About the Project

Literature in Context is a "slow" digital humanities 1 project and an open educational resource 2 created in collaboration between students and faculty to provide a true, open replacement to print anthologies, on the one hand, and the wild west of Internet texts, on the other. Developed with the needs of teachers and students in mind, the project emphasizes quality born-digital classroom editions enhanced with searchability, citability, media-rich annotations and audiobooks, facsimile page images, linked data and data visualizations, social annotation through a native Hypothesis layer, and custom coursepack creation. Teachers can create customized mini-anthologies with any content in the collection, whether in whole or in excerpted form.

Literature in Context evolved from two independent projects, one by John O’Brien at The University of Virginia, and one by Tonya Howe, then at Marymount University. O’Brien and Howe began to collaborate in 2017 and successfully applied for a Level II Advancement Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities in collaboration with Christine Ruotolo, Director of Research in the Arts and Humanities at The University of Virginia Libraries (HAA-258768-18). In 2022, the project was awarded a second grant from the NEH ODH (HAA-290349-23), as well as an Open Course Grant from VIVA, Virginia’s academic library consortium. In April 2025, the second federal grant was terminated, along with many others, by DOGE.

During the project’s evolution, Howe and O’Brien have worked with numerous research assistants and students contributing to the project in the classroom. Faculty from outside of the project’s two home institutions have also contributed texts to the collection. Usage analytics began being captured in 2022. In 2024, 35,205 active users from 149 countries across the globe engaged with Literature in Context.

View the 2024 usage map on Tableau Public.

[1]: Slow DH is a concept in digital humanities that focuses on slowing down the pace of our work in order to sit with it, to reflect, and through that intimacy, to understand the work more fully; see Moya Bailey's discussion in "The Ethics of Pace", for example. Today, it is often used in social justice DH work that seeks out or draws on public, community-based collaboration in some fundamental way. Slow DH pairs well with critical digital pedagogy and open pedagogy, both of which are approaches to teaching and learning that foster transparency, agency, empowerment, and access.

[2]: Open educational resources (or OER) teaching and research materials in the public domain (or released through an open license). They emphasize openness instead of privatization, and foreground sharing, collaboration, reuse, remixing, and adaptation. For more information, visit UNESCO's website on OER, which includes a variety of textual resources discussing the role of OER in human rights.