Multispectral Imaging Project

Recipient: Macfarlane, Roger Thomas (Provo, UT 84602 USA) in affiliation with Brigham Young University, Provo

Goal: Multi-spectral imaging of 400 illegible, or legibly problematic papyri from collections at the University of Michigan; University of California, Berkeley; and Columbia University. The resulting images would be disseminated via the Web-based Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS).

Description: The Ancient Textual Imaging Group at Brigham Young University has pioneered developments into enhancing texts of deteriorated and damaged papyri using multi-spectral imaging. This process has rendered legible many stained, discolored, or faded portions of ancient documents. In effect, the process has restored the documents to a state of legibility that they have not possessed since antiquity. The BYU Multi-spectral Imaging Project is a two-year venture proposed by the Ancient Textual Imaging Group to capture, process, and provide public access via the Advanced Papyrological Information System to high-quality multi-spectral images of hundreds of legibly problematic papyrus documents from the most important papyrus collections in the country.

Grant: 194520 / PW-50427-09,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Humanities Collections and Reference Resources,   Year Awarded: 2009

House of Mortals and Gods: Latin Literature in Context

Recipient: Dougherty, Therese Marie (Baltimore, MD 21210-2404 USA) in affiliation with College of Notre Dame of Maryland (Baltimore, MD 21210 USA)

Goal: A five-week school teacher institute for twenty-five participants to study Latin texts on the themes of house and household in and around Rome and in the region of Pompeii.

Description: College of Notre Dame of Maryland will hold a five-week Summer Institute (June 27-July 28, 2010)for middle and high school Latin teachers. The program will begin at Notre Dame in Baltimore, Maryland and mot to Italy after the first week for the remainder of the institute. Lectures and readings of literary and non-literary Latin texts will be complemented by visits to related sites. The theme of house and household will help to focus the experience on the reality of life in ancient Rome and the practical issues regarding property and personal relationships that resembled concerns of society today. Teachers may read the texts in Latin or in translation. They will design instructional materials for future classroom use.

Grant: 197478 / ES-50310-09,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Institutes for School Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2009

The "Falls of Rome": The Transformations of Rome in late Antiquity.

Recipient: Salzman, Michele Renee (Claremont, CA 91711 USA) in affiliation with American Academy in Rome (New York, NY 10022 USA)

Goal: A five-week college and university teacher seminar for sixteen participants to study the city of Rome as the capital of an empire from the late third to the seventh centuries CE.

Description: This NEH summer seminar will address one of the fundamental issues raised by the study of antiquity: What does it mean to say Rome fell? Unlike other attempts to analyze the fall in terms of the political and military end of the Roman Empire, this seminar will focus on the capital of that empire, the city of Rome, in the late third to the seventh centuries. Through intensive study of newly relevant texts and new archaeological remains, the seminar participants will analyze five key crises that have led historians and archaeologists to view Rome as a "fallen" city. The impact of these crises and responses to them by individuals and groups changed the fabric and institutions of the city, and enabled Rome to be recreated in ways that have had long-lasting influence.

Grant: 197360 / FS-50226-09,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Seminars for College Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2009

New methods for working with old languages: Corpus Linguistics and the future of Textual Scholarship

Recipient: Crane, Gregory R (Medford, MA 02155-5500 USA) in affiliation with Tufts University (Medford, MA 02155 USA)

Goal: Two joint workshops in collaboration with Humboldt University in Berlin (DFG request: 32,200 euros) on the state of the art in digital classics, exploring potential exchanges with other humanities fields, and detailing new areas of research.

Description: We are seeking DFG/NEH support to allow us to host workshops in the US in the summer of 2009 and in Germany in the summer of 2010 in order to explore the application of emerging analytical technologies to classics in particular and the humanities in general. These workshops will focus not only on emerging services (such as named entity recognition, syntactic and morphological analysis, text mining) and knowledge structures (such as domain-specific ontologies), but on the new forms of scholarly knowledge and intellectual analysis that arise as a result. The 2009 workshop will produce a series of papers that document the state of language technologies in the field of classical philology and propose a roadmap for a more general cyberinfrastructure for the study of historical linguistic sources. These papers will circulate during the 2009-10 academic year and lay the foundation for the 2010 workshop in Germany, which will engage other humanities disciplines.

Grant: 196347 / HW-50010-09,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Program: NEH/DFG Symposia and Workshops Program,   Year Awarded: 2009

Enduring Values: Gilgamesh to Frankenstein

Recipient: Freeman, Philip (Decorah, IA 52101 USA) in affiliation with Luther College

Goal: The preparation and teaching of an undergraduate seminar addressing questions of friendship, love, and human dignity.

Description: The Luther College course Enduring Questions: From Gilgamesh to Frankenstein, is an exploration of crucial questions through the careful reading of key works from some of the greatest minds in human history. This seminar course will ask what is the nature of love and friendship, and what do we mean by human dignity? Students will read The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Antigone of Socrates, several Platonic dialogues, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, Dante???s Inferno, Machiavelli???s The Prince, Shakespeare???s King Lear, Swift???s Gulliver???s Travels, Mary Wollstonecraft???s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and Mary Shelley???s Frankenstein. The readings will be supplemented by attendance at local artistic and dramatic events and by the study of material artifacts in museums.

Grant: 196743 / AQ-50118-09,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Enduring Questions: Pilot Course Grants,   Year Awarded: 2009

Large-Scale Learning and the Automatic Analysis of Historical Texts

Recipient: Crane, Gregory R (Medford, MA 02155-5500 USA) in affiliation with Tufts University (Medford, MA 02155 USA)

Goal: Consultation with staff from the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center to investigate the development of dynamic lexica for Latin and ancient Greek.

Description: The Perseus Project recently received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to investigate the automatic construction of "dynamic lexica" for historical languages (specifically Latin and Greek) as the output of automatic processes based on both supervised and unsupervised learning techniques. We are seeking NEH/NERSC supercomputing support and training for two reasons: 1.) to let us significantly reduce our training time for two known automatic processes already under development (automatic parsing and parallel text alignment), in order to allow us to be more agile in our future development and optimization; and 2.) to let us begin experimenting with approaches not available to us without the use of such resources (such as a hybrid approach to word sense disambiguation involving labeled sense induction and clustering). In this we hope not only to improve upon our existing methods but also to investigate the possibility for innovative new work as well.

Grant: 194230 / HH-50001-09,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Program: NEH/DOE Humanities High Performance Computing Program,   Year Awarded: 2009

American Office of l'Annee Philologique

Recipient: Carson, Lisa D (Athens, OH 45701-1717 USA) in affiliation with American Philological Association (Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304 USA)

Goal: The preparation of "l'Année Philologique," a comprehensive bibliography of research in all fields of classical studies that contains abstracts of serial publications.

Description: Since 1927 l'Annee philologique (APh) has been the essential annual comprehensive and authoritative bibliography of classical studies for all humanists studying the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome. Since 2002, APh has become even more valuable because its listings are now available by subscription on a web site which combines current volumes with older volumes put in digital form by another NEH-funded project sponsored by the American Philological Association: the Database of Classical Bibliography. This proposal seeks support for the American Office (AO) of APh, one of five offices around the world. The AO is responsible for preparing full bibliographical entries for works of scholarship published in the USA, the UK, and the current and former countries of the British Commonwealth. The AO has been a leader among the APh offices in introducing valuable technological innovations to the process of collecting and publishing the bibliography.

Grant: 189770 / PW-50068-08,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Humanities Collections and Reference Resources,   Year Awarded: 2008

Advanced Papyrological Information System, Phase 6

Recipient: Bagnall, Roger S (New York, NY 10027 USA) in affiliation with Columbia University

Goal: Enhancements to an integrated information system of papyri collections with access to catalog records, texts, images, and a bibliography, a new user interface, and better integration with related scholarly databases, and expansion of the digital repository.

Description: The Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS) is one of the primary research databases in ancient and classical studies. The Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri (DDbDP) and the Heidelberger Gesamtverzeichnis (HGV) have now partnered with APIS to create a powerful access and research tool, the "Papyrological Navigator." This Phase 6 proposal seeks two-year funding to extend APIS within the context of the new DDbDP / APIS partnership by: further developing the Papyrological Navigator into a stable, robust production-oriented system; conducting formal usability testing and making improvements to the system based on the results; revising portions of the current APIS infrastructure to allow for better integration with the Papyrological Navigator and interoperability with other scholarly databases; continuing to load collection-based cataloging and images from new and existing partner institutions; and continuing to expand the APIS long-term digital preservation repository.

Grant: 189751 / PW-50049-08,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Humanities Collections and Reference Resources,   Year Awarded: 2008

Fellowships at TLL Institute in Munich

Recipient: Coleman, Kathleen M (Cambridge, MA 02138 USA) in affiliation with American Philological Association (Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304 USA)

Goal: One twelve-month fellowship a year for three years.

Description: The American Philological Association (APA) seeks to continue a project in operation since 1984: a fellowship program that enables American scholars to participate in a unique international collaborative research project at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL) Institute in Munich. The TLL has been described by the Encyclopedia Britannica as "probably the most scholarly dictionary in the world." Each fellow has the opportunity to conduct research and write articles for the TLL, to broaden his or her vision of the ancient world, and to work with senior scholars in the field of Latin lexicography. The TLL has been and remains an indispensable reference work for humanities scholars of the ancient and medieval worlds.

Grant: 189890 / RA-50064-08,   Division: Research Programs,   Program: Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions,   Year Awarded: 2008

Endowment for Classics Research and Teaching

Recipient: Blistein, Adam D (Philadelphia, PA 19104-6304 USA) in affiliation with American Philological Association

Goal: Endowment for staff positions and other expenses in the American Office of the l'Année philologique, a bibliographic resource for classical studies, and direct expenses for fund raising.

Description: The American Philological Association (APA) requests a Challenge Grant in the amount of $650,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to establish an endowment for classics research and teaching. Initially, the sole purpose of this endowment will be to support both ongoing operations and new initiatives of the American Office (AO) of l'Annee philologique (APh). Since 1927 classics scholars around the world have considered the APh to be the primary and indispensable source of information about research published in all areas of their field. It is now also a rich and accessible "point of entry" for other humanists seeking information about the ancient Greek and Roman world. This powerful bibliographical tool embraces an extremely wide range of modern scholarly materials and lets the student or scholar pursue serious inquiry in a way that is the envy of many other disciplines. The AO is an indispensable part of this international project, assuring that American and other English language materails are included in the international bibliography. The rapid pace of improvements in the use of technology by scholars and teachers makes it impossible to predict how they will do their work or what resources they will need in 10 years (to say nothing of 25 or 50 years). It would therefore be irresponsible to build an endowment that can be used only for an existing tool, however essential it may be now. In addition, the Association hopes to add to the endowment via additional gifts and capital appreciation and must be prepared for the possibility that in time funds will be available to support other important initiatives besides the American Office.

Grant: 181675 / CH-50359-07,   Division: Challenge Grants,   Program: Challenge Grants,   Year Awarded: 2007

Scalable Named Entity Identification in Classical Studies

Recipient: Crane, Gregory R (Medford, MA 02155-5500 USA) in affiliation with Tufts University (Medford, MA 02155 USA)

Goal: Construction of a testbed of scholarly and cultural documents on the ancient world and the development of digital, open-source tools to enable researchers and librarians to utilize contextual materials available in text-based collections.

Description: The Perseus Project and the Collections and Archives of Tufts University propose to develop infrastructure for finding references to particular people and places from classical antiquity in several ancient and modern languages in primary and secondary source collections. We will offer and publish open-source, stand alone services and Fedora repository disseminators for searching, browsing, and visualizing entities within the Tufts Digital Library. Under a creative commons license, we will publish knowledge sources such as: linguistic data to identify forms of the most common 60,000 proper classical names in seven languages; knowledge base of the 30,000 people and places most prominent in texts; indices associating c. 200,000 passages with particular entities and an association network of 500,000 tagged names for named entity identification systems; automatically generated index of classical people and places identified in a 1 billion-word testbed of both scholarly and general cultural documents.

Grant: 187318 / PK-50022-07,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Advancing Knowledge: The IMLS/NEH Digital Partnership,   Year Awarded: 2007

NEH Fellowship Program at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens

Recipient: Romano, Irene B (Princeton, NJ 08540 USA) in affiliation with American School of Classical Studies at Athens (Princeton, NJ 08540-5232 USA)

Goal: The equivalent of two fellowships a year for three years.

Description: The ASCSA seeks a total of $258,000 for a three-year program to continue support of two to four fellowships per year of five to ten months in duration, in a wide range of disciplines of the Greek world from prehistory to the present. The NEH Fellowship program aims to make the unique resources of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens accessible to a wider scholarly constituency: Blegen Library, devoted to Greek antiquity; the Gennadius Library, a collection of post-ancient Greek culture; and the primary materials accessible at the ASCSA's archaeological research centers in ancient Corinth and at the Athenian Agora. NEH Fellows add immensely to the intellectual life of the School, broadening and enriching the experience of students and scholars in the ASCSA community.

Grant: 184885 / RA-50055-07,   Division: Research Programs,   Program: Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions,   Year Awarded: 2007

Houses of Mortals and Gods: Latin Literature in Context

Recipient: Dougherty, Therese Marie (Baltimore, MD 21210-2404 USA) in affiliation with College of Notre Dame of Maryland (Baltimore, MD 21210 USA)

Goal: A five-week institute for twenty-five middle and high school Latin teachers to contextualize the study of Latin language and Roman culture through on-site study of dwellings in and around Rome and in the region of Pompeii.

Description: This proposal is for a five-week Summer Institute for 25 middle- and secondary-school teachers. The first week will be held at College of Notre Dame of Maryland and the last four weeks in Italy. Lectures and reading of literary and non-literary Latin texts will be complemented by visits to related sites. The theme of house and household will help to focus the experience on the reality of life in ancient Rome and the practical issues regarding property and personal relationships that resembled concerns of ours today. Teachers will design instructional materials for studying literature and archeology appropriate to beginning, intermediate or advanced Latin programs.

Grant: 187104 / ES-50198-07,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Institutes for School Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2007

Identity and Self-Representation in the Subcultures of Ancient Rome

Recipient: Leach, Eleanor W (Bloomington, IN 47405 USA) in affiliation with American Academy in Rome (New York, NY 10022 USA)

Goal: A five-week seminar in Rome for fifteen college and university teachers on the complexities of Roman identity within various subcultures of late Republican and early Imperial Rome.

Description: The proposed NEH Summer Seminar, "Identity and Self-Representation in the Subcultures of Ancient Rome," will be lead by Eleanor Winsor Leach (Indiana University) and Eve D'Ambra (Vassar College) during the summer 2008 at the American Academy in Rome. This seminar will focus on the ever-controversial matter of personal identity by considering ways in which Roman citizens throughout the Mediterranean world used word and image to represent themselves both as individuals and as members of communities. In addition to each week's thematically organized seminar discussions, a series of Roman museums visits and field trips to sites beyond the city should expand each participant's resources for study and teaching in areas of class, gender, and ethnicity. We believe that the particpants may be surprised to encounter the social and occupational diversity of the subcultures emcompassed within the general heading of Roman culture.

Grant: 187066 / FS-50149-07,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Seminars for College Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2007

Oral Poetics and the Homeric Doloneia

Recipient: Ebbott, Mary (Worcester, MA 01610-2395 USA) in affiliation with College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, MA 01610 USA)

Goal: Creation of essays, a critical text, and detailed commentary on the Doloneia, Book 10 of the Homeric epic the Iliad, through the use of epic oral tradition. (18 months)

Description: Our project seeks to correct a major imbalance in Homeric studies, namely the absence of a scholarly commentary that embraces and applies the past 80 years of scholarship into the oral traditional background of the Iliad and Odyssey. Our planned volume focuses on the so-called Doloneia, the tenth book of the Iliad, and will put a spotlight on this most doubted, ignored, even scorned book of the epic. In doing so, we will demonstrate how approaching the poem as an oral traditional epic can answer questions that are particularly vexing when using a strictly literary approach. The volume we propose will consist of (1) a series of introductory essays that addresses central questions in Homeric scholarship and how they apply to Iliad 10 in particular; (2) a critical text, with a full apparatus; and (3) a detailed commentary, which will explicate the language of this book and situate it within the poetics of the oral tradition in which the Iliad and Odyssey were composed.

Grant: 186355 / RZ-50723-07,   Division: Research Programs,   Program: Collaborative Research,   Year Awarded: 2007

Classical Scholarship and the Age of Augustus

Recipient: Dougherty, Therese Marie (Baltimore, MD 21210-2404 USA) in affiliation with College of Notre Dame of Maryland (Baltimore, MD 21210 USA)

Goal: A series of workshops for sixteen high school Latin teachers on the history and culture of Augustan Rome.

Description: Classical Scholarship and the Age of Augustus is a Faculty Humanities Workshop for sixteen Latin teachers from Maryland and neighboring states within commuting distance of College of Notre Dame of Maryland. The program is sponsored by College of Notre Dame of Maryland, a liberal arts college for women with a strong tradition of humanities education and scholarship, and will be directed by Sister Therese Marie Dougherty, a classics scholar and recognized leader in the promotion of classics among high school and college students. Participants will explore several aspects of ancient Rome in the Age of Augustus (27 B.C.E. to 14 C.E). Topics include history, literature, monuments, and religious beliefs, as the teachers study the events leading to the rise of Augustus, the verbal and visual iconography of Augustus and his achievements, and the beginnings of emperor worship.

Grant: 185033 / EZ-50198-07,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Faculty Humanities Workshops,   Year Awarded: 2007

Gods, Myths, and Mortals: Discover Ancient Greece

Recipient: Snider, Karen (New York, NY 10024 USA) in affiliation with Children's Museum of Manhattan

Goal: Implementation of a traveling exhibition for children and families exploring the art, mythology, and architecture of ancient Greece.

Description: The exhibition, Gods, Myths and Mortals: Discover Ancient Greece, will introduce children and their families to the great epics, art, and architecture of ancient Greece and legacy of creativity, wisdom, and insight into the human condition that has shaped western civilization for 2,500 years. It will challenge them to reconstruct the ancient past, and encourage them to find traces of Hellenic culture in their own lives and the world around them.

Grant: 181922 / MI-50038-06,   Division: Public Programs,   Program: Museums Implementation,   Year Awarded: 2006

Roman Religion in its Cultural Context

Recipient: Galinsky, Karl (Austin, TX 78712 USA) in affiliation with American Academy in Rome (New York, NY 10022 USA)

Goal: A six-week summer seminar for fifteen college and university teachers on the development of Roman religion, making use of sites and resources in Rome and its environs.

Description: The seminar will concern itself with a multifaceted overview of Roman religion from the beginnings of Rome to the late Roman empire in the west. One of the central aims is to acquaint the participants with the difference between Roman religion and our (Judaeo-Christian) conceptions of religion and religious experience. Roman religion was an inseparable part of the fabric of the Roman state. While it falls short of our expectations of spirituality, its manifestations, and the evidence for them, it includes a wide range of aspects of Roman civilization. Because religion is a constituent aspect of most civilizations, the seminar will be of interest not only to classicists and scholars of religion, but also to scholars of cultural studies, literature, art, architecture, history, political science, philosophy, and anthropology. Participants will have the unique opportunity to explore the centrality of Roman religion in situ through a combination of study sessions and field trips.

Grant: 182071 / FS-50104-06,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Seminars for College Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2006

Homer’s Readers, Ancient and Modern

Recipient: Porter, James I (Irvine, CA 92697-2000 USA) in affiliation with University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA)

Goal: A four-week seminar for fifteen college and university faculty to engage them in a close analysis of the reception of Homer's epic poems, from ancient times to the twentieth century.

Description: I am proposing to host a four-week seminar for fifteen college and university teachers, the aim of which will be to investigate the reasons for the extraordinary standing and the enduring attraction of Homer’s epics from antiquity to the present day. Running through the seminar will be larger scale questions about canons, the classical ideal, reception, cultures of scholarship, and cultural memory. In the place of close readings of poetry, the seminar will provide a chance to do a close reading of history itself through case studies over time, while also serving as an introduction to ancient and modern perspectives on Homer.

Grant: 182067 / FS-50100-06,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Seminars for College Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2006

The Azoria Project: A Study of Urbanization in Early Iron Age and Archaic Crete

Recipient: Haggis, Donald C (Chapel Hill, NC 27599 USA) in affiliation with University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Goal: To support research on the development of a nascent Cretan polis and of cultural exchange in the Greek Aegean during the Early Iron Age. (36 months)

Description: The project is the archaeological excavation of the Iron Age town of Azoria on the island of Crete in the Greek Aegean, exploring the development of the settlement from its Early Iron Age foundations (ca. 1200-700 B.C.) until its establishment as an urban center in the Archaic period (700-500 B.C.). This component of the project relates material patterns of crop processing and animal husbandry to models of land use and power relationships in order to identify corporate groups and to define the structure of the emerging Greek city-state (polis). The plan of work sets out to examine how the civic center was organized, how agricultural and pastoral production was managed on household and public levels, and what archaeological contexts of food storage, processing, and distribution can reveal about the social organization of the early city. The project's main objectives are to examine archaeological correlates for household and civic organization, establishing conceptual links between agricultural and pastoral production and economic structure and group identity. . . .

Grant: 175880 / RZ-50334-05,   Division: Research Programs,   Program: Collaborative Research,   Year Awarded: 2005