- $100,800
The Digital Montpelier Project
Recipient: Martin, Worthy N (Charlottesville, VA 22904-4115 USA) in affiliation with University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA 22903 USA)
Description: The Digital Montpelier Project will create the first online scholarly resource for the study of Montpelier, James Madison's family estate. Through a collaboration of Gardiner Hallock, a leading architectural historian of Montpelier, and the University of Virginia IATH, one of the world's leading digital humanities centers, the Digital Montpelier Project will use the Internet to make freely available a rich database of materials collected and created from 2003 to 2008 during an effort to completely restore the Montpelier mansion to the condition that James and Dolley Madison knew in the 1820s. The records in the Digital Montpelier Project database will be linked to features of highly realistic and accurate 3D digital models of the site created by IATH for use at the new Visitor Center at Montpelier. The resulting digital information system will offer users the chance to take "virtual fieldtrips" to Montpelier where they can visualize the evolution of the site in a new way.
Grant: 194788 / RF-50006-09, Category: American History, Division: Research Programs, Year Awarded: 2009 - $100,800
Statues of the Late Antique Roman Forum: Historical Memory and Digital Reconstruction
Recipient: Favro, Diane G (Los Angeles, CA 90095-1467 USA) in affiliation with University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA 90024 USA)
Description: The proposed digital project explores the issues of representing late antique memory practices by supplementing the ongoing projects at UCLA's Experiential Technologies Center, chiefly the "Digital Roman Forum." In its current form, UCLA's computer model of the Forum applies stringent archeological criteria to architectural representation. Statues and other monuments do not yet appear in the digital reconstruction, because no data indicates either the scale or the orientation of the original works. The first phase of the project will be to map the late antique statue plinths into their original display spots so as to reveal the topographical significance of their inscriptions. The second phase will be to create animated videos that focus on the location of monuments, their site lines, and their proximity to processional routes to explore how the monuments framed perceptions of architecture and topography and enriched the meanings of downtown Rome's open-air displays.
Grant: 194790 / RF-50008-09, Category: Architecture, Division: Research Programs, Year Awarded: 2009 - $50,400
Sources of Enlightenment: Identifying Borrowed Passages in the Encyclopedie using Sequence Alignment.
Recipient: Morrissey, Robert (Chicago, IL 60637 USA) in affiliation with University of Chicago
Description: Stanford University professor Dan Edelstein and the ARTFL project of the University of Chicago propose to bring the power of machine-assisted learning and text-mining techniques to bear on the difficult question of the Encyclopedie's relationship to past thinkers. Data-mining techniques will allow us to focus on all forms of citation, allusion, borrowing, and outright plagiarism in the Encyclopedie, through which we hope to reach a more thorough and quantified understanding of the status and state of knowledge in the Age of Enlightenment while at the same time reflecting on the use and development of data-mining techniques in the Humanities.
Grant: 194785 / RF-50003-09, Category: French Language, Division: Research Programs, Year Awarded: 2009 - Endowment for the humanities grants to program Fellowships at Digital Humanities Centers; items 1-3 of 3 with a total funding of $252,000.