About

The Digital Humanities Studio began life as the Documentary and Oral History Studio in 2012, at the time a research exercise in the Department of History in which students could learn how to film high production value interviews. This WordPress-based website launched in 2015 as a place for sharing oral history work with a general audience. Over time, the students in Dr. Nystrom’s History A404: Documentary and Oral History have collected dozens of interviews, many of which are available on this site. You will also find posts on technical instruction, which have proven popular with site visitors.

Increasingly, however, docstudio.org has become home to a growing collection of student and faculty digital humanities projects including senior theses. Most notably, students in Dr. Nystrom’s “A History of Food in America” have published their final research projects on this site, some of which have attracted a great deal of attention, including several with over 5,000 views. Docstudio.org has grown from modest beginnings in 2015 to receiving almost 40,000 visitors a year.

Digital Humanities in Loyola’s history department have also grown, too, in the last several years to include the building of our new podcast studio, the implementation of ArcGIS tools, and data analysis tools including PowerBI and Tableau. At the end of 2024, we are thinking about ways to make the content of this site more accessible as the volume and variety of material here has exceeded this WordPress-based organizational framework’s ability to adequately contain it. In addition, we are working towards migrating our oral history collections to an Omeka system so that our interviews are more accessible in a consortium space.

The Studio is directed by Dr. Justin A. Nystrom. If you have any questions about anything you see here, please contact him at jnystrom@loyno.edu