early U.S. Cinema Compendium is a flat database of U.S. film titles up to 1920 created by the Media Ecology Project at Dartmouth College, with direction from Mark Williams and project design by John P. Bell. The Airtable base contains digitized metadata and selected frame samples from rare films held by institutions including the American Film Institute, Library of Congress, Museum of Modern Art, and Eye Filmmuseum. Metadata is separated into tables by collection and theme, and can be sorted, filtered, grouped and searched.

Publications:

The Journal of e-Media Studies devoted a special issue to the Media Ecology Project and the launch of the compendium in 2024:

Zine Bakery

Zine Bakery is a catalog of zines at the intersection of culture, tech, and justice collected by Amanda Wyatt Visconti. The catalog is stored in a relational Airtable base, and the project uses Airtable views filter and organize the catalog by topic and theme. See Visconti's post about the creation of the dataset to learn more about the project's creation and use of Airtable.

Publications:

DH Tools

DH Tools is a collection of commonly used tools by digital humanities practitioners created by the Digital Humanitites Japan Resource Wiki. The Airtable base is organized into tables by theme (e.g. Visualization, Mapping, Text Analysis, OCR, Data/Databases, etc.), and each tool has platform, type, and cost tags, allowing for resources to be sorted, filtered, and grouped.

Crowdsourcing Information

Mapping Black Digital and Public Humanities

Mapping Black Digital and Public Humanities, a project at James Madison University, is a map of digital and public humanities projects related to Black history and culture. The project encourages submissions to its database from scholars working on relevant projects, using an Airtable form to collect project metadata.

Publications:

  • Godfrey, Mollie, and Seán and McCarthy. “Race, Space, and Celebrating Simms: Mapping Strategies for Black Feminist Biographical Recovery.” A/b: Auto/Biography Studies 38, no. 2 (May 4, 2023): 487–506. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2022.2130251.

This tutorial is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).