Reformatting and Cataloging Poetry Tapes

Recipient: Nuzzo, Nancy (Buffalo, NY 14260-4750 USA) in affiliation with SUNY Research Foundation, Buffalo (Amherst, NY 14228 USA)

Goal: The cataloging, digital reformatting, Internet streaming, and creation of Encoded Archival Description finding aids for 1,340 audio recordings of readings by 425 notable poets.

Description: The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, the State University of New York at Buffalo, seeks funding to reformat, catalog, and make accessible 1,340 cassette and reel-to-reel audio recordings of poetry materials. Dating between 1962 and 2000, the recordings fall into three categories: an archive of tapes from poetry readings and other unique events that took place in the Poetry Collection and elsewhere on the University at Buffalo campus; personal recordings that poets made of their own readings over a period of time; and libraries of tapes collected by various individuals and groups. The tapes will be converted to digital files by an audio specialist, item-level cataloging will be created for each tape, collection-level finding aids will be created for logical subsets of the collection, intellectual property rights will be investigated, and streaming sound files with associated metatdata will be made accessible on campus or more widely, depending on permissions.

Grant: 194415 / PW-50322-09,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Humanities Collections and Reference Resources,   Year Awarded: 2009

The Wright Connection: Native Son, Black Boy, and Uncle Tom's Children

Recipient: Graham, Maryemma (Lawrence, KS 66045-7590 USA) in affiliation with University of Kansas Center for Research, Inc (Lawrence, KS 66045-3101 USA)

Goal: : A two-week high school teacher institute for thirty participants to explore Richard Wright's Native Son, Black Boy, and Uncle Tom's Children within their historical contexts.

Description: The institute will read Wright's texts conspicuously absent from many curricula despite the direct connection to contemporary concerns about literacy, tolerance, and diversity central to national dialogue. Native Son, Black Boy, and Uncle Tom's Children, two short stories and select poems will link close reading, guided research, and seminars and workshops by scholars, practitioners, and specialists approached from a range of perspectives. New technologies, including a website and virtual seminars, will expand learning opportunities post-institute and offer access to a larger community of educators. Teachers will contribute to the construction of a digital sourcebook, to maximize the use of technology for sharing their course materials. The import lies in the role of education in a civil society, reaffirming a key goal of humanities education: to elicit a keen sense of identity from an examination of past deeds, events, documents, and forms of self-expression from our cultural past.

Grant: 199826 / ES-50320-09,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Institutes for School Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2009

The Melville Electronic Library (MEL)

Recipient: Bryant, John (Hempstead, NY 11549 USA) in affiliation with Hofstra University (Hempstead, NY 11550 USA)

Goal: Creation of an online Melville "critical archive;" and the transcription, editing, and publication of the initial three Melville works selected for inclusion on the website.

Description: The proposed project will launch the Melville Electronic Library (MEL), a born-digital "critical archive" that will, when completed, provide readers access to reliable digital versions of Melville's works and other research materials. To establish MEL's textual core, the editors will follow a fluid-text approach that preserves the textual integrity of meaningful variant versions of Melville's manuscript and printed work. Editorial teams will design MEL's TEI-XML and metadata schemas, prepare digital images of documents, generate diplomatic transcriptions and base versions, and encode revisions sites using TEI's P5 guidelines. Hofstra's Faculty Computing Service will continue to develop its NEH-funded transcription tool, TextLab. The project will complete stand-alone editions of three representative works--Moby-Dick, Battle-Pieces, and Billy Budd--which will serve as models for editing the remainder of Melville's works in manuscript and print, poetry and prose.

Grant: 196561 / RQ-50392-09,   Division: Research Programs,   Program: Scholarly Editions,   Year Awarded: 2009

The Letters of Charles Brockden Brown

Recipient: Kamrath, Mark L (Orlando, FL 32816-1346 USA) in affiliation with University of Central Florida, Orlando (Orlando, FL 32816 USA)

Goal: Preparation of the letters of Charles Brockden Brown for print and digital publication. (36 months)

Description: The Charles Brockden Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition is preparing an edition of the complete letters of Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), one of Early America's most significant novelists and politically astute writers. His writings explore fundamental question about individual identity, nationalism and imperialism, as well as transformations of print culture and the public sphere in the Atlantic World. The Kent State University Press will publish The Letters of Charles Brockden Brown, a volume we plan to submit for an MLA CSE seal of approval. After print publication, we will make available an expanded, searchable, electronic version of that work that is TEI (level P5) conformant, fully integrated with a digital version of the Bicentennial Edition (1977-1987) of Brown's novels at the Kent State University Institute for Bibliography and Editing (IBE), and freely accessible to the public.

Grant: 196566 / RQ-50397-09,   Division: Research Programs,   Program: Scholarly Editions,   Year Awarded: 2009

Poetry as a Form of Life, Life as a Form of Poetry

Recipient: Vendler, Helen (Cambridge, MA 02138 USA) in affiliation with Harvard University

Goal: A four-week school teacher seminar for sixteen participants to study how British and American poetry meditates on life and reflects the patterns of life.

Description: Summer Seminar for Teachers. A four-week seminar at Harvard University, led by Professor Helen Vendler.

Grant: 197397 / FV-50224-09,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Seminars for School Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2009

America and The Great War: An Interdisciplinary Seminar in Literature and History

Recipient: Sharistanian, Janet (Lawrence, KS 66045-7590 USA) in affiliation with University of Kansas Center for Research, Inc (Lawrence, KS 66045-3101 USA)

Goal: A five-week school teacher summer seminar for sixteen participants on the United States and World War I, focused on the conflict's history and cultural impact.

Description: This NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers will draw on literature, history, and the visual arts to examine America's relationship to the Great War--a major turning point in both American and world history. Co-directed by a literary scholar and an historian, it will involve coordinated readings, trips to the National World War I Museum and Fort Leavenworth, an on-campus art exhibit and play, and work with original documents to provide school teachers with a rich experience of intellectual renewal and development.

Grant: 199827 / FV-50238-09,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Seminars for School Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2009

Soul of a People: Voices from the Writers' Project - Library Outreach Programs

Recipient: Gause, Virginia Haynie (Edinburg, TX 78539-2999 USA) in affiliation with University of Texas, Pan American (Edinburg, TX 78539 USA)

Description: "Soul of a People: Voices from the Writers' Project" will offer The University of Texas-Pan American Library the chance to develop a series of five public programs with scholar led discussion that will outreach to students, faculty, staff, and the general public, involving them in some creative thinking about the now virtually forgotten story of the largest cultural experience in U.S. history - the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) that was administered during the Depression years from 1935-1942.

Grant: 194263 / LR-50029-09,   Division: Public Programs,   Program: Small Grants to Libraries: Soul of a People,   Year Awarded: 2009

The Mark Twain Project

Recipient: Hirst, Robert H (Berkeley, CA 94720-6000 USA) in affiliation with University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA 94720 USA)

Goal: Completion of editorial work on electronic and print publications of the Autobiography of Mark Twain, and continued adding of Twain's major works to the Mark Twain Project Online. (36 months)

Description: If funded, this proposal would enable the professional staff of the Mark Twain Project to finish preparing the Autobiography of Mark Twain, publishing the first third electronically on its new web site, Mark Twain Project Online, and also the first of a three-volume print edition, by the centenary of Mark Twain's death in 2010. The Autobiography is by far the largest and arguably the most important of the works that Mark Twain left deliberately unpublished, specifically prohibiting publication of parts of it for one hundred years after his death. Its publication in complete form will be a signal event both in Mark Twain studies and in the world of American literature. This proposal will also allow the editors to continue populating Mark Twain Project Online with editions of Mark Twain's major works, drawing on converted forms of the twenty-six scholarly volumes they have published to date.

Grant: 191454 / RQ-50336-08,   Division: Research Programs,   Program: Scholarly Editions,   Year Awarded: 2008

Walt Whitman's Civil War Writings

Recipient: Price, Kenneth (Lincoln, NE 68588-0333 USA) in affiliation with University of Nebraska, Lincoln (Lincoln, NE 68588 USA)

Goal: A comprehensive electronic edition of Walt Whitman's Civil War writings. (36 months)

Description: The Walt Whitman Archive will create a comprehensive edition of the Civil War writings of Walt Whitman, probably the most important literary interpreter of this conflict. Support from the National Endowment for the Humanities will allow us to complete this work by 2011, in time for the observance of the sesquicentennial of the outbreak of the War. The War profoundly shaped Leaves of Grass, the first masterpiece of American poetry, and Whitman extensively depicted and analyzed the Civil War in journals, notebooks, letters, essays, journalism, memoirs, and manuscript drafts. We will electronically edit, arrange, and publish -- often for the first time -- the hundreds of documents that give voice to Whitman's experience of the war. In addition to making these documents freely available, our work will help to model for other scholars best practices in creating, publishing, and sustaining electronic editions.

Grant: 191456 / RQ-50338-08,   Division: Research Programs,   Program: Scholarly Editions,   Year Awarded: 2008

The Letters of Ernest Hemingway

Recipient: Spanier, Sandra W (University Park, PA 16802 USA) in affiliation with Pennsylvania State University, Main Campus

Goal: Work on the first four volumes (encompassing the years 1908-39) of a twelve-volume scholarly edition of Hemingway's letters. (36 months)

Description: This project will result in the publication by Cambridge University Press of a comprehensive scholarly edition of the estimated 6,000-7,000 letters of Ernest Hemingway, only about ten percent of them ever published. Hemingway's pioneering contributions to American literature made a profound and lasting impact on modern English-language prose style, and his life and work still command enormous popular as well as scholarly interest worldwide. Besides providing new biographical and artistic insights into the achievement of this most influential American writer, the letters constitute a running eyewitness account and cultural history of much of the twentieth century. This edition will be published in twelve volumes over the next fifteen years. We are requesting a three-year funding to see into print volumes 1 and 2, to complete and submit volume 3, and to continue volume 4, together encompassing Hemingway's letters through 1939.

Grant: 191460 / RQ-50342-08,   Division: Research Programs,   Program: Scholarly Editions,   Year Awarded: 2008

Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston and her Eastonville Roots

Recipient: Schoenacher, Ann S (St. Petersburg, FL 33701-5005 USA) in affiliation with Florida Humanities Council

Description: The two week-long seminars outlined in this proposal provide K-12 teachers with an interdisciplinary exploration of the life and work of Zora Neale Hurston and the community that formed her identity and fueled her imagination - Eatonville, Florida. Added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1998, Eatonville is the oldest incorporated black town in the United States. During each seminar week, participants will examine Hurston’s accomplishments within the context of the historical and cultural development of Eatonville and grapple with compelling questions about how this unique black enclave fueled her appreciation of folk culture, inspired her literary works, created her racial and gender identity, and formed her sometimes controversial views on race. Organized by the Florida Humanities Council in cooperation with the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community and Rollins College, the seminars are scheduled to occur over two consecutive weeks from June 14-27, 2009.

Grant: 192174 / BH-50297-08,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Landmarks of American History,   Year Awarded: 2008

John Steinbeck: Voice of a Region, Voice for America: A Summer Institute exploring the author's life and writing in historica

Recipient: Shillinglaw, Sussan (San Jose, CA 95192-0090 USA) in affiliation with San Jose State University Foundation (San Jose, CA 95192 USA)

Goal: A two-week institute for high school history and English teachers that studies John Steinbeck's works in the contexts of their literary, historical, and ecological frames.

Description: The Summer Institute will focus on reasons why John Steinbeck remains significant as a novelist, social critic, ecologist; as the enduring voice of the twentieth century American values and ideas. Steinbeck is a central figure in the secondary English curriculum, so through this project high school teachers are encouraged to study the author because of his presence in the secondary canon. Central to full appreciation of his work, will be field trips with focus on his environmental holism. Participants will learn about the history of the local agricultural and fishing industries as well as pertinent local history. Steinbeck scholars will lead a series of workshops primarily focused on exploring the regional influences and historical contexts for several of Steinbeck's major novels. The institute will focus on texts and films common to the high school curriculum. Participants will also consider how to integrate science and literature, through Steinbeck's ecological perspective.

Grant: 192032 / ES-50266-08,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Institutes for School Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2008

Looking for Whitman: the Poetry of Place in the Life and Work of Walt Whitman

Recipient: Gold, Matthew (Brooklyn, NY 11201 USA) in affiliation with CUNY Research Foundation, NYC College of Technology

Goal: Development of a series of courses at four partner institutions that would engage students in online investigations of Walt Whitman's work in geographical context

Description: This Level 1 Digital Humanities project, " Looking for Whitman: The Poetry of Place in the Life and Work of Walt Whitman," will engage faculty and students at four academic institutions--New York City College of Technology; New York University; University of Mary Washington; and Rutgers University, Camden--in a concurrent, connected, semester-long inquiry into the relationship of Whitman's poetry to local geography and history. Each class will explore the interrelationship between a specific locale and a particular phase of the poet's work. Utilizing open-source tools to connect classrooms, the interdisciplinary project will create a collaborative, online space in which students can participate in a dynamic, social, web based learning environment. In its conception and articulation, this project reflects the central themes of Whitman's work: democracy, diversity, and connectedness.

Grant: 192328 / HD-50537-08,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Program: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants,   Year Awarded: 2008

Melville, Revision, and Collaborative Editing: Toward a Critical Archive

Recipient: Bryant, John (Hempstead, NY 11549 USA) in affiliation with Hofstra University (Hempstead, NY 11550 USA)

Goal: The development of the TextLab scholarly editing tool to allow for analysis of texts that exist in multiple versions or editions, beginning with the Melville Electronic Library.

Description: The project is to initiate the Melville Electronic Library (MEL), an online "critical archive" of primary and substantial secondary materials. To promote the collaborative editing of "fluid texts" (works that exist in multiple revised versions), the team will also create a proof of concept of its innovative editorial feature: TextLab. With this tool, groups of scholars or students may download images of Melville manuscripts, transcribe their "revision text," identify revision sites direcly on the image, and link each marked site to the transcription text. The transcription will also be linked to explanatory revision narratives. These procedures will take place in a version control system that enables users to track their own changes to the transcriptions they are collaboratively building. The project's goals are to inaugurate TextLab using samples from Harvard's Houghton Library, organize a meeting of Melville scholars to plan work flow, and write further grant proposals for MEL.

Grant: 191259 / HD-50351-08,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Program: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants,   Year Awarded: 2008

Preservation Survey of National Book Awards Archives

Recipient: Augenbraum, Harold (New York, NY 10016 USA) in affiliation with National Book Foundation

Goal: A general preservation assessment of the Foundation's archives documenting the founding and development of the Foundation and its National Book Awards. The collection includes the original letters of literary and political figures, including W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Ralph Ellison, William Faulkner, Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag, and Dwight Eisenhower.

Description: The National Book Foundation seeks a grant of $5,000 to contract with the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) to conduct a preservation survey of its archival holdings accumulated during the past 58 years. The Foundation is the parent of the National Book Awards, one of the most prestigious literary awards in America. Its archives hold unique letters, telegrams, photographs, programs, posters, newspaper clippings, other materials on paper, audiotapes, videotapes, CDs, DVDs and other materials that document the National Book Awards from their founding in 1950 to 2007. The survey will be used to begin the process of making the archives more widely known and accessible to students, scholars, and others through electronic cataloging and digitization of some materials.

Grant: 189375 / PG-50378-08,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Preservation Assistance Grants,   Year Awarded: 2008

We the People Bookshelf: Created Equal

Recipient: Castle, Lainie (Chicago, IL 60611 USA) in affiliation with American Library Association

Grant: 187495 / BB-50009-07,   Division: Public Programs,   Program: Bookshelf Cooperative Agreement, We the People,   Year Awarded: 2007

Eudora Welty's Secret Sharer: The Outside World and the Writer's Imagination

Recipient: Marrs, Suzanne (Jackson, MS 39202 USA) in affiliation with Millsaps College (Jackson, MS 39210 USA)

Goal: Two one-week workshops for 100 school teachers to study landmarks and archival collections associated with Eudora Welty in their historical context.

Description: The two one-week "Landmarks in American History and Culture" workshops will focus on the ways that landmarks can enrich the teaching of Eudora Welty's fiction. The Eudora Welty House, a National Historic Landmark, reveals much about Welty's life- her friends, her reading interests, her passion for art- and the house is the source for many images in her work. The extensive collection of Welty manuscripts, photographs, and correspondence held at the state archives tells the story of her creative process: The revisions she undertook, the images that inspired stories, and the wide-ranging comments she made in letters to friends and colleagues are all there. The evolving nature of the world about which Welty wrote is documented at the Smith Robertson Museum, the state Agriculture and Forestry Museum, and the Medgar Evers House. The workshops will focus on the insights these locales can bring to teachers of Welty's fiction and on the insights her fiction can bring to historical studies.

Grant: 187166 / BH-50203-07,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Landmarks of American History,   Year Awarded: 2007

Theodore Dreiser: Marching Alone

Recipient: Pozderec, George (Babylon, NY 11704 USA) in affiliation with New York Foundation for the Arts (Brooklyn, NY 11201 USA)

Goal: Scripting of a 90-minute documentary film exploring the life and writings of Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945).

Description: Drawing together new scholarship and rich historical resources (including extensive interviews with Dreiser intimates and never before heard radio and film interviews by Dreiser himself) the documentary is an opportunity to engage the public in an exploration of the man behind such seminal novels as "Sister Carrie," "Jennie Gerhardt," "The Financier" and "An American Tragedy." As the first documentary on Dreiser, this film is envisioned as a way to illuminate Dreiser's life through the exploration of the literary and social impact of his writings. Besides the nature of Dreiser's career, it will explore his groundbreaking inquiries into issues that still resonate with meaning today: poverty and the leisure class in America, the dilemnas of urban life, ethnic conflic, sexual mores, civil liberties in times of war, the dilemnas of modern marriage, censorship, the role of women in contemporary society.

Grant: 186465 / TS-50047-07,   Division: Public Programs,   Program: Media TV Scripting,   Year Awarded: 2007

Emily Dickinson: Person, Poetry, and Place

Recipient: Dickinson, Cynthia S (Amherst, MA 01002 USA) in affiliation with Amherst College

Goal: A Faculty Humanities Workshop series for twenty-four local K-12 teachers on the life and poetry of Emily Dickinson.

Description: The Emily Dickinson Museum will sponsor "Emily Dickinson: Person, Poetry, and Place" in 2007-2008. This Faculty Humanities Workshop will include a one-week summer session (offered twice to accommodate a total of 24-K-12 teachers) and three one-day sessions on Saturdays in the 2007-2008 academic year. The Workshop will examine Emily Dickinson's (person) biography, her poetry, and her place (her home, her town of Amherst, and the physical, social, and cultural environment of western Massachusetts). The Workshop is designed for teachers from western Massachusetts, especially the Amherst-Pelham Regional School District, where the Museum is located. Five organizations are collaborating with the Museum on this project.

Grant: 185040 / EZ-50205-07,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Faculty Humanities Workshops,   Year Awarded: 2007

Rumors of My Death Are Greatly Exaggerated: The Life and Work of Mark Twain

Recipient: Augenbraum, Harold (New York, NY 10016 USA) in affiliation with National Book Foundation

Goal: Planning of reading and discussion and other programs to be held at 100 library or other community sites around the nation along with a traveling exhibition and an extensive website about Twain and his lasting cultural influence.

Description: The National Book Foundation, in conjunction with the Mark Twain House & Museum, seeks a planning grant of $39,972 of a total budget of $62,401 to plan "Rumors of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated...: The Work and Life of Mark Twain", a series of public programs that will explore themes in the work and life of Mark Twain (1835-1910) on the centennial of his death and the anniversary of his birth. The planning process will include: 1) a national planning meeting , 2) development of an honorary committee, 3) draft of a Twain timeline, 4) draft of a useable bibliography, 5) draft of a filmography, 6) a survey of institutional holdings, 7) an outline for a travelling exhibition, 8) a speakers list of scholars, 9) a plan for recruitment of venues, 10) research on a new Library of America volume, 11) draft of a participants' handbook, and 12) a corporate and foundation funding packet.

Grant: 184968 / LP-50014-07,   Division: Public Programs,   Program: Libraries Planning,   Year Awarded: 2007