Eternal Flames: Living Memories of the Pacific War

Recipient: Christy, Alan Scott (Santa Cruz, CA 95064 USA) in affiliation with University of California, Santa Cruz

Goal: Development and testing of a prototype multilingual website platform for the gathering and study of memories of the Pacific theater of World War II incorporating perspectives of survivors from the United States and Asia.

Description: Funds requested for an innovative website that provides a living archive of Pacific War memories in multiple languages. Out prototype provides a social media and multi-lingual database structure enabling communication between researchers, war survivors, and the general public in English, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. This site facilitates research on the circulation of war memories throughout the Pacific region and across linguistic boundaries. Online participants will transcribe, translate, tag, and add context to user-contributed archive posts. The architecture makes transparent the negotiations and contested categories of memory-in-translation. In this online environment, users can confront the cultural embeddedness of language, and researchers can trace the transformations of memory as it travels across cultural boundaries. As an open source tool, our online platform can be applied in various contexts to address the language barrier issue that is so central to the humanities.

Grant: 196216 / HD-50594-09,   Category: Far Eastern History,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Year Awarded: 2009

Image to XML (img2xml)

Recipient: Smith, Natalia N (Chapel Hill, NC 27599-1350 USA) in affiliation with University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC 27599 USA)

Goal: Development an open-source transcription and annotation tool using Scalable Vector Graphics for historical and literary archival manuscripts, using materials from the Carolina Digital Library and Archives as a test bed.

Description: The img2xml ("image to XML") project plans to develop a 100% Open Source set of components for the linking and display of manuscript images, transcriptions and annotations. The linking will be based on a Scaleable Vector Graphics (SVG) tracing of the text in the manuscript image, which will then be analyzed and displayed via a web browser interface using tools developed for web-based map viewing. This means that links can be made to and from a graphical representation of the actual text on the page rather than a box drawn around it. The proposed approach will enable linking between text and image in a more fine-grained way than any annotation tool currently in existence. This work represents a fundamentally different way of connecting manuscript images with transcriptions and annotations.

Grant: 196223 / HD-50601-09,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Digital Humanities,   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,   Category: Literature,   Division: Digital Humanities,   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,   Year Awarded: 2009

Main Street, Carolina: Uncovering and Reclaiming the History of Downtown

Recipient: Smith, Natalia N (Chapel Hill, NC 27599-1350 USA) in affiliation with University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC 27599 USA)

Goal: Development of an open-source framework for accessing the UNC Library's collection of original Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, indexed to a wide range of primary source material.

Description: Main Street, Carolina is a web-based digital history resource that would allow local libraries, schools, museums, preservation and local history societies, and other community organizations across the state to preserve, document, interpret, and share the history of the places that have given each town its character and identity over the past century. This project builds on our nationally recognized digital humanities project, Going to the Show, which has developed cutting-edge techniques for representing local cultural and social history through the use of the North Carolina Collection's unparalleled archive of local maps, photographs, and historic newspapers. Main Street, Carolina will share the benefits of this historical research and technological expertise with local organizations throughout the state by providing them with a flexible, user-friendly digital platform on which they can add a wide variety of "local" data.

Grant: 197778 / HD-50809-09,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Year Awarded: 2009

The Open Modern Art Collection of Iraq: Web tools for Documenting, Sharing and Enriching Iraqi Artistic Expressions

Recipient: Shabout, Nada (Denton, TX 76203 USA) in affiliation with Alexandria Archive Institute (San Francisco, CA 94127 USA)

Goal: The creation of a database with community input to reassemble the partially dispersed and lost collections of the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad.

Description: The Open Modern Art Collection of Iraq (OMACI) project will prototype a robust, participatory content-management system to trace, share and enable community enrichment of the modern art heritage of Iraq. The project represents a collaborative effort of the University of North Texas, the Alexandria Archive Institute, and the School of Information at UC Berkeley. OMACI will create a virtual gallery with images of works of art, many of them now lost, from the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad, linked to publications, exhibition catalogs, and personal documentation. Technologies deployed in this project focus on ease of use and localization, extensive and inclusive documentation, community contribution, and syndication of content elsewhere on the web. The success of the system lies in its ability to reach a wide and participatory audience across the globe, offering users the ability to document, discuss, explore, and enrich Iraqi artistic expressions and experiences.

Grant: 197790 / HD-50821-09,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Year Awarded: 2009

centerNet: Cyberinfrastructure for the Digital Humanities

Recipient: Walter, Katherine L (Lincoln, NE 68588-4100 USA) in affiliation with University of Nebraska, Lincoln (Lincoln, NE 68588 USA)

Goal: A series of meetings, concluding with an international summit, to plan for future activities of an international network of digital humanities centers.

Description: centerNet, a nascent international network of digital humanities centers, requests an NEH Digital Humanities Start Up Grant, Level II, to build a technical infrastructure and institutional framework that will enable it to play a vital role in developing both national and international cyberinfrastructure and become a stable, self-supporting organization. Included in the plan are a one-time world wide summit of digital humanities centers and funders to discuss possible emergent programs. We are aware that our application, which involves innovation in the form of cyberinfrastructure, will be different in kind from most other applications in this funding category, which will focus on individual tools or projects. But many of these very tools and projects themselves are dependent on the support of digital humanities centers, which have been described in the report of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Commission on Cyberinfrastructure as 'crucial seedbeds of innovation.'

Grant: 197816 / HD-50847-09,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Year Awarded: 2009

Manos Teatrales: Cyber-Paleography and a Virtual World of Spanish Golden Age Theater

Recipient: Greer, Margaret R (Durham, NC 27708 USA) in affiliation with Duke University

Goal: The development of handwriting identification software using archival materials from Spanish Golden Age theater.

Description: In the Manos Teatrales (Theatrical Hands) project, literary scholars, historians and computer scientists will develop manual and automatic methods for analyzing rich manuscripts collections and their societies, using the treasure-trove of Spanish Golden Age theater and related archival records as a case study. Our cyber-paleography effort will build a live, layered virtual world on the web, open to librarians, scholars and students. A first layer will connect digitally restored images of manuscript pages to descriptions of the pen strokes on paper. Manual and automatic analysis of these descriptions will yield profiles of the writers' handwriting styles and enable semi-automatic inferences based on machine learning methods, about who wrote what and when. A second layer will connect sources to individual and collective histories of the theater community and help scholars understand it. A third layer will describe the techniques of cyber-paleography for both humanists and scientists.

Grant: 196200 / HD-50578-09,   Category: Spanish Literature,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Year Awarded: 2009

A DIGITAL PATHFINDER FOR HISTORIC SITES

Recipient: Coleman, Ron (Poughkeepsie, NY 12601-1387 USA) in affiliation with Marist College (Poughkeepsie, NY 12601 USA)

Goal: Development of a hand-held GPS personal data assistant for tours of historic sites.

Description: The Digital Pathfinder for Historic Sites Project will develop a new model for tours at historic sites. It uses a hand-held GPS personal data assistant programmed with open source software to provide interactive digital maps, navigation, rich media, and other information about the site and its environment. The platform is cost-effective and flexible, allowing each visitor to select the path, duration, and depth of their tour. The start-up funds will focus on the Staatsburgh Estate, the largest of two Beaux Arts properties among the Great Estates of the Hudson River Valley. The mansion and grounds exemplify the elegant estates built by America's financial and industrial leaders during the Gilded Age, known as the American Renaissance, which lasted from 1876 to 1917. This period was marked by America's rapid economic growth and emergence as a world power. The template being developed will readily adapt to other great estates or any historic site or museum that interprets its grounds.

Grant: 197757 / HD-50788-09,   Category: American History,   Division: Digital Humanities,   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,   Category: Literature,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Year Awarded: 2009

Virtual Taxila: A Web-Accessible, Multi-User Virtual Environment (MUVE) of an Ancient Indian City

Recipient: Michon, Daniel (Claremont, CA 91711 USA) in affiliation with Claremont McKenna College

Goal: Reconstruction of the ancient city of Taxila (located in modern Pakistan) through computer modeling, including animated and interactive "inhabitants," with public access via the Internet.

Description: The Virtual Taxila project will develop a web-accessible, 3D, immersive, multi-user virtual environment (MUVE), where visitors will engage in situated, participatory learning about ancient Indian culture. The project will focus on the archaeological site of Taxila, the ancient capital of western Punjab and now an UNESCO World Heritage site located in Pakistan. Taxila was inhabited c. 500 BCE to c. 700 CE, but the project will model the city as it stood at circa 1 CE. The model will include both the city's tangible heritage (the built environment and the physical artifacts) and its intangible heritage (the people and their rituals, commercial transactions, and work activities). Virtual Taxila will create a "situated" community of practice, where visitors will be immersed in the historical context about which they learn. By logging in online, visitors will be able to interact with computer controlled characters that will act as guides, providing them with an insider's experience.

Grant: 197735 / HD-50766-09,   Category: Archaeology,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Year Awarded: 2009

Red Land/Black Land: Teaching Ancient Egyptian History Through Game-Based Learning

Recipient: Watrall, Ethan C (East Lansing, MI 48824-1115 USA) in affiliation with Michigan State University (East Lansing, MI 48824 USA)

Goal: The development of a modification of the game Civilization IV that would allow students to explore ancient Egypt.

Description: This project will produce a robust Civilization IV mod (a modification to an existing game) allowing players to explore the society and history of Ancient Egypt. The project has three goals: 1) players will explore the process of social and historical change from the early Predynastic period to the end of the Third Intermediate Period (ca 4000 - 525 B.C.); 2)supplementary game content will help players explore the construction of historical knowledge-- how Egyptologists and archaeologists know what they do about ancient Egypt; 3) the mod will provide an accurate counterpoint to many mainstream commercial videogames that perpetuate pseudo-historical and pseudo-archaeological notions of ancient Egypt. This game-based learning approach will provide a far deeper, more experiential understanding of the subject than might be gained through more traditional means such as textbooks or lectures.

Grant: 196195 / HD-50573-09,   Category: Media-General,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Year Awarded: 2009

CAMP: The Collaborative Ajax-Based Modeling Platform

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 a prototype for open-source, collaborative three-dimensional modeling software to allow for the re-creation of historic buildings, using historic theaters as test cases.

Description: The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and the Theatre Department at the University of Maryland in College Park want to set up CAMP, a Collaborative, Ajax-Based, Modeling Platform. As the name suggests, this tool is an open source, collaborative, 3d modeler that will allow users with very little experience to generate a 3-dimensional model in their web browser which they can then allow other users to both view and edit. The tool will initially be used to construct an international database of pre-19th century theater buildings, but will be intentionally generic so that scholars interested in structures of any sort can easily port it into their own projects.

Grant: 196228 / HD-50606-09,   Category: Theater History and Criticism,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Year Awarded: 2009

(AI)2 Artificially Intelligent Artifact Interpreter

Recipient: Pershey, Edward J (Cleveland, OH 44106 USA) in affiliation with Western Reserve Historical Society

Goal: The development and evaluation of a prototype of a virtual museum docent employing Radio Frequency Identification tags and artificial intelligence for use in interactive history museum exhibitions.

Description: This project prototypes a virtual history museum docent to interpret historical artifacts to a general audience. Engaging visitors in exploring original artifacts is the key to successfully connecting them to human history. Traditionally artifacts have been presented in two ways. Either artifacts are displayed with graphic or media labels, providing a one-way avenue of information to the visitor, or a live docent interacts one-on-one with the visitor to explain and demonstrate the artifact. Using 21st-century computer technology, including RFID tags and AI software, this project will create an Artificially Intelligent Artifact Interpreter that will respond to visitors' handling of artifacts, prompting the visitor with questions and offering the visitor information about the physicality of the artifact itself and its broader historical interpretation. This prototype is intended to be used in an introductory area at the museum to engage visitors or as the introduction to a larger exhibit.

Grant: 197766 / HD-50797-09,   Category: Museum Studies or Historic Preservation,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Year Awarded: 2009

Digital Humanities Start Up Grant: Metadata Games -- An Open Source Electronic Game for Archival Data Systems

Recipient: Flanagan, Mary (Hanover, NH 03755 USA) in affiliation with Dartmouth College

Goal: Development of an open source computer game for the Internet that would supplement library metadata on holdings in collections with descriptions provided by the public.

Description: Our team proposes a Level II startup project to create a working example of an open source internet-based computer game system for augmenting access to archival records. This game software system, Metadata Games, and the funding for the Start Up will allow us to design and build a prototype of Metadata Games for the Rauner Library at Dartmouth College. This pilot is seen as seed for a larger open source initiative that would fully allow for the deployment of the full Open Source Electronic Game for Archival Data Systems at other institutions. Anticipated outcomes of this startup grant will be a technically sound, scalable model for the creation of Metadata Games on an open source platform that would also support later visualization efforts compatible with archival and library standards. How can the strengths of current digital tools enhance the environment and the collection of the archive? Can the use of player choice enhance access to the archive?

Grant: 197818 / HD-50849-09,   Category: Archival Management and Conservation,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Year Awarded: 2009

Semantically Rich Tools for Text Exploration

Recipient: Ashton, Andrew (Providence, RI 02912 USA) in affiliation with Brown University

Goal: Creation of a suite of software tools designed to allow humanists to analyze large collections or archives of TEI encoded texts in the new Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research (SEASR).

Description: Literary scholarship is poised to benefit immensely from the emerging modular software frameworks that support deep and finely grained investigations of digital texts. Humanities research centers, such as the Brown University Women Writers Project, have invested substantially in enriching bodies of literary texts with semantic and structural information, using XML formats such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Recent innovations in scholarly software design offer opportunities to exploit the semantic depth of TEI collections by creating new tools for textual analysis and collaboration. To this end, the Brown University Scholarly Technology Group (STG) and the Brown University Women Writers Project (WWP) propose a new effort to create a prototype suite of software tools to explore TEI encoded texts in the new Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research (SEASR).

Grant: 197791 / HD-50822-09,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Year Awarded: 2009

The Journalism History Hub: Developing a Research-based Interdisciplinary Social Network and Meta-Conference

Recipient: King, Elliott (Baltimore, MD 21210-2699 USA) in affiliation with Loyola College in Maryland (Baltimore, MD 21210 USA)

Goal: The development of a social network and repository system, called the Journalism History Hub, to support the field of history of journalism and to serve as a model for communities from other interdisciplinary fields.

Description: A Level II Digital Humanities Start-up grant, the Journalism History Hub will use Web 2.0 technology to support, enhance and provide an ongoing technological framework for scholarly communication and collaboration. Participants will have access to preprints and postprints of conference papers and abstracts, scholarly articles, and conference programs, with the added ability to comment on archived research and the opportunity to identify and collaborate with scholars working on similar issues across different disciplines in innovative ways. The grant will provide for planning, developing a prototype, initially populating, and soliciting participation in the Hub. Ultimately, the Hub proposes to "mash-up" social networking and content repository technology in conjunction with existing interdisciplinary scholarly communities who meet at specialized conferences.

Grant: 197792 / HD-50823-09,   Category: Journalism,   Division: Digital Humanities,   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,   Category: Literature,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Year Awarded: 2009

Digital Mappaemundi: A Resource for the Study of Medieval Maps and Geographic Texts

Recipient: Foys, Martin Kennedy (Madison, NJ 07940 USA) in affiliation with Drew University

Goal: An extensible, open-source editing toolset that would allow scholars to edit networks of text and image data, using medieval "maps of the world" as the development source material.

Description: Digital Mappaemundi (DM) is designed to enable scholars to edit networks of text and image data, and users to search within and link between these documents. Our data are medieval "maps of the world" and their geographical source texts. These transdisciplinary, transmedia works provide a perfect basis for development of an extensible, open source tool useful for other humanities projects. DM provides new interactions within maps and texts through an interface in which these documents can be examined individually and relationally, i.e., as a database of documents searchable for points of origin, correlation and difference. Users search across edited items for specific details, and results take users to exact spots on maps and in literature, and create cross-referenced lists of comparable material across items searched. DM develops extensible markup language (XML) tags to easily edit data to points in images and texts, so all documents can be linked through shared content.

Grant: 196196 / HD-50574-09,   Category: Interdisciplinary,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Year Awarded: 2009

Neatline: Facilitating Geospatial and Temporal Interpretation of Archival Collections

Recipient: Nowviskie, Bethany (Charlottesville, VA 22904-4129 USA) in affiliation with University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA 22903 USA)

Goal: Creation of an open source tool that integrates timelines and maps to literary and historical materials in archival collections to strengthen the visualization of research.

Description: UVA Library seeks Level II Start-Up funding for the development of Neatline, a tool for the creation of interlinked timelines and maps as interpretive expressions of the literary or historical content of archival collections. Neatline promotes collaboration by libraries and cultural heritage institutions with scholarly end-users, who will build on standard EAD (Encoded Archival Description) metadata to produce geospatial and temporal visualizations of the textual content of cataloged letters and manuscripts. Neatline is a geo-temporal framework for fruitful interchange among scholars and the stewards of primary resources. It builds on robust, open standards and tools, including OpenLayers and SIMILE Timeline. The innovation of our approach lies in our dedication to providing a seamless, out-of-the-box experience for users without deep Web development skills. Neatline is a contribution to interpretive humanities scholarship in the visual vernacular.

Grant: 197738 / HD-50769-09,   Category: Geography,   Division: Digital Humanities,   Year Awarded: 2009