The Digital Maximum (DM) Project

The hallmark of the first few decades of the Digital Humanities field has been a widespread digitization of primary materials such as printed books, maps, photographs, sheet music, and more. Yet, such digital archives remain largely static. This project funds the development and wide implementation of a digital annotation resource that poises UW-Madison to lead the way in opening up digital collections for scholarship and teaching.

DM software allows people with no advanced technical expertise to create a powerful architecture of linked, annotated and searchable data for a wide range of online uses. Initial DM projects focused on the study of medieval manuscripts and maps, but this next phase of work provides technical development and support to realize the tool’s potential to reach across the digital humanities and social sciences. The system will be useful to faculty, staff, and graduate students in research, teaching, digital publishing and public outreach products. This tool is compliant with library archival standards while also allowing non-archivists to easily collaborate in ways that can extend but not compromise the metadata and other elements of the archive’s integrity.

Principal Investigator

• Martin Foys
  Professor of English
  

Co-Investigator

• Jonathan Senchyne
  Assistant Professor of Library and Information Studies and Director of the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture
  

Collaborators

• Dorothy Porter
  Curator of Digital Research Services for the Kislak Center for Special Collections at the University of Pennsylvania
• Heather Wacha
  Postdoctoral Fellow in Library and Information Studies