Commoning Biomedicine

This digital humanities project (2022–26) aims to bring together numerous oral history repositories that can already be found online in a manner that makes them more visible and accessible to historians of biomedicine. These repositories are diverse and range from large institutional archives to small and thematically focused collections.


In order to make these rich sources useful to historians, “Commoning Biomedicine” has developed an online platform to enable scholars to search within and across repositories. This platform supports mixed-methods approaches that combine digital humanities expertise with qualitative historical research to ask new questions with oral historical sources.


Commoning Biomedicine currently makes fully searchable a total of 1637 records from the following 15 collections: