Professor Shorter created the Archive of Healing in 2021. Featured on the Smithsonian Magazine Good Food with Evan Kleiman, and Atlas Obscura, the site received international acclaim. Avishay Artsy described the Archive of Healing as an “interactive, searchable website featuring hundreds of thousands of entries that span more than 200 years, and draws from seven continents, six university archives, 3,200 published sources, and both first and second-hand information from folkloric field notes. The entries address a broad range of health-related topics including everything from midwifery and menopause to common colds and flus. He goes on to expound the site's intention to "preserve Indigenous knowledge about healing practices, while preventing that data from being exploited for profit.” 

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For over nine years, David worked with programming and data management teams to develop a way to search this database in ways that would best serve healers and medical professionals, in addition to researchers and the general public. David notes: “The whole goal here is to democratize what we think of as healing and knowledge about healing, and take it across cultures in a way that’s respectful and gives attention to intellectual property rights,” said David. You can hear David discuss the Archive at a reception for his being awarded the Faculty Innovation Fellowship from UCLA.