2009-10 Great Michigan Read

Recipient: Parker, Gregory L (Lansing, MI 48912 USA) in affiliation with Michigan Humanities Council (Lansing, MI 48912-1270 USA)

Goal: To support a variety of activities for the 2009-2010 Great Michigan Read, including reader's guides, a teacher's guide, grants for speakers, newspaper inserts, radio and television features and other promotional material. The selected book is "Stealing Buddha's Dinner" by Bich Minh Nguyen.

Description: The 2009-10 Great Michigan Read is a humanities initiative encouraging the entire state to read the same book. Targeting young adults to seniors, The Great Michigan Read aspires to make reading more accessible and appealing, engaging Michiganians with literature unique to the Great Lakes State while encouraging them to learn more about their state, their history, and their society. The selected title, "Stealing Buddha???s Dinner," by Bich Minh Nguyen, chronicles the author???s migration from Vietnam in 1975 and her coming of age in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the 1980s. Along the way, she struggles to construct her own cultural identity from a menagerie of uniquely American influences. The Council???s programming will encourage people to read Stealing Buddha???s Dinner and use the text to explore three themes: immigration stories, cultural understanding, and contemporary history.

Grant: 197596 / BC-50461-09,   Division: Federal/State Partnership,   Program: Grants for State Humanities Councils,   Year Awarded: 2009

Building the Poets House Endowment

Recipient: Briccetti, Lee Ellen (New York, NY 10012 USA) in affiliation with Poets House, Inc.

Goal: Endowment to partially support a full-time librarian for expanded humanities services and programming in the new permanent home for Poets House.

Description: Poets House plans to augment its existing $225,000 endowment with $500,000 in new endowment funds over the next five years. Income from the Poets House endowment will help fund the salaries of additional humanities (library and programming) staff who will be hired during the first years of operations in the new permanent home for Poets House, which is now under construction in Lower Manhattan. In its larger space in a new location, Poets House will increase access to its collections and expand its services, reach a broader audience and enhance the scope of its humanities programming. Endowment building has been planned by Poets House as an integral part of its "Campaign for Poets House" to secure all necessary funds for construction, working capital reserves, and long-term endowment.

Grant: 193754 / CH-50654-09,   Division: Challenge Grants,   Program: Challenge Grants,   Year Awarded: 2009

"The Campus Literary Discussion Series, Unifying the College Through Literature" project

Recipient: Winn, Ryan (Keshena, WI 54135 USA) in affiliation with College of Menominee Nation (Keshena, WI 54135-1179 USA)

Goal: A project to create a campus-wide literary discussion series.

Description: The Campus Literary Discussion Series, Unifying the College Through Literature Project

Grant: 196906 / AD-50023-09,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Humanities Initiatives for Faculty: TCUs,   Year Awarded: 2009

Magazine Modernism

Recipient: Latham, Sean (Tulsa, OK 74103-9700 USA) in affiliation with University of Tulsa (Tulsa, OK 74104 USA)

Goal: A four-week college and university teacher seminar for sixteen participants to explore the "golden age of magazines."

Description: The rise of the "new modernist studies" has sparked a flourishing scholarly and pedagogical interest in the cultural and aesthetic complexities of the early twentieth century. This "return to the scene of modern" has been crucially fueled by the simultaneous rise of periodical studies--an interdisciplinary and international attempt to explore the so-called "golden age of magazines," when new technologies and the rise of mass culture created a radical transformation in print culture. This seminar will offer participants a chance to engage with these interlocking fields of study by exploring archival materials and experimenting with cutting-edge tools for digital research. Archival exploration and digital workshops will be coupled with lectures delivered by leading scholars, providing participants a unique opportunity to explore the vibrant print cultures that emerged in the early twentieth century as part of a global and densely interconnected modernity.

Grant: 197347 / FS-50213-09,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Seminars for College Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2009

Humanities Research Infrastructure and Tools (HRIT): An Environment for Collaborative Textual Scholarship

Recipient: Shillingsburg, Peter L (Chicago, IL 60660 USA) in affiliation with Loyola University, Chicago (Chicago, IL 60611 USA)

Goal: Development of a collaborative online editing environment and tagging tool for producing electronic scholarly editions and text archives.

Description: Our object is, first, to identify best practice and define principles for electronic infrastructure for scholarly collaboration on primary literary and historical texts and for tools to enhance humanities scholarship. Second it is to build an open-source, collaborative, robust HRIT (Humanities Research Infrastructure and Tools) environment, in which to aggregate, link or cross-reference, edit, and share vetted primary documentary texts--along with their scholarly enhancements, analyses, and commentaries, in the form of markup, annotation, keyword tagging, linking, etc. And third, it is to create a Collaborative Tagging Tool (CaTT) that responds to said principles and infrastructure, enabling ordinary humanist scholars to create sophisticated scholarly electronic editions and archives in a collaborative environment. The result will be an ecology consisting of the infrastructure, an initial on-line tool, and a model vetting system.

Grant: 197751 / HD-50782-09,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Program: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants,   Year Awarded: 2009

The Sapheos Project: Transparency in Multi-image Collation, Analysis, and Representation

Recipient: Cream, Randall (Columbia, SC 29208 USA) in affiliation with University of South Carolina Research Foundation

Goal: Development of an online collation tool to allow for analysis and display of multiple page images along with software that identifies and links to specific points, letters, words, and images on the page.

Description: Our proposal for a Level II Start-Up grant for the Sapheos project seeks to develop innovative software to analyze, represent, and collate images in the humanities. While there are an array of text based digital projects underway that offer increasingly powerful tools for marking up, analyzing, and visualizing textual data in the humanities, image-based analysis has not received similar attention. From the project's inception, our aim has been to develop extensible open-source software that researchers across the humanities can use to link image to text in a discrete, granular fashion. Working with the NEH-funded Spenser Project, a multi-institutional Scholarly Editions project, we're developing two significant image-based software tools: (a) digital collation software that builds on and extends the work of optical methods, using transparency to "stack" and collate multiple copies, and (b) software for automatically sectioning and identifying (x,y) coordinate pairs for images.

Grant: 197849 / HD-50880-09,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Program: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants,   Year Awarded: 2009

Electronic Literature Directory: Collaborative Knowledge Management for the Literary Humanities

Recipient: Tabbi, Joseph (Chicago, IL 60607-7120 USA) in affiliation with Electronic Literature Organization (College Park, MD 20742 USA)

Goal: The development of a descriptive metadata vocabulary and the redesign of the Electronic Literature Directory website using open source content management and social networking software.

Description: In 1999, the Electronic Literature Organization developed a comprehensive directory of electronic literature that has guided readers to thousands of works of electronic literature and helped to develop an international humanities discipline. But as the nature and complexion of the field has changed and matured, the directory has become both technologically and conceptually outdated. A decade after the release of the first incarnation of the directory, the authors and scholars at the Electronic Literature Organization will rebuild the Electronic Literature Directory using an open source, collaborative knowledge management platform and Semantic Web-based tools. The completely reconstructed directory will make records of works of electronic literature more accessible to the public, a team of editors will develop a metatag vocabulary and revise descriptions of listed works, and the finished product will show works in the context of critical scholarship about electronic literature.

Grant: 197747 / HD-50778-09,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Program: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants,   Year Awarded: 2009

Confronting Mortality

Recipient: Busch, Austin (Brockport, NY 14420 USA) in affiliation with SUNY Research Foundation, Brockport

Goal: The development of a junior-level undergraduate course dealing with issues of death, the afterlife, mourning, suicide, and the impact of biomedical advances on understanding death.

Description: ???Confronting Mortality??? encourages students to consider the implications of human mortality through an ambitious program of reading that addresses the following issues: the plausibility of life after death, public and private mourning and consolation, the ethical permissibility of suicide, and the effects of biomedical advances on our understanding of death. Readings include Greco-Roman poetic and philosophical texts; religious and philosophical writings from the Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions; pre-20th century European philosophy; 19th century Russian and British narrative and lyric; and brief forays into 20th century philosophical and ethical writings. This junior level English course will also be proposed as a Contemporary Issues course meeting General Education requirements. The course will be offered twice during the project period of July 1, 2009 - December 31, 2010.

Grant: 196646 / AQ-50021-09,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Enduring Questions: Pilot Course Grants,   Year Awarded: 2009

"Say Something Wonderful: Teaching the Pleasures of Poetry"

Recipient: Selinger, Eric (Chicago, IL 60614 USA) in affiliation with DePaul University (Chicago, IL 60604 USA)

Goal: A four-week summer seminar for fifteen K-12 teachers to investigate poetry from multiple perspectives.

Description: "Say Something Wonderful: Teaching the Pleasures of Poetry," a four-week summer seminar hosted by DePaul University, invites K-12 teachers to investigate the pleasures of poetry from a variety of critical, historical, and aesthetic perspectives. The primary texts include classical, English, and American works, with an emphasis on poems that can be taught at multiple grade levels; teachers will deepen and broaden their knowledge of poems, poets, and poetic forms, and they will hone their skills as close readers and oral performers of poetry. Building on successes in 2003, 2005, and 2007, the seminar will again equip its participants to link, in their own classes, instruction and delight.

Grant: 191941 / FV-50182-08,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Seminars for School Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2008

Literature and the Law: Disciplinary Perspectives and Faculty Development

Recipient: Pease, Allison (New York, NY 10019 USA) in affiliation with CUNY Research Foundation, John Jay College (New York City, NY 10019 USA)

Goal: To Support: A year-long faculty development seminar series in the field of law and literature.

Description: The English Department of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, seeks to fund a year-long faculty seminar and series of lectures in literature and the law. The seminar will host six internationally recognized scholars in the field of law and literature who will deliver public lectures and run seminars for English Department faculty. These seminars will ensure the Department's new English major with an optional concentration in Literature and the Law has a strong intellectual foundation. Grant funds will be used to pay for travel expenses and honoraria of visiting scholars as well as small stipends and book allowances for faculty participants.

Grant: 189553 / AC-50045-08,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Humanities Initiatives for Faculty: HSIs,   Year Awarded: 2008

Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use

Recipient: Kirschenbaum, Matthew Gary (College Park, MD 20742 USA) in affiliation with University of Maryland, College Park (College Park, MD 20742-5141 USA)

Goal: A series of planning meetings and site visits aimed at developing archival tools and best practices for preserving born-digital documents produced by contemporary authors.

Description: Digital Humanities Initiative Level 1 Start Up funding is requested to support a series of site visits and planning meetings among personnel working with the born-digital components of three significant collections of literary material: the Salman Rushdie papers at Emory University's Woodruff Library, the Michael Joyce Papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Deena Larsen Collection at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. The meetings and site visits will facilitate the preparation of a larger collaborative grant proposal among the three institutions aimed at developing archival tools and best practices for preserving and curating the born-digital documents and records of contemporary authorship. Initial findings will be made available through a jointly authored and publicly distributed online white paper, as well as conference presentations at relevant venues.

Grant: 191254 / HD-50346-08,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Program: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants,   Year Awarded: 2008

Cataloging and Creating Digital Access to American and British Children's Literature, 1890 to 1910

Recipient: Smith, Rita J (Gainesville, FL 32611 USA) in affiliation with University of Florida

Goal: Cataloging 7,500 American and British titles in children's literature published between 1890 and 1910 and providing online access to 2,500 titles containing color illustrations.

Description: This two year project (July 2007-June 2009) will catalogue and digitize titles from the University of Florida's Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature published from 1890 through 1910. The Baldwin Library is one of the largest collections of English-language children's literature in the world. It contains approximately 100,000 volumes published in Great Britain and the United States between 1656 and 2006. Of the 7,500 books to be cataloged in the selected date range, about half will be original records, indicating that the Baldwin Library holds the only known copy. The digitization portion will make over 2,500 of these historical books available to a wide audience of researchers, students, teachers, home schoolers and other people interested in children's literature via the internet.

Grant: 184645 / PC-50042-07,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Grants to Preserve & Create Access to Humanities Collections,   Year Awarded: 2007

Mass Deacidification and Cataloging of Serials in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library

Recipient: Nelson, Naomi L (Atlanta, GA 30322-2870 USA) in affiliation with Emory University (Atlanta, GA 30322 USA)

Goal: The mass deacidification of 6,500 volumes, the cataloging of 4,000 volumes, and the rehousing of embrittled materials from the Danowski Poetry Library.

Description: The Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) of Emory University seeks $280,368 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a two year $467,539 project to deacidify and catalog poetry periodicals recently acquired by Emory University as a part of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library. Specifically, Emory seeks support to catalog 4,000 titles, deacidify selected titles (circa 6,500 volumes), and to house limp bindings (i.e. paperbacks) in custom archival boxes.

Grant: 184688 / PC-50085-07,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Grants to Preserve & Create Access to Humanities Collections,   Year Awarded: 2007

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

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

Goal: A three-week seminar for fifteen school teachers on the patterns of poetry and how they mirror the patterns of life.

Description: High school teachers of Literature and related fields are invited to Harvard University for a three-week poetry seminar with Helen Vendler. Our aim in the seminar is to deepen and enlarge our sense of how poetry might be discussed. One of our objectives will be to see how poetry mediates on life, and why it has to have pattern in order to accomplish its task of reflecting life. Reading will range from the Shakespearean sonnet to contemporary American poetry. Weekday excursions to Harvard's libraries and museums, Longfellow House, and Boston's Freedom Trail, and weekend trips to Concord (Thoreau's Walden Pond) and Amherst (The Dickinson Homestead) will augment classroom study.

Grant: 187041 / FV-50155-07,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Seminars for School Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2007

How to Teach a Poem (and Learn from One, Too)

Recipient: Selinger, Eric (Chicago, IL 60614 USA) in affiliation with DePaul University (Chicago, IL 60604 USA)

Goal: An eleven-month Faculty Humanities Workshop aimed at providing twenty Chicago-area middle school teachers with the knowledge and expertise to teach poetry more effectively in their classrooms.

Description: "How to Teach a Poem (and Learn from One, Too)" is an eleven-month Faculty Humanities Workshop for Chicago middle school teachers hosted by DePaul University and the Poetry Foundation. Working with English professors, master teachers, and poets, teachers will deepen and broaden their knowledge of poetry, learn current best practices in poetry instruction, and become more confident, well-informed readers in their own right, able to make good use of poetry across their existing curricula. ?How to Teach a Poem? builds upon the success of "Poetry Out Loud," the National Recitation Contest for high school students, sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, and "Say Something Wonderful: Teaching the Pleasures of Poetry," an NEH summer seminar for schoolteachers at DePaul (2003, 2005, 2007). It brings the resources and innovations of these programs to a new audience of students and teachers in grade 6-8, and builds a much-needed, on-going community of instruction and support.

Grant: 185039 / EZ-50204-07,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Faculty Humanities Workshops,   Year Awarded: 2007

Virgin Islands Voices: A Spoken Word Celebration

Recipient: Mill-Bocachica, Wanda (St. Thomas, VI 00802 USA) in affiliation with Virgin Islands Humanities Council (St. Thomas, VI 00802-6746 USA)

Goal: To support "Virgin Islands Voices: A Spoken Word Celebration," a series of activities in collaboration with several partners to conduct writing and poetry workshops, to produce a humanities festival focused on the spoken word, and to organize a book festival to highlight both the oral and written traditions of the Virgin Islands.

Description: The Virgin Islands spoken word tradition manifests itself and is preserved through various literary forms such as cariso, calypso, and poetry. These genres, liberated through performance, will resonate with the hearts and minds of adults, college-aged and K-12 students. The Virgin Islands Humanities Council requests $51,280 to present “Virgin Islands Voices: A Spoken Word Celebration,” through spoken word workshops, a poetry contest, a book festival, and a lecture.

Grant: 189183 / BC-50382-07,   Division: Federal/State Partnership,   Program: Grants for State Humanities Councils,   Year Awarded: 2007

Digital Tools

Recipient: Reside, Douglas Larue (College Park, MD 20742 USA) in affiliation with University of Maryland, College Park (College Park, MD 20742-5141 USA)

Goal: Development of the Ajax XML Encoder (AXE), a web-based tool for tagging text, video, audio, and image files with XML metadata in a web-based environment.

Description: The Ajax XML Encoder (AXE), developed at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), will revolutionize the production of electronic editions and digital archives. AXE is a web-based tool for "tagging" text, video, audio, and image files with XML metadata, a process that is now a necessary but onerous first step in the production of digital material. With an intutitive, web-based interface, AXE will make this process more efficient and accurate. It will also facilitate collaboration in the digital humanities by permitting multiple scholars to work on the same document or archive at the same time from various locations, and will track all work so that variant versions can be collated and all versions can be archived. The open source AXE will provide a free and better alternative for tagging all kinds of digital content in a web-based and multi-medial digital environment.

Grant: 187444 / HD-50224-07,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Program: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants,   Year Awarded: 2007

Branching Out: Poetry for the 21st Century, Series Two

Recipient: Briccetti, Lee Ellen (New York, NY 10012 USA) in affiliation with Poets House, Inc.

Goal: Implementation of a two-year series of lectures by poet/scholars in public libraries in eight cities, a training institute for participating librarians, bus posters, and a companion website exploring poetry.

Description: Poets House and the Poetry Society of America request renewed support for Branching Out: Poetry for the 21st Century. As in the successful NEH-funded pilot project, leading poet/scholars will deliver accessible, engaging lectures in public libraries, challenging broad-based general audiences to deepen their interest in and understanding of poetry. The coordinated implementation of Poetry in Motion, the popular PSA initiative to place poems on public transport, will stir interest in poetry. Poets House, through Poetry in The Branches, its award-winning model for poetry services in public libraries, will mentor and support the libraries to amplify and sustain that interest. A companion Web site further extends the project's impact. The proposed project will run from September 2006 through August 2008. Eight cities will participate: Fresno (CA), Hartford (CT), Jacksonville (FL), Kansas City (MO), Little Rock (AR), Milwaukee (WI), New Orleans (LA) & Salt Lake City (UT).

Grant: 181852 / LI-50068-06,   Division: Public Programs,   Program: Libraries Implementation,   Year Awarded: 2006

Writing of Robert Frost; The Collected Letters

Recipient: Faggen, Robert (Claremont, CA 91711 USA) in affiliation with Claremont McKenna College

Goal: An edition of the collected letters of Robert Frost. (24 months)

Description: No comprehensive scholarly edition of Robert Frost's letters exist. We will rectify this omission by the publication of "The Collected Letters of Robert Frost," edited by Robert Faggen, Mark Richardson and Donald Sheehey to be published by Harvard University Press as part of a multi-volume "Writing of Robert Frost." In his correspondence, Frost often reveals much of his thinking about poetics, politics and religion, as well as aspects of his personal and family life. The collected letters and annotation will bring into full view many aspects of the poet's life currently unavailable to scholars, students, biographers and general readers.

Grant: 181617 / RQ-50201-06,   Division: Research Programs,   Program: Scholarly Editions,   Year Awarded: 2006

Say Something Wonderful: Teaching the Pleasures of Poetry

Recipient: Selinger, Eric (Chicago, IL 60614 USA) in affiliation with DePaul University (Chicago, IL 60604 USA)

Goal: A five-week summer seminar for fifteen school teachers on the joys and challenges of teaching poetry.

Description: "Say Something Wonderful: On Pleasure, Poetics, and Poetry" is a five-week summer seminar for schoolteachers which explores the pleasures of poetry from a variety of critical, historical, and aesthetic perspectives. As they discuss the relationships between reading and eros, knowledge and snob-value, pleasure and difficulty, teachers will deepen and broaden their knowledge of poems, poets, and poetic forms from a variety of periods and cultures, and they will hone their own skills as close readers and oral performers of poetry. Building on its successes in 2003 and 2005, this seminar will again equip its participants to link, in their own classes, instruction and delight.

Grant: 182147 / FV-50106-06,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Seminars for School Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2006