The following is a list of digital history projects that use or have large amounts of digital data. If you know of other good ones let, me know.

Digital History Projects Using Large Datasets

Text and Document Archives

The GDELT Project
URL: https://www.gdeltproject.org/
The GDELT Project contains over 8 trillion datapoints spanning more than 8 trillion datapoints from global events, with real-time analysis of news coverage in over 150 languages across multiple decades.

HathiTrust Digital Library
URL: https://www.hathitrust.org/
HathiTrust provides access to over 18 million digitized volumes from major research libraries, representing one of the world’s largest digital libraries with preservation and access to both public domain and copyrighted materials.

Perseus Digital Library
URL: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/
Perseus offers comprehensive access to Greek and Roman materials with over 68 million words in classics texts, including 3,679 individual works (2,522 Greek and 1,247 Latin) with links to over 11,000 online versions.

Europeana
URL: https://www.europeana.eu/
Europeana provides access to over 58 million cultural heritage items from more than 3,700 European libraries, archives, museums and collections, spanning European cultural history from prehistory to the present.

Correspondence and Social Networks

Mapping the Republic of Letters
URL: http://republicofletters.stanford.edu/
This Stanford project visualizes correspondence networks of Enlightenment intellectuals, using metadata from tens of thousands of letters to analyze the geographic, temporal, and social patterns of early modern scholarly communication78.

Linked Jazz
URL: https://linkedjazz.org/
Linked Jazz uses oral history transcripts from over 50 archives to map relationships between jazz musicians, creating network visualizations that reveal the social connections within the jazz community from the 1940s-1960s.

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon
URL: http://sixdegreesoffrancisbacon.com/
This Carnegie Mellon project creates an interactive network visualization of Francis Bacon’s professional and social connections in early modern Britain, mapping thousands of relationships across multiple degrees of separation.

Kindred Britain
URL: http://kindred.stanford.edu/
Kindred Britain visualizes family relationships among nearly 30,000 notable British individuals across 1,500 years, connecting figures through blood, marriage, and affiliation relationships.

Slavery and Social History

Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
URL: https://slavevoyages.org/
This database documents approximately 36,000 slave voyages between 1514-1866, providing detailed information on vessels, routes, and the 12.5 million Africans who were transported, representing the most comprehensive resource on the Atlantic slave trade.

Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade
URL: https://enslaved.org/
Active since 2018, this database compiles multiple datasets to provide comprehensive search capabilities for information about enslaved people, their lives, and experiences in the historical slave trade.

London Lives 1690-1800
URL: https://www.londonlives.org/
London Lives provides access to 240,000 digitized manuscript pages from eight London archives containing over 3.5 million name instances, focusing on the lives of ordinary Londoners through criminal justice and poor relief records.

Old Bailey Proceedings Online
URL: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/
This database contains fully searchable transcripts of over 197,000 criminal trials at London’s central criminal court from 1674-1913, along with biographical details of approximately 2,500 executed individuals.

Geographic and Spatial History

ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World
URL: http://orbis.stanford.edu/
ORBIS simulates travel times and costs across the Roman Empire circa 200 CE, connecting 750 sites across 10 million square kilometers through roads, rivers, and sea routes to model ancient transportation networks19.

Geography of the Post
URL: https://cameronblevins.org/gotp/
This Stanford visualization maps over 14,000 post offices in the American West from 1867-1902, tracking their opening and closing dates to analyze the expansion and contraction of postal networks during westward expansion.

Pelagios Project
URL: https://pelagios.org/
Pelagios connects ancient world resources through linked open data, bringing together over 30 scholarly websites about ancient art, archaeology, history, and literature through geographic annotations.

Cultural and Scientific History

Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO)
URL: https://emmo.folger.edu/
EMMO provides transcriptions and high-quality images of English manuscripts from the 16th and 17th centuries from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s collection, making secretary hand documents searchable and accessible.

Time Machine Project
URL: https://www.timemachine.eu/
Time Machine aims to create a large-scale historical simulator mapping thousands of years of European history by processing millions of historical documents, paintings, and monuments using artificial intelligence.

World Historical Gazetteer
URL: https://whgazetteer.org/
The World Historical Gazetteer contains over 2 million place records spanning human history from the Bronze Age to the 21st century, linking geographic information across time and language from more than 70 datasets.

Textual Analysis and Digital Newspapers

Mining the Dispatch
URL: https://dsl.richmond.edu/dispatch/
This University of Richmond project uses computational text analysis on nearly 1,400 issues of the Richmond Daily Dispatch (1861-1865), containing 24 million words, to analyze Civil War-era journalism and public discourse.

Viral Texts Project
URL: https://viraltexts.org/
Viral Texts analyzes reprinting patterns in 19th-century newspapers and magazines to understand how texts “went viral” in print culture, examining circulation patterns across large databases of digitized newspapers.

Chronicling America
URL: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
The Library of Congress’s National Digital Newspaper Program provides searchable access to millions of pages from historic American newspapers published between 1836-1922 from all U.S. states and territories.

Economic and Scientific Data

Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
URL: https://dp.la/
DPLA aggregates digitized content from over 1,600 libraries, archives, and museums across the United States, providing access to more than 10 million items including books, photographs, maps, and cultural artifacts.

World War I Document Archive
URL: http://www.gwpda.org/
This international archive contains primary documents from the Great War period (1890-1930), including treaties, official papers, memorials, and personal reminiscences from multiple countries and languages.

Image from Popular Mechanics, June 1946. Page 139.