Unfortunately, there are not many Digital Humanities projects out there (at least none that I could find) that specifically deal with the American Southwest at the turn of the century or the medical field in this area. Generally, many of the more prominent projects follow more popular historical topics, such as war histories. A great deal of the Digital Humanities projects that I was able to find specifically addressed literature and text mining in specific texts of famous authors or notable figures in history which, while interesting, do not help my research or focus area out much. There are a few tools which can be useful for teaching, such as Lacuna Stories, tools which discuss digital cultures, such as Challenging Methods or research tools, such as HathiTrust which will prove useful on a general level, but, again, projects specifically dealing with my research interests of women in the American West at the turn of the century and traditional and professional medicine in the Southwest were few and far between.
That being said, I did find a few notable projects that either slightly qualify as Digital Humanities or are very amazing projects that, while not very widespread, at least indicate ways that the field can expand into the Digital Realm.
The first, most readily available Digital Project are archival projects which contain numerous accessible documents. There are numerous kinds of archival projects available, but the one most relevant to my work is found with the New Mexico Digital Collections. This site features a fantastic searchable archive from collections across New Mexico and is a great way to get started on looking for primary sources for any project. I've used this before and will definitely use it again, and while the project itself does not have any larger purpose beside provide access to these collections, the site as a whole is fairly notable. Not only are all of the sources free to access, the overall search terms needed to locate certain documents seems fairly well put together, which, unfortunately, can't be said for all digital archives.
I have found two other Digital Humanities projects that deal with my research, both of them for medical history. The first is the Text Analysis and Topic Modeling of Martha Ballard's diary. Ballard was midwife in Maine who kept a daily record of her life between 1785 and 1812. As the article linked above discusses, after cleaning the text to have a readable OCR that could be analyzed with topic modeling, a lot of useful information about the life of Ballard and the daily life of a midwife was revealed, even though some of the findings initially seemed mundane. This kind of analysis takes the information provided by digital tools and provides more context to what is initially provided, such as the frequency of housework being mentioned in her journals, for example, and discusses the changes of these kind of entries over time within the context of the time period. Not only is a remarkable understanding revealed of Ballard's life (that of a general married woman in Maine at this time), it also provides great insight into the life of a midwife and how they thought about and went about their practice. While similar diaries as complete as Ballard's are rare, there is potential in the field to take such practices and apply them to other works and daily records to analyze and understand daily life. Changes in frequency of words, further, can reveal just as much as words that are repeated most often. This project, as a whole, is a wonderful example of the kind of work needed in treating a historical document and the kind of information that can be mined from it.
The final project I wish to discuss is the Voluntary Hospital Database which, again, deals with medical history. This database provides searchable information about hospitals and healthcare from the 1890s to 1940s and presents a map which features the placement and change of amount of hospitals over time, which can be utilized to discuss the rise of professionalization in medicine and an increasing reliance upon science and professional medicine in a medical facility, as opposed to traditional healing or healing in the home. The project itself focuses on hospitals in the British Isles and while the research on display does not help me at the moment, the project can be applied to the geographic location I am studying and try to investigate similar changes and information. So, while this project isn't immediately useful to me now, in the future, possible projects along these same lines will greatly improve what kind of analysis I can provide of the intersection of traditional and professional medicine and how they interacted over time across categories of race, class, and gender, especially in areas with not as easily accessible forms of professional healthcare.
Again, I really was not able to find many Digital Humanities project that exactly pertained to my field. I was fairly pleased to find things that dealt with medical history and can be applied to future work in the field, but it seems that projects dealing with the Southwest or women in the Southwest are sparse. In the future, many of these projects can be more refined and broaden out their focus to encompass more interests and information. If anything, what the field needs most is expansion. The projects that I have selected really do seem to accomplish their intended goals fairly well, and the biggest notes of improvement are for expansion and to have more projects to look at to discuss and enhance the field.
New projects should be following along the lines of what these projects have done in utilizing digital tools to enrich the forms of scholarship available. If anything, more maps dealing with the Southwest that attempt to discuss or present complex ideas, such as the intersection of health and transportation in the West with TB at the turn of the century, or even information to discuss the racial composition of different areas during points of immigration, such as the Gold Rush, would be useful. Also, in general, I really would like to see more continuation of topic modeling projects that also seek to increase the availability of primary documents with clean OCRs, which can be used for further analysis and investigation. While more documents are being digitized and made available online, many still have to be printed out for any real analysis to take place and cannot be read by technology to reveal any other information outside of what can be gained from reading the text at face value.
I don't think this lack of sources or projects really is a bad thing, if anything, it is a note for improvement and acknowledgement that as scholarship progresses, we will probably see more projects similar to those mentioned above pop up. It is fairly exciting to know that while there isn't a lot out there now, current historians can make the next big contribution to enhance and enrich the field. As our technology becomes more advanced, so too, will our understanding and use of it to produce some extremely exciting digital projects and forms of digital scholarship.
