Alliance for Response: A National Program on Cultural Heritage and Disaster Management

Recipient: Long, Jane S (Washington, DC 20005 USA) in affiliation with Heritage Preservation

Goal: Funding supports three Alliance for Response forums, two national institutes, and an educational outreach campaign focused on developing and sustaining partnerships between cultural institutions and emergency management and response officials to enhance the protection of cultural heritage collections.

Description: Humanities collections throughout the country are vulnerable to emergencies, from localized flooding to region-wide catastrophic events. Alliance for Response: A National Program on Cultural Heritage and Disaster Management aims to educate stewards of humanities collections on how to collaborate with cultural heritage institutions and emergency management agencies to implement networks, plans, and policies that reduce the risk of damage to collections. Relationships with emergency management agencies are key to protecting collections, but few cultural heritage institutions have formal ones and few emergency management agencies include cultural heritage in official disaster planning. Training will take place at Alliance for Response Forums, Leadership Institutes, and through education of emergency managers on the importance of humanities collections to communities. This project builds on Heritage Preservation???s six years of success with Alliance for Response.

Grant: 200048 / PE-50042-10,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Preservation Education and Training,   Year Awarded: 2010

Digging into Image Data to Answer Authorship Related Questions

Recipient: Rehberger, Dean (East Lansing, MI 48824 USA) in affiliation with Michigan State University

Goal: This project will pursue research using advanced computational techniques to explore humanities themes related to the authorship of large collections of cultural heritage materials, namely 15th-century manuscripts, 17th- and 18th-century maps, and 19th- and 20th-century quilts. The project team includes staff from Michigan State University, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Sheffield.

Description: An international, multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary team of researchers from the University of Sheffield (UoS), UK; Michigan State University (MSU), MI, USA; and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), IL, USA jointly propose the exploration of authorship across three distinct but in some respects complementary digital dataset collections: 15th-century manuscripts, 17th- and 18th-century maps and 19th- and 20th-century quilts. The datasets, freely available to the investigators, represent very large and diverse collections of digitized scans or photographs in standard image file formats. The US team will consist of members from UIUC (applying to NSF) and MSU (applying to NEH). The UIUC team led by Peter Bajcsy (as US NSF project director), the MSU team led by Dean Rehberger (as US NEH project director), and the UK team led by Peter Ainsworth (as UK JISC project director). The topic of authorship serves as a common question at the intersection of humanities, arts and social sciences research that unites the proposed exploration of image analyses.

Grant: 200400 / HJ-50001-10,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Program: Digging into Data,   Year Awarded: 2010

Towards Dynamic Variorum Editions

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

Goal: This project supports the creation of a framework to produce "dynamic variorum" editions of classics texts that enable the reader to automatically link not only to variant editions but also to relevant citations, quotations, people, and places that are found in a digital library of more than one million primary and secondary source texts. The project team includes members from Tufts University, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Imperial College, London, and Mount Allison University.

Description: Building upon collaborations between computer scientists and classicists across three countries, we propose to build a framework that combines emerging technologies and large collections to provide for every surviving Greek and Latin author scalable, sustainable information that can exceed the breadth of traditional bibliographic databases for an entire field and the depth of traditional variorum editions for individual authors and works. We can furthermore identify patterns in the changing reception of and scholarship about Greco-Roman antiquity with greater power and flexibility than was feasible with traditional methods. The work proposed here will demonstrate and analyze the significance of these new methods. Our hypothesis, based on years of development with smaller collections, is that we can now see a wholly new generation of services that better address the most traditional goals of scholarship, are customizable to the needs of far broader audiences, and are much more practical to maintain over time.

Grant: 200412 / HJ-50013-10,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Program: Digging into Data,   Year Awarded: 2010

Using Zotero and TAPoR on the Old Bailey Proceedings: Data Mining With Criminal Intent

Recipient: Cohen, Daniel J (Fairfax, VA 22030 USA) in affiliation with George Mason University

Goal: This project will develop tools and models for comparing, visualizing, and analyzing the history of crime, using the Old Bailey Online, which contains extensive court records of more than 197,000 individual trials held over a period of 240 years in Great Britain. The team is composed of scholars from George Mason University, the University of Hertfordshire, and the University of Alberta.

Description: The With Criminal Intent project will create an intellectual exemplar for the role of data mining in an important historical discipline–the history of crime–and illustrate how the tools of digital humanities can be used to wrest new knowledge from one of the largest humanities data sets currently available: the Old Bailey Online. It will create a seamlessly connected environment, the Newgate Commons, in which scholars can use data mining techniques to select themed texts from the 120 million words of trial records contained in the Old Bailey, and employ these texts as the basis of a study collection in Zotero where they will in turn be available for analysis using TAPoR tools (including quantitative text analysis and visualization). In the process, this project will showcase the integration of online textual resources with bibliographical and analytical tools emerging from Digital Humanities.

Grant: 200447 / HJ-50048-10,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Program: Digging into Data,   Year Awarded: 2010

Railroads and the Making of Modern America -- Tools for Spatio-Temporal Correlation, Analysis, and Visualization

Recipient: Thomas, William G (Lincoln, NE 68588-0327 USA) in affiliation with University of Nebraska, Board of Regents (Lincoln, NE 68588-0430 USA)

Goal: This project will integrate a vast collection of textual, geographical, and numerical data about the railroad and its impact on society over the centuries, concentrating initially on the Great Plains and Northeast United States. The project team is comprised of humanities scholars and computer scientists from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and the University of Portsmouth.

Description: This project aims to integrate large-scale data sources from the Digging into Data repositories with other types of relevant data on the railroad system, already assembled by the project directors. Our project seeks to develop useful tools for spatio-temporal visualization of these data and the relationships among them. Our interdisciplinary team includes computer science, history, and geography researchers. Because the railroad "system" and its spatio-temporal configuration appeared differently from locality-to-locality and region-to-region, we need to adjust how we "locate" and "see" the system. By applying data mining and pattern recognition techniques, software systems can be created that dynamically redefine the way spatial data are represented. Utilizing processes common to analysis in Computer Science, we propose to develop a software framework that allows these embedded concepts to be visualized and further studied.

Grant: 200427 / HJ-50028-10,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Program: Digging into Data,   Year Awarded: 2010

Digging Into the Enlightenment: Mapping the Republic of Letters

Recipient: Edelstein, Dan (Stanford, CA 94305-4015 USA) in affiliation with Stanford University (Stanford, CA 94305 USA)

Goal: This project will focus on a body of 53,000 18th-century letters and analyze the degree to which the effects of the Enlightenment can be observed in the letters of people of various occupations. The project is lead by humanities scholars, librarians, and computer scientists from Stanford University, the University of Oklahoma, and Oxford University.

Description: The Digging Into the Enlightenment: Mapping The Republic of Letters project is a collaborative effort between humanities scholars and computer scientists at Stanford University and the University of Oklahoma in the United States, and at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Our research hypothesis is that we can revolutionize the practice of interpretive research in the humanities by integrating innovative visualization and annotation techniques into highly interactive tools for excavating and dissecting details about people, places, times, and relationships in large data sets. Our project focuses on the Electronic Enlightenment (EE), a University of Oxford collection currently containing more than 53,000 letters. The goal of the project is thus to develop new visualization techniques and tools that support research into the "Republic of Letters" by facilitating interpretation of the complex data sets that have been materialized from this predominantly textual archival collection.

Grant: 200455 / HJ-50056-10,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Program: Digging into Data,   Year Awarded: 2010

Should Art Be Moral? The Ancient Quarrel Between Philosophy and Poetry

Recipient: Alznauer, Mark Vinzenz (Evanston, IL 60208-2214 USA) in affiliation with Northwestern University (Evanston, IL 60208 USA)

Goal: The development of a one-semester course that would be offered at least twice, for twenty undergraduates, on the question of the moral value of art.

Description: In this seminar-style course, we will look at some of the most prominent episodes of what Plato called "the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry" in order to compass the alternative answers given to the perennial question: should art be moral? In pursuing this question, we will examine both the works of art that have figured most prominently in this debate as well as the philosophic and literary disputes that have followed in their wake. The course is comprised of three units. The first concerns the pre-modern background of the quarrel and will include readings from Sophocles, Plato, and Dante, among others. The second unit deals with the reemergence of this debate in modern writers such as Moliere, Rousseau, Schiller and Nietzsche. In the last unit, we turn to five late modern poets and writers who have explicitly treated the relation of morality to their art: Tolstoy, Brecht, Eliot, Woolf and O'Connor.

Grant: 196724 / AQ-50099-10,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Enduring Questions: Pilot Course Grants,   Year Awarded: 2010

Preservation Assistance for the Vassar College Costume Collection

Recipient: Kirkland, Arden (Poughkeepsie, NY 12604 USA) in affiliation with Vassar College (Poughkeepsie, NY 12601 USA)

Goal: Hiring consultants to conduct a preservation assessment of the Drama Department's costume collection, to purchase preservation supplies, and to hold workshops for staff and students on the appropriate handling of costumes. The collection contains clothing dating from the 1820s. It is used by students and researchers in the study of the history of fashion, drama, and the history of the college.

Description: The Vassar College Costume Collection (VCCC), a research collection of historic clothing maintained in Vassar's Drama Department, seeks a Preservation Assistance Grant for the Historic Costume Preservation Project. This project will include a general preservation assessment, preservation supplies, and education and training in the form of a series of three workshops. Since the VCCC exists as a study collection, the goal of conducting a condition survey, with condition reports for each of the 535 objects in the collection, presents a wonderful opportunity for hands-on experience with the objects. Working with professional consultants, staff and students will learn best practices for proper handling of costume objects; assessment and documentation of their condition; museum cataloging procedures; and stabilization and mounting techniques to conserve and safely display the objects.

Grant: 199695 / PG-50951-10,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Preservation Assistance Grants,   Year Awarded: 2010

Archaeology and Anthropology Collections Survey, Yager Museum of Art and Culture

Recipient: Anderson, Donna (Oneonta, NY 13820 USA) in affiliation with Hartwick College

Goal: A condition assessment to identify for preservation treatments 80 of the most significant archaeological and ethnographic objects in the collections of the college's Yager Museum of Art and Culture and to develop a long-range conservation plan for 15,000 other anthropological artifacts. The proposed plan, recommended as a priority in a 2006 Conservation Assessment Program (CAP) evaluation, will address storage and exhibition environments as well as storage methods and materials.

Description: The Yager Museum of Art and Culture at Hartwick College seeks funds to engage a conservator to undertake a condition assessment of the most significant portions of the anthropology and archaeology collections, to advise on improving environmental conditions and storage methods, and to help staff develop a long-range prioritized collections care plan. This project follows on the recommendations from a 2006 CAP survey of the collection completed by conservator Barbara Applebaum. Completion of a collections-specific CAP survey and long range plan will allow the museum to better preserve these objects and integrate collections care with other research, interpretation, and exhibition plans for sharing this significant material with communities in the region.

Grant: 199621 / PG-50877-10,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Preservation Assistance Grants,   Year Awarded: 2010

International Tennis Hall of Fame Environmental Monitoring Project

Recipient: Stark, Douglas Andrew (Newport, RI 02840 USA) in affiliation with International Tennis Hall of Fame

Goal: Environmental monitoring in the 1880 National Historic Landmark building that houses more than 16,000 artifacts, as well as books, photographs, and audiovisual materials that document the history of tennis from its origins in the 12th century to the present.

Description: This project will allow the International Tennis Hall of Fame to purchase Environmental Monitors and the Climate Notebook Software as well training from the Image Permanence Institute as the first step in a multistep program to develop and implement a long-term environmental program. The importance of developing and implementing an environmental monitoring program will establish a baseline of information on the ranges of temperature and relative humidity found within the various spaces within our 19th century National Historic Landmark. Our facility interprets the history of tennis and its impact on our culture as well as the building which is representative of the Gilded Age in Newport, Rhode Island.

Grant: 199563 / PG-50819-10,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Preservation Assistance Grants,   Year Awarded: 2010

Purchase of Environmental Monitoring Equipment for Collections Storage and Galleries

Recipient: Pfeifer, Nezka (Scranton, PA 18510-2380 USA) in affiliation with Everhart Museum of Natural History, Science and Art (Scranton, PA 18510 USA)

Goal: Funding supports the purchase of equipment to monitor the environmental conditions of storage and exhibition facilities for the museum's decorative arts collections. These include paintings, sculpture, funerary objects, glass and bronze objects, coins, jewelry, ceramics, textiles, religious objects, weapons, metalwork, furniture, masks, and tools from around the world, dating from ancient times to the present.

Description: NEH Preservation Assistance Grant funds will be used to purchase data loggers and other environmental monitoring equipment. The Everhart Museum recently completed a CAP project and that report's recommendations will guide the selection and placement of the equipment in storage areas and galleries located throughout the three-story museum structure.

Grant: 199643 / PG-50899-10,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Preservation Assistance Grants,   Year Awarded: 2010

Fellowships at the National Humanities Center

Recipient: Mullikin, Kent (Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 USA) in affiliation with National Humanities Center (Durham, NC 27709-2256 USA)

Goal: The equivalent of four fellowships per year for three years.

Description: The National Humanities Center requests support for fellowships for advanced study in the humanities.

Grant: 194583 / RA-50073-09,   Division: Research Programs,   Program: Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions,   Year Awarded: 2009

Emily Dickinson’s Garden: The Poetry of Flowers

Recipient: Fraser, Susan (Bronx, NY 10458-5126 USA) in affiliation with New York Botanical Garden (Bronx, NY 10458 USA)

Goal: Implementation of outdoor and indoor exhibitions, and public and educational programs, exploring the importance of plants as a source of inspiration for noted American poet Emily Dickinson.

Description: The New York Botanical Garden requests an implementation grant in the amount of $400,000 to help underwrite the costs associated with Emily Dickinson's Flowers, a Garden-wide multi-element exhibit that will demonstrate the importance of plants as a source of inspiration for poets and writers, in general, and to Dickinson, in particular. The exhibit, sited throughout the Garden???s 250-acre historic landscape including the LuEsther T. Mertz Library, the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, the Everett Children's Adventure Garden, and the permanent collection, will examine both the relationship between art and nature and Dickinson as a gardener, a poet, an amateur botanist, and a lover of flowers. Using dynamic and interpretative displays, signage, and educational and public programming activities, Emily Dickinson's Flowers will illustrate the natural marriage between plants and the written word, and make Dickinson???s poetry broadly accessible to general audiences.

Grant: 197002 / GI-50130-09,   Division: Public Programs,   Program: America's Historical & Cultural Organizations Implementation,   Year Awarded: 2009

Designing Tomorrow: America's World's Fairs of the 1930s

Recipient: Frankel, Cathy (Washington, DC 20001 USA) in affiliation with National Building Museum (Washington, DC 20016 USA)

Goal: Implementation of a traveling exhibition exploring how the modern architectural and industrial design displayed at the 1930s world's fairs articulated a unique American modernism and laid the groundwork for post-World War II consumerism.

Description: Designing Tomorrow: America's World's Fairs of the 1930s investigates the history of modern design at six expositions across the United States between 1933 and 1939. The fairs propelled a modernist vision into the popular imagination and laid the groundwork for what would emerge as a fully-realized post-war consumer culture. In the midst of the Great Depression, they articulated a unique American modernism that amounted to a revolution in transportation, urban design, domestic life, and communication. Companies like General Electric, Ford, and DuPont publicized their most innovative products. A new generation of architects and designers promoted visions of superhighways and suburban communities and experimented with buildings framed in steel, beautified with glass block, and economically constructed of drywall, Masonite, and plywood. The 6,000 sq. ft. exhibition, the first to treat the six Depression-era fairs, features nearly 200 artifacts, archival footage, and interactive stations.

Grant: 196925 / GI-50104-09,   Division: Public Programs,   Program: America's Historical & Cultural Organizations Implementation,   Year Awarded: 2009

History of Cartography [HOC]

Recipient: Edney, Matthew H (Madison, WI 53706-1404 USA) in affiliation with University of Wisconsin, Madison (Madison, WI 53706 USA)

Goal: Continued development of the multi-volume reference work, the "History of Cartography," with especial attention to Volume 4, "Cartography in the European Enlightenment."

Description: We seek funding to support the continued preparation of the award-winning series, The History of Cartography, under the direction of Matthew Edney. The history of cartography is a rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field that spans the humanities and social sciences; it is driven by an appreciation that maps are complex, culturally rich texts through which people organize and make sense of their world. This project accordingly studies the people who have produced and used maps in the context of their cultures and societies. This proposal primarily focuses on preparing manuscripts for Volume Four (European Enlightenment, 1650-1800), edited by Edney and Mary Pedley, and designing Volume Five (Nineteenth Century),edited by Roger Kain. Some costs will also be incurred for Volume Six (Twentieth Century),edited by Mark Monmonier. Quality control will be directed by Edney and accomplished by the Project staff in Madison and the publisher, the University of Chicago Press.

Grant: 194402 / PW-50309-09,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Humanities Collections and Reference Resources,   Year Awarded: 2009

Encyclopaedia Iranica [EI]

Recipient: Yarshater, Ehsan O (New York, NY 10027-6821 USA) in affiliation with Columbia University (New York, NY 10027 USA)

Goal: Preparation of the "Encyclopædia Iranica," a multi-disciplinary reference work and research tool on Iranian history and civilization from prehistory to the present.

Description: Encyclopaedia Iranica is a major interdisciplinary research tool in the humanities for scholars and students in Middle Eastern, Central Asian, Caucasian, and Indian studies, and for non-specialists interested in Persian culture and related fields. It is a vehicle for the publication of original research or synthesis. All of the articles are written with careful documentation and extensive bibliography by leading scholars from many different countries. Nearly 14 volumes have been published electronically and in print: a total of 92 fascicles plus 571 additional online articles. Focusing increasingly on the electronic edition (www.iranica.com), we continue working on improving its accessibility and technical aspects as well as planning for enhancement of its search engine and metadata architecture. The present two-year application is for support to publish c. 375 articles per year of which 175-200 articles will be first posted online & 150-175 will be printed and then posted online.

Grant: 194421 / PW-50328-09,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Humanities Collections and Reference Resources,   Year Awarded: 2009

The Tecolote Program - Continuing Education for K-16 New Mexico Educators

Recipient: Van Luchene, Stephen (Santa Fe, NM 87505 USA) in affiliation with St. John's College, Santa Fe (Santa Fe, NM 87501 USA)

Goal: Endowment for Tecolote colloquia for New Mexico educators K-16

Description: Tecolote provides K-16 educators in New Mexico a series of colloquia for building ideas through the structured discussion of centrally important texts and ideas. Instituted in the fall of 2002 with 64 teachers participating, Tecolote consists of eight one-day colloquia on Saturdays in September and February. A unifying theme is selected each year from the "great books" and this theme governs the integrated program of readings Each session follows the discussion mode of learning developed at St. John's and includes a small group tutorial, a larger group seminar and a luncheon with a brief presentation. Participants receive an honorarium for attending. The primary purpose of Tecolote is to return revitalized teachers to their classrooms who are better able to motivate student learning. Both the material studied and the way it is approached are about rediscovering the founding principles of the U.S. and helping build strong, intelligent participation in our civic institutions.

Grant: 191882 / CZ-50203-09,   Division: Challenge Grants,   Program: Special Initiatives,   Year Awarded: 2009

La Florida: 500 Years of Spanish Legacy in Florida

Recipient: Putman, Patricia (St. Petersburg, FL 33701 USA) in affiliation with Florida Humanities Council (St. Petersburg, FL 33701-5005 USA)

Goal: Funding will support grants, workshops for teachers, an issue of the Council's FORUM magazine, public programs and a website that will explore the topic, "La Florida: 500 Years of Spanish Legacy in Florida."

Description: Grants, teacher workshops, an issue of FHC???s FORUM magazine, public programs and a website will explore the topic, ???La Florida: 500 Years of Spanish Legacy in Florida.??? Historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, literary scholars, artists, writers, and architects will design resources and programs to provide a deeper understanding of both the historical context and the cultural significance of Florida???s relationship with Spain.

Grant: 199893 / BC-50489-09,   Division: Federal/State Partnership,   Program: Grants for State Humanities Councils,   Year Awarded: 2009

Network Analysis for the Humanities

Recipient: Tangherlini, Timothy R (Los Angeles, CA 90095-1537 USA) in affiliation with University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA 90024 USA)

Goal: A ten-day workshop and follow-up symposium for humanities faculty members and advanced graduate students on the use of large-scale network analysis for humanities topics and questions.

Description: We propose to host an Institute in Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities focusing on techniques for the discovery, visualization and analysis of networks in Humanities corpuses. Networks in this context are broadly defined to include both external networks (networks of production, networks of circulation, networks of influence, and networks of reception) and internal networks (networks of characters, networks of text, networks of language) in the data. The institute will consist of two main parts: a ten day intensive institute, taking place over two weeks in June 2010, and a shorter three day research symposium in June 2011. Both events will be housed at NSF's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics on UCLA's campus.

Grant: 197331 / HT-50016-09,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Program: Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities,   Year Awarded: 2009

Humanities Gaming Institute: Serious Games for Research and Pedagogy

Recipient: Buell, Duncan A (Columbia, SC 29208 USA) in affiliation with University of South Carolina Research Foundation

Goal: A three-week institute on the role of immersive, interactive technologies and games within the context of the humanities, with a year of follow-up support for the twenty participants.

Description: We propose a three-week Institute on Humanities Gaming to develop the intellectual frameworks necessary to support gaming as an active area of humanities research and pedagogy. Our institute aims to reduce the technical barriers to the adoption of gaming as a research and teaching platform by leveraging investments in the infrastructure of computing and digital media. The institute will (a) investigate the cognitive components of games that inform and enable successful game play, including immersive structure, rule governance, interactivity, and simulation; (b) provide hands-on research into existing serious games from a variety of fields, including history, literature, linguistics, philosophy, and economics; (c) produce, under the guidance of experienced game developers, games that can scale to meet participants' research and teaching needs in the humanities.

Grant: 197340 / HT-50025-09,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Program: Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities,   Year Awarded: 2009