The Text Image Linking Environment (TILE)

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

Goal: A research and development project to create a Web-based image markup tool, the Text-Image Linking Environment, which scholars, curators, and editors can use to generate semi-automated links between images and text in digital archives.

Description: To create the next generation of the technical infrastructure supporting image-based editions and electronic archives of humanities content, we propose through the NEH Preservation and Access: Humanities Collections and Resources program (research and development focus) a new web-based image markup tool, the Text-Image Linking Environment (TILE). At the end of two years, we will have produced software interoperable with other popular tools (including both the popular Image Markup Tool and the Edition Production and Presentation Technology suite) and capable of producing TEI-compliant XML for linking image to text. We will also put the image linking features of the newest version of the Text Encoding Standard (TEI P5) through it's first rigorous, "real world" test, and, at the close of the project, expect to provide the TEI with a list of suggestions for improving the standard to make it more robust and effective. TILE will be developed and thoroughly tested with the assistance of ou

Grant: 194462 / PW-50369-09,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2009

InPhO @ Work: Providing Integrated Access to Philosophy

Recipient: Allen, Colin (Bloomington, IN 47405, IN USA) in affiliation with Indiana University, Bloomington (Bloomington, IN 47405 USA)

Goal: A research and development project to design an online ontology for the field of philosophy and to develop tools for managing metacontent in a dynamic reference work.

Description: The Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) project combines human expertise and software analysis to dynamically generate a computational ontology for the domain of philosophy. Our project uses a combination of statistically-generated suggestions and user feedback to create an ontology for the discipline of philosophy, which we plan to deploy in various applications including ontology-guided cross-referencing, search, and visualization for digital philosophy reference works. Our proposal fosters integrated access and interoperability between digital philosophy projects generically and specifically, including the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Noesis, Wikipedia, and the Philosophy Family Tree. Our goal is achieved through publication and regular updates of InPhO data, made available through publication of the ontology and an API to our database. Thus we provide a metadata backbone that other developers of open access digital philosophy projects may build upon.

Grant: 194494 / PW-50401-09,   Category: Philosophy,   Division: Preservation and Access,   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,   Category: Interdisciplinary,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2009

Dictionary of American Regional English [DARE]

Recipient: Hall, Joan H (Madison, WI 53706-1403 USA) in affiliation with University of Wisconsin, Madison (Madison, WI 53706 USA)

Goal: Lexicographical work to complete all entries of the "Dictionary of American Regional English" (DARE), which documents geographical differences in the vocabulary, pronunciation, and morphology of American English.

Description: The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) is a reference work describing regional and folk varieties of American English. Based on a large body of oral data collected in all fifty states between 1965 and 1970, it also draws on thousands of written and electronic sources covering the colonial period to the present time. A unique feature of DARE is its use of computer-generated maps to show distributions of regional terms. Volumes I (A to C), II (D to H), III (I to O), and IV (P to Sk), published by Harvard University Press in 1985, 1991, 1996, and 2002, respectively, have been highly acclaimed by scholars and public alike. Volume V (Sl to Z) will appear in 2010, with a supplementary volume of data and an electronic edition to follow. DARE's materials will remain available for scholars both in electronic form and through the maintenance of an archive of research and reference materials.

Grant: 194408 / PW-50315-09,   Category: English,   Division: Preservation and Access,   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,   Category: Interdisciplinary,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2009

Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings

Recipient: Seubert, David (Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9010 USA) in affiliation with University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA)

Goal: This project will add 30,000 additional entries to the comprehensive Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings (1900-1950), which is a searchable electronic database freely available on the Internet.

Description: The Encyclopedic Discography of Victor Recordings (EDVR) is a comprehensive online resource that documents both the daily recording activities and all 78-rpm disc releases of the largest record company in the U.S., Victor Records, from 1900 to 1950. It details more than 165,000 recording sessions produced by the company, including information about more than 300,000 "takes" and over 90,000 works recorded with the participation of 29,000 performers. The EDVR database is the basis of the most comprehensive discographic resource yet available over the internet, with recording data on 40,000 sessions through 1920 to be available online at the completion of the 2007-09 grant cycle and an additional 30,000 sessions from the 1920s by mid-2011. The recorded content includes music of all types--classical, popular, and ethnic--as well as radio programs, motion picture soundtracks, drama, poetry, instruction, and other genres of recorded sound.

Grant: 194540 / PW-50447-09,   Category: Music History and Criticism,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2009

Access to New-York Historical Society's Pamphlet Collection, Phase Two

Recipient: Raine, Henry F (New York, NY 10024 USA) in affiliation with New-York Historical Society

Goal: The final phase of a four-year project to catalog and preserve 36,000 American pamphlets, including speeches, political tracts, annual reports, biographical sketches, catalogs, and sermons dating from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Description: The New-York Historical Society (N-YHS) seeks funding for the second half of a four-year project to catalog and conserve a collection of approximately 36,000 American pamphlets published during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. The N-YHS library pamphlet collection, which includes political tracts, annual reports, biographical sketches, catalogs, sermons, and scientific works, illuminates the cultural, economic, political, religious, social, and scientific history of the United States. It contains more than 9,000 items cataloged nowhere else, and is the last sizeable printed collection at the N-YHS that is unknown and inaccessible to researchers. This second phase of the project will build upon records found in the WorldCat union catalog, and it will create original cataloging records for items cataloged nowhere else, resulting in the cataloging of 18,000 items, the remaining half of the collection. It will also conserve approximately 9,000 items.

Grant: 194551 / PW-50458-09,   Category: American History,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2009

The Audible Strauss: Preserving and Publishing the Audio Record of Leo Strauss's Teaching

Recipient: Tarcov, Nathan S (Chicago, IL 60637 USA) in affiliation with University of Chicago

Goal: The digitization of audio recordings and edited transcriptions of course lectures given by philosopher Leo Strauss.

Description: Leo Strauss is becoming increasingly recognized as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. He was also an extraordinary teacher. Fortunately, an extensive record of Strauss???s teaching exists in the form of audio tapes of his courses and transcripts made from those audio tapes. The University of Chicago requests a grant of $350,000 over two years to assist its Leo Strauss Center in preserving and publishing in digital form the audio record of Strauss???s teaching.

Grant: 194554 / PW-50461-09,   Category: Political Science,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2009

Marcel Breuer, Architect: Life and Work, 1922-1955

Recipient: Quimby, Sean (Syracuse, NY 13244-2010 USA) in affiliation with Syracuse University (Syracuse, NY 13244 USA)

Goal: The arrangement and description of the papers of architect and designer Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) and the creation of an online digital resource that integrates sources on Breuer from several cultural repositories.

Description: This project, Marcel Breuer, Architect: Life and Work, 1922-1955,will digitally unite source materials from the earlier years of Breuer's architectural career to give architectural historians, students of modernism, and the merely curious access to an authoritative, digital scholarly edition. At the close of the project (May 2011), the following results will be realized: 1) The arrangement and description of Syracuse???s Marcel Breuer collection, including file-level EAD inventory and collection-level MARC record. 2) A Web-based digital edition (tentatively called ???Marcel Breuer, Architect: Life and Work, 1922-1955), mounted on the eXtensible Text Framework (XTF) foundation, that integrates vital Breuer sources from a variety of repositories. 3) Usability testing of the digital edition by Syracuse University students, including those enrolled in the School of Architecture.

Grant: 194557 / PW-50464-09,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2009

Multispectral Imaging Project

Recipient: Macfarlane, Roger Thomas (Provo, UT 84602 USA) in affiliation with Brigham Young University, Provo

Goal: Multi-spectral imaging of 400 illegible, or legibly problematic papyri from collections at the University of Michigan; University of California, Berkeley; and Columbia University. The resulting images would be disseminated via the Web-based Advanced Papyrological Information System (APIS).

Description: The Ancient Textual Imaging Group at Brigham Young University has pioneered developments into enhancing texts of deteriorated and damaged papyri using multi-spectral imaging. This process has rendered legible many stained, discolored, or faded portions of ancient documents. In effect, the process has restored the documents to a state of legibility that they have not possessed since antiquity. The BYU Multi-spectral Imaging Project is a two-year venture proposed by the Ancient Textual Imaging Group to capture, process, and provide public access via the Advanced Papyrological Information System to high-quality multi-spectral images of hundreds of legibly problematic papyrus documents from the most important papyrus collections in the country.

Grant: 194520 / PW-50427-09,   Category: Classics,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2009

Mon-Khmer Languages Project

Recipient: Sidwell, Paul (San Clemente, CA 92673-2719 USA) in affiliation with CRCL INC

Goal: The preparation of a lexical database, an etymological dictionary, and a collaborative Web site for research on the Mon-Khmer languages, which include the national languages of Vietnam and Cambodia as well as those of communities in India, China, Burma, Malaysia, Laos, and Thailand.

Description: The Mon-Khmer Languages Project is developing badly needed research and reference resources for the Mon-Khmer language family. By far the largest subgroup of the Austroasiatic stock, the roughly 150 Mon-Khmer languages are of great antiquity and extraordinary linguistic interest, and are of primary importance for the study of Southeast Asian history and culture. Mon-Khmer languages are the national languages of Vietnam and Cambodia, and are found in communities large and small in India and China, and across broad swaths of Burma, Malaysia, Laos, and Thailand. The project is creating three primary resources: a Mon-Khmer languages database, a Mon-Khmer etymological dictionary, and a collaborative website for Mon-Khmer language research.

Grant: 194473 / PW-50380-09,   Category: Linguistics,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2009

Digitization of Deteriorating Photographs of American Paintings

Recipient: Reist, Inge (New York, NY 10021 USA) in affiliation with Frick Collection

Goal: The digitization of 15,000 images of works of art, primarily early American portraits photographed 1922-67 in homes and public institutions throughout the United States.

Description: The Frick Collection's Frick Art Reference Library is proposing a two-year project to digitize, and make available to an international community of students and researchers, images and documentation that describe 15,000 works of art from its negative collection. Most of these unique large-format black and white glass plate and acetate negatives, made between 1922 and 1967, document works of art in private homes and small public collections throughout the United States. They record paintings that are generally not well-known and in some instances are the only extant images of works that have been subsequently lost, stolen, or destroyed. These negatives, and study photographs printed from them, together with the extensive firsthand information about the works of art, constitute an irreplaceable resource for humanities research, particularly for the history of art and art collecting, American history, social history, material culture, and genealogy.

Grant: 194403 / PW-50310-09,   Category: Art History and Criticism,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2009

Sound Directions: Digital Preservation and Access for Global Audio Heritage Phase III, North American Endangered Recordings

Recipient: Burdette, Alan (Bloomington, IN 47405 USA) in affiliation with Indiana University, Bloomington

Goal: The digitization of 29 unique audio collections created on lacquer and aluminum discs and fragile reel-to-reel tape that document Native American, African American, and Anglo American oral traditions, as well as those of other immigrant populations in the United States.

Description: Building upon the research and the success of the first two phases of the Sound Directions project of Indiana and Harvard Universities, we propose a 19-month Phase III project through which we will put our new digital preservation systems to work preserving and making accessible highly endangered field recordings of Native American, African American, and Anglo American traditions as well as various immigrant populations in the United States. In short, we are proposing a body of recorded heritage that is of great significance to the humanities and that must receive preservation treatment soon if their content is to survive at the highest level of quality possible or, in a number of cases, survive at all. In addition, this project will provide a model by which digital audio preservation systems, which are in an early phase of development, may be employed in a full audio preservation and access project using appropriate standards.

Grant: 194444 / PW-50351-09,   Category: Folklore/Folklife,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2009

Womens Worlds in Qajar Iran: A Digital Archive and Website

Recipient: Najmabadi, Afsaneh (Cambridge, MA 02138 USA) in affiliation with Harvard University

Goal: The development of a comprehensive digital archive and Web site that will preserve and render accessible primary sources related to the social and cultural history of women during the Qajar dynasty (1785-1925) in Iran.

Description: Womens Worlds in Qajar Iran: A Digital Archive and Website May 2009 to April 2011. Harvard University seeks $341,933 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop a comprehensive digital archive and website that will preserve, link, and render accessible primary source materials related to the social and cultural history of womens worlds during the reign of the Qajar dynasty, 1785 to 1925, in Iran. The Qajar dynasty is perhaps most notable for a series of intense interactions with Europe (Britain and Russia, in particular), many of which introduced cultural and political changes that still resonate in the Iran of today. The proposed archive will address a significant gap in the scholarship related to this important time in the history of Iran by making available writings and other personal documents created by, and reflecting the lives of, women during the Qajar era.

Grant: 194571 / PW-50478-09,   Category: Near Eastern History,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2009

Amplifying Access to Manuscript Collections: Saving Legacy Data in Historical Card Catalogs

Recipient: Levitt, Martin L (Philadelphia, PA 19106-3387 USA) in affiliation with American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia, PA 19106 USA)

Goal: The production and enhancement of finding aids for 178 manuscript collections comprising 2,165 linear feet pertaining to American intellectual and cultural history from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries.

Description: The American Philosophical Society requests support to dramatically enhance accessibility to manuscript collections focusing on American history from the colonial era through the early Republic, Native American anthropology, and the history of science from the 18th century forward. These collections are currently documented in two antiquated card catalogs that reference approximately 15% of the Library???s 10 million manuscripts. With the experience of a completed pilot project involving item-level cards for holdings related to Benjamin Franklin, the Society now proposes to digitize item-level or folder-level descriptions available in these card catalogs and ???work up,??? creating web-accessible EAD finding aids and ensuring that these important humanities collections are processed to modern archival standards. The project will serve as a model for other primary source repositories facing similar problems of legacy data in antiquated manuscripts card catalogs.

Grant: 194392 / PW-50299-09,   Category: Humanities,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2009

Pamphlets and Ephemera as Social and Cultural History: Preserving an Alternative Print Tradition at the Tamiment Library

Recipient: Nash, Michael H (New York, NY 10012 USA) in affiliation with New York University

Goal: The arrangement and description of one million items, with full cataloging of 1,200 monographs, 600 serials, and 1,100 pamphlets, from the Tamiment Library's collection on the history of labor and radicalism in the United States; 250 Internet-accessible Encoded Archival Description finding aids would also be developed linked to collection-level MARC records.

Description: As the historical and American Studies literatures have been increasingly influenced by the work of social and cultural historians and students of material culture, scholars have discovered that ephemeral publications often document details of everyday life and forms of political participation that are not visible through traditional research collections. Research libraries with their emphases on the printed book, manuscript collection, and organizational archive have treated these materials as an after thought. The Tamiment Library???s pamphlet and ephemera collection documenting the history of labor and radical politics has long been recognized as one of the most important archives of its kind in the United States. This project will rely on archival arrangement, description,and collection-level cataloging to make the Tamiment collections accessible to the research community.

Grant: 194394 / PW-50301-09,   Category: American History,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2009

Mulberry Row Reassessment: Digitizing a Decade of Archaeological Research on Slavery at Monticello

Recipient: Neiman, Fraser D (Charlottesville, VA 22902 USA) in affiliation with Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc.

Goal: The completion of cataloging and digitization of 132,720 archaeological artifacts from areas along Mulberry Row, occupied from 1804 to 1858 by enslaved African Americans at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello Plantation, and making the data freely available on the Internet.

Description: In the 1980s archaeologists excavated sixteen sites along Mulberry Row, a dirt path adjacent to the neoclassical mansion that Thomas Jefferson designed and built at Monticello Plantation near Charlottesville, Virginia. The sites were once the homes and workspaces of enslaved artisans and domestics. The assemblages recovered were never completely catalogued, depriving both scholars and the general public of the possibility of using them to probe the historical dynamics of slavery at Monticello. Monticello???s department of archaeology initiated the Mulberry Row Reassessment in 2000 to digitize completely artifacts, faunal remains, and field records from this decade of fieldwork, following protocols established by the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery. This proposal seeks funds to complete the project, to make the results accessible to scholars and the public on the web, and to enhance our understanding the changing life ways of people enslaved at Monticello.

Grant: 194450 / PW-50357-09,   Category: Archaeology,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2009

Enhancing Access to Primary Cultural Heritage Materials of India

Recipient: Scharf, Peter M (Providence, RI 02912 USA) in affiliation with Brown University

Goal: A research and development project to produce software that would allow the searching of Sanskrit manuscripts and their integration into a digital library. The project would create a prototype based on the "Mahabharata" and the "Bhagavata Purana."

Description: The proposed project aims to enhance access to primary cultural heritage materials of India housed in American libraries by integrating them with machine-readable texts, lexical resources, and linguistic software in a digital library of Sanskrit, one of the world's richest culture-bearing languages. Integrating primary cultural materials with the Sanskrit Library will enable broad use of Indic collections for research and education. The project develops a prototype using the collections of Sanskrit manuscripts in the libraries at Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania. The result will be extendable to collections of Indic materials throughout the U.S. and the world and will serve as a model for digitization projects of cultural materials in other major culture-bearing languages such as Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian, and Chinese.

Grant: 194501 / PW-50408-09,   Category: Asian Languages,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2009

ASOR- Near East Archaeology Archives

Recipient: Meyers, Eric M (Durham, NC 27708 USA) in affiliation with American Schools of Oriental Research (Boston, MA 02215 USA)

Goal: Arranging and describing the contents of three geographically dispersed archives that focus on archaeological excavations and the history of archaeology in the Middle East from 1871 to the present, as well as creating finding aids and mounting digitized materials on the Internet.

Description: The American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) seeks $300,903 from the National Endowment of the Humanities for a project 1) to unite the three portions of its historic, yet previously inaccessible archive collections, 2) to digitize and publish online most of the items, and 3) to establish a finding aid on the internet with metatags that will dramatically increase public and scholarly access to this material. The requested fund from the NEH will be combined with cost-sharing contributions of $137,488 from ASOR, Boston University, and the Harvard Semetic Museum. These materials describe archaeological and historical explorations of the eastern Mediterranean and range in date from the end of the nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth century. The collections consist of over 410 lineal feet of documents, 15 drawers of maps and plans, and approximately 20 boxes of photographs and glass negatives.

Grant: 194406 / PW-50313-09,   Category: Archaeology,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2009

Digitizing the University of Pennsylvania's Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts, 1000-1600

Recipient: Shawcross, Nancy M (Philadelphia, PA 19104-6206 USA) in affiliation with University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA)

Goal: The digitization of 800 codices, documents, and fragments constituting the entirety of medieval and Renaissance primary sources held by the university's Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

Description: Penn proposes to produce & make freely available on the Internet digital facsimiles of its collection of European manuscripts from 1000 to 1600. With a total project cost of $790,272, Penn requests $292,958 from NEH to fund salary & fringe benefits for 2 years for 1 full-time digital data coordinator & 2 full-time digital camera operators. Penn???s collection comprises approximately 800 discrete items, totaling approximately 320,000 pages and offers important research material in the fields of art history; English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish literatures; European political, social, and economic history; the history of science and technology, including alchemy; the history of witchcraft; legal studies; music; religious studies; and philosophy. The project will provide 3 entry points for the facsimiles: access through a hot link in the WorldCat and local cataloging records, access via Digital Scriptorium, and access through a project-specific website with faceted searching.

Grant: 194389 / PW-50296-09,   Category: Medieval Studies,   Division: Preservation and Access,   Year Awarded: 2009