Arabic Tutorials
Arabic Tutorials is a suite of drills and quizzes that originated from a set of HyperCard stacks produced in the 1990s by BYU Professor Dilworth Parkinson. In the early 2000s his daughter, Kristy Parkinson, then a student in the Computers in the Humanities program (predecessor of the Digital Humanities and Technology program) ported the content over to the LiveCode platform. The tutorials were in use in Humanities Labs from about 2004 through 2015. Devin Asay of ODH worked with Kristy in the migration process, especially helping her set up the backend database.
Arabic Tutorials were also one of the original modules in the Learning Web project.
Cambodian Oral History Project
For various reasons, family histories are uncommon in Cambodia. Many of the few records that did exist were destroyed during the Khmer Rouge period (1975 to 1979). With up to one-third of the adult population killed during the purges, the population is young and the remainder of the older generation’s stories are being rapidly lost. Many of Cambodia’s younger generation hardly know their families’ backgrounds.
Formally launched in January 2016, The Cambodia Oral History Project seeks to capture these stories by engaging local youth in the process. Youth and young adults in Cambodia interview family members to learn about their lives and stories. To date, we have collected over 5,000 interviews. Most of them are available as audio on the project website, and the team is transcribing and translating them.
The project is led by Prof. Dana Bourgerie in the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Studies. ODH designed the data model, as well as the websites for both entering and accessing those data.
Chinese Pronunciation & Romanization Tutorials and Diagnostic Tests
These tutorials and diagnostic tests are used to teach beginning Mandarin Chinese students the fundamentals of tone discrimination and Pinyin transcription. Developed with Dr. Dana Bourgerie of the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages, this project has been in near continuous use since 1991, having undergone several migrations to newer technologies.
C’eravamo tanto amati
C’eravamo tanto amati (We all Loved Each Other So Much) is a beloved 1974 Italian film that depicts the social upheaval in Italy after World War II by following the intertwined lives of four major characters who represent various classes of people in Italian society. Beginning in the late 1990s Harold Hendricks negotiated rights to distribute this film as an instructional project that incorporated transcribed dialog, English translation of the dialog, commentary, actor bios, an interactive dictionary, and quizzes. For about a decade this project was used by BYU Italian classes for listening comprehension development and cultural lessons. A team of BYU students, teachers and ODH personnel developed the project through several versions over several years. Initially produced on Windows as a Toolbook application by student developer Matthew Hamby, later Devin Asay worked on first a HyperCard then later a LiveCode version of the software. This project was eventually released for sale on Amazon with the subtitle Foreign Language Through Feature Films.
English Genome Project
Stylometrics on English essays by written by prominent essayists
Eye Tracking lab
The Office of Digital Humanities maintains an eye-tracking lab for researchers in the college. Currently, the lab is equipped with an EyeLink 1000 Plus. The most notable ongoing projects in the lab are related to eye behavior of readers at various L1 and L2 proficiency levels.
Fairy Tale TV
Fairy Tales are some of the most well-known forms of folklore. They were cross-cultural artifacts well before the advent of mass media. With the appearance of broadcasting, however, fairy tales became even more visible: tropes that were familiar and that could be subverted in interesting ways—to say nothing of being free of copyright concerns.
Led by Jill Terry Rudy, the Fairy Tale on TV (FTTV) database categories television episodes that use one or more fairy tale tropes. Students in Rudy’s class as well as several research assistants have worked to categorize fairy tales that appear in shows as predictable as Grimm or Once Upon a Time, as well as less tale-centric shows like Sesame Street or The Bachelor.
To date, the project has amassed nearly 2,000 television episodes that draw on fairy tales. The data can be browsed by genre, date, and the type of fairy tale being used. Team members write about what they have learned through their research on the site’s blog. And the site features two interactive visualizations—a time series and a network graph—to help users better understand how tales are used over time and in connection with one another.
FLATS
The FLATS testing program allows students all across the United States to take the FLATS test at a college or university in their area, and receive up to 12 college credits.
HMEG
H-MEGs support student-centered, faculty-driven research experiences up to $10,000 for year-long and $5,000 for short-term grants.
Humanities 101 Tutorials
The Humanities 101 Tutorials were commissioned by Professor of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature, Dr. Jon Green in the early 1990s, for use in his Introduction to Humanities course. They introduced students to basic principles of a number of art forms, including architecture, ballet, drama, film, music, visual arts, classic mythological motifs, opera, and poetry. The original version was created by various Computers in the Humanities (CHum) students using HyperCard, under the direction of Chuck Bush and Devin Asay. It was actively used for Humanities 101 from about 1998 through about 2005.
HumFunding
ODH facilitates and maintains online services for Humanities faculty funding requests, including research, travel, leave, and equipment. These processes usually involve the department chair of the applying faculty member, as well as final approval by the dean and subsequent processing by the financial controller and administrative secretary.
Humgrants
A form and approval system for Humanities Grants to faculty for research with students.
Humplus Funding
Through the generous donations of alumni and friends, the College of Humanities supports experiential learning an integral part of an undergraduate career.
Kanji Drill
Kanji Drill is a set of driil and practice exercises for intermediate Japanese students, developed for Dr. Kazzy Watabe of the Department of Asian & Near Eastern Languages. It helped students drill themselves in Kanji reading and pronunciation skills using an “audio flashcard” format. Student would be given a Kanji phrase to read aloud, then would be presented with a native speaker recording and sample sentences to check their accuracy. The application tracked student progress through the drills.
LiveCode University
LiveCode University is an electronic, interactive textbook developed for use in the Digital Humanities & Technology (DigHT) 210 course. DigHT 210 is designed to teach students from non-technology backgrounds the fundamentals of programming and “algorithmic thinking”. LCU has also been distributed worldwide. In 2021 Devin Asay received the BYU Creative Works Award for LiveCode University. This award recognizes faculty who “demonstrate outstanding achievement in the development of creative works that have had wide acceptance and national or international distribution.”
Maladroit Mallet Text Processing Tool
Web interface that streamlines LDA topic modeling with MALLET and the generation of network diagrams in Gephi.
More than Muses
More than Muses is a place where faculty and students collect, transcribe, edit, translate, and share literary texts by and information about women writers who lived on the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century.
Mythology Research
OGCMA-online properties are designed for use in ClCv 241 courses at Brigham Young University and students elsewhere. The present resource contains information assembled for The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300 – 1990’s, edited by J. Davidson Reid (Oxford 1994)
NetRecorder
NetRecorder was an audio recording application intended to make it simple for students to make short recordings for their instructor over the internet, and which the instructor could quickly and easily download for review and evaluation. At the time it was created there were very few tools that could do this, and our instructors were struggling to find an easy, reliable way to let students make short recordings. Devin Asay created this in 2008, and thousands of student recordings were captured for teacher-created assignments. It was retired in 2019 after more robust and simple to use web recording applications became available.
ODH Room Scheduler
Devin Asay created a scheduling application for scheduling the various labs, special technology rooms, and seminar rooms controlled by the College of Humanities. The Scheduler has been in continuous use since 2005.
Pangrammer
A tool for writing pangrams
Quechua Realwords
Quechua Real Words is a multimedia resource to learn and study ideophonic constructs of Ecuadorian Quechua.
RuMOR
Russian Mentor for Orthographic Rules (RuMOR) is a free and open-source intelligent tutoring system that automatically diagnoses learner errors and provides succinct explanations to help the learner correct the errors. The learner-language analysis depends on a specially built finite-state transducer that uses mal-rules to model and tag learner errors. Explanations are available in English and Norwegian.
Russian Language Assessment
Russian Language Assessment a searchable database of student work in several categories in Russian capstone course. Faculty uses submitted papers as part of regular assessment activities.
Spanish & Portuguese TA Scheduler
The Department of Spanish & Portuguese requires all of its first-year students to attend conversation labs with a native speaker once a week while enrolled in Spanish or Portuguese 101, 102, 105, and 106. Students choose which conversation session fits into their schedule. The Department approached ODH in 2009 looking for help in managing the scheduling of the sessions and the student signup process. Devin Asay produced an application to manage the setup of conversation sessions, and a web form that allows students to choose a conversation session based on the level they are enrolled in. The application and signup form have been in use since Winter 2010
Thai 101 Pronunciation Tutorials
Devin Asay worked with BYU Thai instructor Kritsana Imvitaya to produce tutorial modules for beginning Thai students. The modules included introduction to the Thai alphabet, pronunciation of vowels and consonants, sample dialogs, vocabulary development, and reading practice. Each module included native speaker recordings of vocabulary items and a tie-in to the NetRecorder application that allowed students to submit practice recordings for evaluation. The module was delivered through the Learning Web application, and included a feature that allowed the instructor to track student progress through the lessons.
The Brigham Young Papers Project
The Brigham Young Papers is an upcoming project for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Part of the preliminary project development is to collect all of the writings related to Brigham Young, such as journals and speeches. There are usually multiple sources or transcripts for the same writings, so editors need to have a way at looking all sources at the same time. These writings are being housed in WordCruncher due to its ability to synchronize the scrolling of multiple documents and its search features.
The Learning Web
The Learning Web is a web-centric desktop application created by Devin Asay of the Brigham Young University Office of Digital Humanities. It allows you to run various computer-based tutorial programs, previously available only in the Humanities Learning Resource Lab at BYU, from your home computer. It is not a web browser; it could be more accurately called a web application launcher.
Victorian Short Fiction Project
A student-curated, peer-reviewed collection of works from Victorian periodicals. Accredited by NINES.
Vitya Maleev
The aim of this program is to get you reading normal everyday Russian out loud with correct word stress and so improve your speaking fluency. This program is for speakers who are at least at the intermediate level.
A web app to assist learning of conversational Russian stresses and conjugation
Web Support
ODH Web Support for the college of Humanities
WebCLIPS
WebCLIPS is a web-based tool for assessing learners’ abilities and providing remedial learning modules. Courses exist for Spanish, Portuguese, English Writing, English as a Second Language. WebCLIPS is a re-implementation of CLIPS, which is itself a re-implementation of TICCIT, one of the first computer-based learning platforms in the world. In a sense, this makes WebCLIPS one of the oldest continuously maintained pieces of software in the world.
WordPress
The Office of Digital Humanities maintains and implements over 100 WordPress sites, ranging from conference sites to custom research apps and headless WordPress back-ends.
¡Háblame! Dialogs
¡Háblame! is a beginning Spanish textbook co-authored by the late C. Dixon Anderson and Alan Meredith, BYU Professors of Spanish. The textbook included a series of audiotaped conversations with illustrations. In the 1990s Meredith’s TA, Richard James, also a former ODH colleague, created a HyperCard application that made these dialog exercises available on CD-ROM. In 2007 Devin Asay created a Learning Web module that made it possible to access the ¡Háblame! dialogs over the internet.