It is often said that history is written by the victors. But it’s probably more true to say it is written by the people who have the opportunity to write.

One example of this is the study of black women, their lives and their experiences. Documents recording the lives of black women are often historically obscure, hidden away in vast library collections and unintentionally misleadingly titled or cataloged. Other historical documents don’t mention black women directly but may still offer clues. Until recently, researchers had no good way of recovering this “lost history” from either of these categories of documents.

Ruby Mendenhall, an associate professor of sociology, African American studies and urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is leading a collaboration of social scientists, humanities scholars and digital researchers that hopes to harness the power of high-performance computing to find and understand the historical experiences of black women by searching two massive databases of written works from the 18th through 20th centuries. The team also is developing a common toolbox that can help other digital humanities projects.