Project Statement
About the Archive
Archive of Invisible Senses is a student-created digital humanities project for researchers interested in sensory history, religion, mental illness, and stigma.
Purpose
This site is meant to become a working research tool, not only an exhibition. Its long-term goal is to organize primary sources, interpretive labels, metadata, sensory categories, and ethical reading practices for people studying how societies perceived and stigmatized mental distress.
Ethics
Historical Terms, Present-Day Care
Terms such as “madness,” “insanity,” and “possession” appear as historical categories. They are not labels for people today. The project studies stigma in order to understand and critique it, not to reproduce it.
Future versions should include citations, source provenance, patient-centered perspectives where available, and review by people familiar with medical humanities and mental health ethics.