General Preservation Assessment

Recipient: Kelly, Thomas Michael (Amherst, MA 01002-5000 USA) in affiliation with Amherst College (Amherst, MA 01002 USA)

Goal: A general preservation assessment of the Archives and Special Collections (ASC) unit that will identify short, medium, and long-term preservation priorities. ASC holds rare books, literary manuscripts, documents, and artifacts that relate to Amherst College and its history.

Description: Archives & Special Collections (ASC) of the Frost Library of Amherst College seeks a $5,275 Preservation Assistance Grant from the NEH. Funding will be used to undertake a general preservation assessment of the collections by a consultant from the Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC). As a small facility without any professional conservators on staff, the Frost Library of Amherst College requires the experience and expertise of outside professionals to ensure the longevity of the materials in our care. Intellectual control and access to materials in ASC is very good. As our staff continues to improve access for scholars, students, and the public, the resulting increase in use makes the physical care and preservation of these materials an urgent priority. A conservation expert from NEDCC will be brought to the Amherst College campus in western Massachusetts to evaluate the state of the collections. She will produce a report that will serve as the basis for planning future pres

Grant: 199719 / PG-50975-10,   Category: Archival Management and Conservation,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Preservation Assistance Grants,   Year Awarded: 2010

Punishment, Politics, and Culture

Recipient: Sarat, Austin D (Amherst, MA 01002-5000 USA) in affiliation with Amherst College (Amherst, MA 01002 USA)

Goal: A five-week school teacher summer seminar for sixteen participants on punishment and its place in American culture.

Description: From The Gospel of Matthew to George Bernard Shaw and former Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, many have remarked that how a society punishes reveals its true character. Punishment then tells us who we are. The way a society punishes demonstrates its commitment to standards of judgment and justice, its distinctive views of blame and responsibility, its understandings of mercy and forgiveness, and its particular ways of responding to evil. The Seminar I am proposing, Punishment, Politics, and Culture, will examine the nature and limits of punishment and its place in the "American story." This Seminar will address questions about punishment that go to the heart of humanistic inquiry.

Grant: 197374 / FV-50201-09,   Category: Law and Jurisprudence,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Seminars for School Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2009

OCRonym: Entity Extraction and Retrieval for Scanned Books

Recipient: Allan, James (Amherst, MA 01003 USA) in affiliation with University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Goal: Development of an extraction and retrieval system for named entities-people, places, and organizations-located across a large number of documents in order to use the system to track Optical Character Recognition (OCR) error rates in an effort to improve "noisy" OCR.

Description: In the past five years, massive book-scanning projects have produced an explosion in the number of sources for the humanities, available on-line to the broadest possible audiences. Transcribing page images by optical character recognition makes many searching and browsing tasks practical for scholars. But even low OCR error rates compound into high probability of error in a given sentence, and the error rate is even higher for names. We propose to build a prototype system for information extraction and retrieval of noisy OCR. In particular, we will optimize the extraction and retrieval of names, which are highly informative features for detecting topics and events in documents. We will build statistical models of characters and words from scanned books to improve lexical coverage, and we will improve name categorization and disambiguation by linking document contexts to external sources such as Wikipedia. Our testbed comes from over one million scanned books from the Internet Archive.

Grant: 197763 / HD-50794-09,   Category: Library Science, Archival Management, and Conservation,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Program: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants,   Year Awarded: 2009

Outwitting History! The Campaign for the National Yiddish Book Center

Recipient: Sherman, Nancy (Amherst, MA 01002-3375 USA) in affiliation with National Yiddish Book Center

Goal: Endowment for preservation and international book rescue; public programming; a translation series; and faculty salaries and honoraria in a summer internship program for undergraduates.

Description: "Outwitting History! The Campaign for the National Yiddish Book Center" is a plan to continue the world's most successful effort at saving Yiddish literature and making Yiddish books in their original language or English translations widely accessible. This campaign will ensure, through means of endowment, that the Book Center's substantive and exceptional contributions to the humanities continue in perpetuity. The importance of Yiddish--the language spoken by more than three-quarters of the world's Jews for the thousand years preceding World War II--and the literature it produced, cannot be understated. The endowment yield generated by an NEH grant and subsequent match will provide urgently needed funds to sustain and expand humanities offerings at the National Yiddish Book Center, including preservation and international book rescue, public programs, visiting scholars to the college internship program, and translation services for the Book Center's English-language magazine.

Grant: 186196 / CH-50435-08,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Challenge Grants,   Program: Challenge Grants,   Year Awarded: 2008

Emily Dickinson: Person, Poetry and Place

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

Description: Unpublished in her lifetime, Emily Dickinson's poetry is considered among the finest in the English language. Her intriguing biography and the complexity of her poems have bred an intimacy and obsession with the poet and her work that is far more pronounced for Dickinson than for any other American poet. Her poetry is intimately connected with the social, cultural, and natural environment in which she grew up. Through a wide variety of experiences--study of poetry and letters, lectures, discussions, tours, and inquiry-based workshops--participants will gain a broader and deeper understanding of the poet that will translate tangibly into curriculum projects for their classrooms. By critically considering her biography, her work, and artifacts from her world, participants will emerge from the Workshop as more discerning scholars and better-informed educators. The Emily Dickinson Dickinson Museum will offer two one-week sessions (July 5-10 and 12-17) for 40 teachers each.

Grant: 192101 / BH-50290-08,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Landmarks of American History,   Year Awarded: 2008

Pride and Passion: The African American Baseball Experience - A Traveling Exhibition to Libraries

Recipient: Bunk, Brian D (Amherst, MA 01003 USA) in affiliation with University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Description: The 1,000-square-foot panel exhibition examines baseball as a reflection of race relations in the United States, asking how baseball has shaped, and been shaped by, national identity and culture. Photographs, broadsides, team rosters, scorecards, and other baseball memorabilia would tell the story of black participation in baseball, from the integrated amateur leagues of the nineteenth century and the creation of segregated Negro Leagues in the Jim Crow era to Jackie Robinson's now-famous breaking of the color barrier in 1947.

Grant: 192359 / LT-50025-08,   Category: American History,   Division: Public Programs,   Program: Small Grants to Libraries: Pride and Passion,   Year Awarded: 2008

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,   Category: American Literature,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Faculty Humanities Workshops,   Year Awarded: 2007

Punishment, Politics, and Culture

Recipient: Sarat, Austin D (Amherst, MA 01002-5000 USA) in affiliation with Amherst College (Amherst, MA 01002 USA)

Goal: A five-week seminar for fifteen school teachers on the role of punishment in law, politics, society, and culture.

Grant: 176868 / FV-50095-05,   Category: Law and Jurisprudence,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Seminars for School Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2005

Art, Literature, and Philosophy: Cuban Americans and American Culture

Recipient: Gracia, Jorge (Amherst, NY 14226 USA) in affiliation with SUNY Research Foundation, Buffalo (Amherst, NY 14228 USA)

Goal: A three-week seminar for fifteen college and university teachers on Cuban-American art, literature, and philosophy.

Grant: 176896 / FS-50076-05,   Category: History of Philosophy,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Seminars for College Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2005

German and European Studies in the U.S.: Changing World, Shifting Narratives

Recipient: Byg, Barton (Amherst, MA 01003 USA) in affiliation with University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Goal: A four-week summer institute for twenty-five college teachers to study changing German perspectives on the National Socialist era, Cold War divisions, and German reunification and to review the present state of German and European studies.

Grant: 171935 / EH-50023-04,   Category: Interdisciplinary,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Institutes for College and University Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2004

Latin American Philosophy: The Appropriation of European Thought in Latin America

Recipient: Gracia, Jorge (Amherst, NY 14226 USA) in affiliation with SUNY Research Foundation, Buffalo (Amherst, NY 14228 USA)

Goal: A four-week summer institute for twenty-five college teachers to explore Latin American adaptations of European philosophical traditions.

Grant: 171944 / EH-50032-04,   Category: History of Philosophy,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Institutes for College and University Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2004

Punishment, Politics and Culture

Recipient: Sarat, Austin D (Amherst, MA 01002-5000 USA) in affiliation with Amherst College (Amherst, MA 01002 USA)

Goal: A five-week summer seminar for school teachers on the role of punishment in law, politics, society, and culture.

Grant: 171850 / FV-50058-04,   Category: Law and Jurisprudence,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Seminars for School Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2004

Purchase Storage Materials

Recipient: Beman, Lynn S (Amherst, NY 14228-1599 USA) in affiliation with Amherst Museum (Amherst, NY USA)

Goal: The purchase of supplies for the rehousing of humanities collections, which document the history of Amherst and the Niagara Frontier region of New York.

Grant: 167445 / PA-50277-04,   Category: American History,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Program: Preservation/Access Projects,   Year Awarded: 2004

Punishment, Politics, and Culture

Recipient: Sarat, Austin D (Amherst, MA 01002-5000 USA) in affiliation with Amherst College (Amherst, MA 01002 USA)

Goal: A six-week seminar for 15 college teachers on the role of punishment in American law, politics, society, and culture.

Grant: 165499 / FS-50015-03,   Category: Law and Jurisprudence,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Seminars for College Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2003

Shakespeare, the Early Modern Theatre and Computational Stylistics

Recipient: Kinney, Arthur F (Amherst, MA 01004 USA) in affiliation with University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Amherst, MA 01003 USA)

Goal: a book-length study addressing problems central to Shakespearean studies such as attribution of works, chronology, and literary influences through computational stylistics. (24 months)

Description: The investigators aim to answer some central questions in Shakespearean drama through a collaborative study combining computational and traditional methods. They will explore areas not hitherto studied with computational means, such as the nature of collaboration in the drama writing of the period, and intertextual relations between source materials and plays, as well as long-standing questions in authorship and dating. Statistical and corpus-based results will be aligned with scholarly-critical evidence to provide findings of exceptional authority, and to establish a new paradigm for humanities research. The main outcome will be a jointly authored book.

Grant: 162865 / RZ-50044-03,   Category: Renaissance Studies,   Division: Research Programs,   Program: Collaborative Research,   Year Awarded: 2003

Voices from Three Centuries: Teaching the History of Women, Family, and Reform through Primary Sources

Recipient: Laurie, Bruce (Amherst, MA 01003-0000 USA) in affiliation with University of Massachusetts, Amherst (Amherst, MA 01003 USA)

Goal: A four-week institute for 15 middle and high school teachers on the philanthropic and reform endeavors of women in prominent New England families.

Grant: 95691 / ES-23186-02,   Category: American History,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Institutes for School Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2002

Punishment, Politics, and Culture

Recipient: Sarat, Austin D (Amherst, MA 01002-5000 USA) in affiliation with Amherst College (Amherst, MA 01002 USA)

Goal: A five-week seminar for school teachers on the role of punishment in law, politics, society, and culture.

Grant: 114437 / FV-22444-02,   Category: Law and Jurisprudence,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Seminars for School Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2002

Punishment, Politics, and Culture

Recipient: Sarat, Austin D (Amherst, MA 01002-5000 USA) in affiliation with Amherst College (Amherst, MA 01002 USA)

Grant: 151636 / FS-23252-01,   Category: Law and Jurisprudence,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Seminars for College Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2001

There She Is: A History of Miss America

Recipient: Ades, Lisa (Amherst, MA 01002 USA) in affiliation with Clio History (Charlotte, VT 05445 USA)

Goal: Production of a 90-minute film on the history of the Miss America Pageant, exploring changes in popular images of American women from the pageant's origins in the 19th century to the present.

Grant: 157036 / GN-26083-00,   Category: American History,   Division: Public Programs,   Program: Media, Humanities Projects in,   Year Awarded: 2000

Punishment, Politics and Culture

Recipient: Sarat, Austin D (Amherst, MA 01002-5000 USA) in affiliation with Amherst College (Amherst, MA 01002 USA)

Grant: 154723 / FV-22375-00,   Category: Law and Jurisprudence,   Division: Education Programs,   Program: Seminars for School Teachers,   Year Awarded: 2000