The Office of Digital Humanities is happy to announce 20 awards from our Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program from our September 2013 deadline. These awards are part of a larger slate of 208 grants just announced by the NEH.
Congratulations to all the awardees for their terrific projects!
Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum (Chicago, IL 60605-2403)
HD51957, Digital Historic Skies
Project director: Jodi Lacy
To support: Preliminary planning and development of a web-based project to crowdsource information about historical astronomical maps, as well as a mobile application that would offer both humanistic and scientific interpretation of these materials.
Arkansas State University, Main Campus (State University, AR 72467)
HD51944, Dangerous Embodiments: Theories, Methods, and Best Practices for Historical Character Modeling in Humanities 3D Environments
Project director: Alyson Ann Gill, Arkansas
Project director: Angel David Nieves, Hamilton College
To support: The development and testing of a comprehensive typology for avatar (graphical representations of a user or the user's character) creation in historical simulations in digital heritage environments.
Brandeis University (Waltham, MA 02453-2700)
HD51881, Functional Geometry and the Traite de Lutherie
Project director: Harry George Mairson
To support: The development of a software language and protocols for digitally reconstructing and studying historical musical instruments. This stage of the project would focus on historic string instruments.
Cleveland State University (Cleveland, OH 44115)
HD51912, Curating Kisumu: Adapting Mobile Humanities Interpretation in East Africa
Project director: J. Mark Souther
Project director: Meshack Owino
To support: A collaborative venture between Cleveland State University's Center for Public History + Digital Humanities and Maseno University in Kenya to explore how to use the Curatescape mobile framework, which allows for mobile interpretation of historical and cultural sites, in Kenya.
Creighton University (Omaha, NE 68178-0133)
HD51851, Mobilizing the Past for a Digital Future: The Potential of Digital Archaeology
Project director: Erin Walcek Averett , Creighton University
Project director: Derek B. Counts, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Project director: Jody Gordon, Wentworth Institute of Technology
To support: A two-day workshop hosted by the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, Massachusetts, on the uses of mobile tablet technologies in archaeological field work and interpretative analysis.
Cultural Heritage Imaging (San Francisco, CA 94102-5867)
HD51978, Data Sustainability and Advanced Metadata Management for Scientific Imaging in the Humanities
Project director: Mark Mudge
To support: The completion of two case studies examining documentation of computational photography methods applied to humanities collections, as well as dissemination of best practices and enhancement of relevant software tools.
CUNY Research Foundation, Graduate School and University Center (New York, NY 10016-4309)
HD51895, The Social Paper: DH Start up Level 1
Project director: Matthew K. Gold
To support: Development of a free, open-source online writing tool that would allow scholars, students, and teachers to share and receive feedback on works-in-progress from colleagues and broader audiences. The tool would be incorporated into the Commons-In-A-Box software platform, and would allow users to keep an online portfolio of their work.
Florida State University (Tallahassee, FL 32306-0001)
HD51921, The Mesoamerican Corpus of Formative Period Art and Writing
Project director: Michael David Carrasco, Florida State University
Project director: Joshua Englehardt, El Colegio de Michoacán
To support: The development of a prototype database and complementary tools to facilitate analysis of Mesoamerican iconography and art objects from the Formative period, 1500-400 BCE.
Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD 21218)
HD51904, The Black Press Research Collective Newspaper Project: Visualizing the History of the Black Press in the United States
Project director: Franklin W. Knight , Johns Hopkins University
Project director: Kim Gallon, Purdue University (Visiting Scholar, Johns Hopkins University)
To support: A two-day workshop to discuss the development of mapping and geocoding tools & data visualization authoring programs to assist scholars working with the Black Press.
Miami University, Oxford (Oxford, OH 45056-1602)
HD51918, Orientation for the Mississippi Freedom Project: An Interactive Quest for Social Justice
Project director: Ann Elizabeth Armstrong
Project director: Bob De Schutter
Project director: Elias Tzoc
To support: Development of a prototype for a location-based game centered on historical events surrounding orientation sessions at Western College for Women in preparation for the Mississippi Summer Project, in which students trained for civil rights activism in Mississippi in June 1964. The grant would fund a prototype of the first level, which provides historical content and context, drawing in a number of humanities consultants and offering an initial evaluation period.
Modern Language Association of America (New York, NY 10003-6981)
HD51863, Humanities CORE
Project director: Kathleen Fitzpatrick, MLA
Project director: Rebecca Kennison, Columbia University
To support: The development of software to connect the Commons-In-A-Box (CBOX) social network platform (which is the basis of MLA Commons) to a Fedora-based institutional repository system. This combined system would be called Humanities Commons, a social network and repository system that would be made available for use by other scholarly societies.
Northern Kentucky University Research Foundation (Highland Heights, KY 41099-0001)
HD51858, The Augmented Palimpsest: Engaging Students through AR Encounters with the Past
Project director: Tamara F. O'Callaghan, Northern Kentucky University
Project director: Andrea R. Harbin, SUNY Cortland
To support: The development of tools that would allow students to access supplementary digital content alongside Geoffrey Chaucer's prologue to The Canterbury Tales using mobile devices.
University of Maryland, College Park (College Park, MD 20742-5141)
HD51836, Enhancing Music Notation Addressability
Project director: Raffaele Viglianti
To support: The development of software tools that would facilitate citation and annotation of music notation and capture information about multiple participants' contributions to collaborative digital projects. As an initial case study, the project would focus on an existing effort to compile a critical edition of Nicolas Du Chemin's Chansons Nouvelles.
University of Maryland, College Park (College Park, MD 20742-5141)
HD51839, Transforming the Afro-Caribbean World (TAW)
Project director: Jennifer E. Guiliano, University of Maryland, College Park
Project director: Julie Greene, University of Maryland, College Park
To support: A two-day workshop exploring appropriate digital collections and tools that would facilitate archival research on the relationship between Afro-Caribbean labor and migration history and the construction of the Panama Canal from 1904-1914.
University of Nebraska, Board of Regents (Lincoln, NE 68588-0430)
HD51897, Image Analysis for Archival Discovery (Aida)
Project director: Elizabeth Lorang, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Project director: Leen-Kiat Soh, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
To support: The development of a prototype tool that would allow scholars and students to apply image processing and machine learning techniques to identify specific visual elements within digitized collections. The project would start with an attempt to identify poetry found in the Chronicling America collection of historic newspapers.
University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA 15260-6133)
HD51828, World-Historical Gazetteer
Project director: Patrick Manning, University of Pittsburgh
Project director: Ruth Mostern, University of California, Merced
To support: A two-day workshop in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and follow-up activities for geographers, historians, and information scientists to consider how a world-historical gazetteer might be created that combines earlier work in regional and historical place name databases.
University of Texas, Austin (Austin, TX 78712)
HD51864, Periods, Organized (PeriodO): A gazetteer of period assertions for linking and visualizing periodized data
Project director: Adam T. Rabinowitz, University of Texas, Austin
Project director: Ryan Shaw, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
To support: The development of a gazetteer that incorporates different scholarly definitions of historical and archaeological periods.
University of the Pacific (Stockton, CA 95211-0110)
HD51907, Coptic SCRIPTORIUM: A Corpus, Tools, and Methods for Corpus Linguistics and Computational Historical Research in Ancient Egypt
Project director: Caroline T. Schroeder
To support: The development of a user interface and language analysis tools to facilitate interdisciplinary, collaborative research and annotation of digitized Coptic texts.
Wayne State University (Detroit, MI 48201-1347)
HD51852, Ethnic Layers of Detroit: Experiencing Place through Digital Storytelling
Project director: Krysta Ryzewski, Wayne State University
Project director: Felecia Lucht, Wayne State University
Project director: Sangeetha Gopalakrishnan, Wayne State University
Project director: Alina Klin, Wayne State University
Project director: Laura Kline, Wayne State University
To support: The continued development and testing in the classroom of an interactive, mobile storytelling website that allows for the creation of multimedia narratives of historic sites. This phase of the project would focus on creating narratives that illustrate the traditions and transformation of Detroit's ethnic neighborhoods, with attention to the Corktown, Chinatown, Poletown, and Heidelberg neighborhoods.
West Virginia University Research Corporation (Morgantown, WV 26505)
HD51866, A Search Engine for Electronic Literature
Project director: Charles Baldwin
To support: Development of a search interface and implementation of shared metadata standards that would join the databases for nine international research centers in electronic literature, allowing researchers to cross-search the complete archives.