ODH Update

Awards for Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities

Jennifer Serventi — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:05:00 GMT

I'm very happy to say that the NEH has just announced five new awards from our Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program. These grants support national or regional training programs for scholars and advanced graduate students to broaden and extend their knowledge of digital humanities.

These awards are part of a larger group of 154 awards announced today by the NEH. For a full state-by-state list of all the awards, please see today's press release.

Awards in the Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program:

George Mason University -- Fairfax, VA
One Week, One Tool: A Digital Humanities Barn Raising
Tom Scheinfeldt, Project Director
Outright: $249,221
To support: A one week institute for twelve participants on the principles of humanities-centered tool design, development, and implementation, followed by a year of development support.

University of California, Irvine -- Irvine, CA
Broadening the Digital Humanities: The Vectors-IML/UC-HRI Summer Institute on Multimodal Scholarship
David Theo Goldberg, Project Director
Outright: $249,895
To support: A four-week summer institute to investigate scholarly research methods in the digital age, to include thematic discussion seminars and hands-on workshops in collaboration with technologists.

University of California, Los Angeles -- Los Angeles, CA
Network Analysis for the Humanities
Timothy Tangherlini, Project Director
Outright: $232,737
To support: A ten-day workshop and follow-up symposium for humanities faculty members and advanced graduate students on the use of large-scale network analysis for humanities topics and questions.

University of South Carolina Research Foundation -- Columbia, SC
Humanities Gaming Institute: Serious Games for Research and Pedagogy
Duncan Buell, Project Director
Outright: $232,096
To support: A three-week institute on the role of immersive, interactive technologies and games within the context of the humanities, with a year of follow-up support for the twenty participants.

University of Virginia -- Charlottesville, VA
Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship
Bethany Nowviskie, Project Director
Outright: $162,457
To support: Two institutes, aimed at scholars, librarians, museum officials, and advanced graduate students, to explore how geospatial technologies like Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can be used for teaching, learning, and research in the humanities.

NEH Start-Up Grant White Papers (Part II)

Brett Bobley — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:33:00 GMT

This is Part II of a series of posts highlighting recent white papers (Part I also available). Numerous ODH programs (and some programs in other NEH divisions and offices) require the grantee to submit a "white paper" at the conclusion of the grant. In ODH, we publish these white papers in our Library of Funded Projects. In the white paper, the grantee provides a summary of the grant activities, what they learned, recommended best practices, and even what they might have done differently. By making these white papers freely available, members of the public -- including other prospective applicants -- can learn from what has already been done and build upon it.

More...

NEH Start-Up Grant White Papers (Part I)

Brett Bobley — Wed, 13 May 2009 20:38:00 GMT

Numerous ODH programs (and some programs in other NEH divisions and offices) require the grantee to submit a "white paper" at the conclusion of the grant. In ODH, we publish these white papers in our Library of Funded Projects. In the white paper, the grantee provides a summary of the grant activities, what they learned, recommended best practices, and even what they might have done differently. By making these white papers freely available, members of the public -- including other prospective applicants -- can learn from what has already been done and build upon it.

In a series of posts, I'll be highlighting some of the white papers we have recently added to the library.

Update: Part II of this series is now available.

In each case below, just click the title and then scroll down to find the "download" button to access the full report:

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

University of Maryland, College Park
Project Director: Matthew Kirschenbaum
This project is about developing archival tools and best practices for preserving born-digital documents produced by contemporary authors. Traditionally, humanists have found great scholarly value in studying the papers, correspondence, and first drafts of authors, politicians, and other historical figures. In this white paper, the project director notes that contemporary figures compose almost all of their materials on a computer. What challenges will this present to humanists, archivists, and librarians in the future? This very readable paper explores many of these issues with specific case studies involving a number of leading libraries and archives.

InPhO: the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project

Indiana University, Bloomington
Project Director: Colin Allen
This project is about the development of machine learning software to automate searching, navigating, and representing the relations among philosophical ideas, scholars, and works. The project is using the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as a testbed. The Stanford Encyclopedia is a very well-regarded web-based encyclopedia that includes lengthy entries written by academic philosophers from around the world. The InPhO project is creating software which analyzes the text of the encyclopedia to create new metadata describing each article -- a "dynamic ontology." What is remarkable is that this metadata actually includes dynamically generated information about the ideas expressed in each article. Hence, this new ontology can allow the reader to find related ideas in articles across the encyclopedia. The potential is for a new paradigm for searching that doesn't depend on simply looking for particular words in a body of text. In the white paper, the project director and his co-authors provide a very thorough discussion of the project, including how they are using expert input from philosophers to help train the software to provide better results.

Humanities Collections and Reference Resources

Brett Bobley — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 18:01:00 GMT

The NEH’s Division of Preservation and Access has recently released the guidelines for the program “Humanities Collections and Reference Resources.” This program supports projects that preserve and create intellectual access to such collections as books, journals, newspapers, manuscript and archival materials, maps, still and moving images, sound recordings, art, and objects of material culture. The grant can cover activities such as digitizing materials, cataloging collections, implementing preservation measures, developing databases, and many others. Please consult the guidelines for more details. The deadline for this program is July 15, 2009.

Please note that "Humanities Collections and Reference Resources" is a separate program from "Research and Development." The R&D program has a deadline of July 30, 2009 and you can read more about it in this earlier ODH Update post.

Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital Scholarship

Brett Bobley — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:53:00 GMT

I'm pleased to announce that Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital Scholarship is now available for download via the CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) website.

Working Together is the final report from a symposium sponsored by the NEH and CLIR. The symposium was held on September 15th, 2008, and brought together 30 leading scholars to discuss research challenges in the humanities, social sciences, and computation. The report includes a terrific overview of the symposium written by Amy Friedlander of CLIR as well as a series of original papers commissioned for the meeting. The papers cover a wide range of topics that should be of great interest to the humanities research community:

Tools for Thinking: ePhilology and Cyberinfrastructure, by Gregory Crane, Alison Babeu, David Bamman, Lisa Cerrato, Rashmi Singhal
The Changing Landscape of American Studies in a Global Era, by Caroline Levander
A Whirlwind Tour of Automated Language Processing for the Humanities and Social Sciences, by Douglas W. Oard.
Information Visualization: Challenge for the Humanities, by Maureen Stone.
Art History and the New Media: Representation and the Production of Humanistic Knowledge, by Stephen Murray.
Social Attention in the Age of the Web, by Bernardo A. Huberman .
Digital Humanities Centers: Loci for Digital Scholarship, by Diane M. Zorich.

My particular thanks go to Amy Friedlander at CLIR and Joel Wurl from the NEH for their tremendous work putting this together.

Awards for DFG/NEH Bilateral Symposia and Workshops

Jason Rhody — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 20:39:00 GMT

We are pleased to announce the awardees from the DFG/NEH Bilateral Symposia and Workshops program. This program offers support for digital humanities projects funded by NEH in collaboration with the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft e.V., DFG) in Germany. These grants require collaboration between U.S. and German entities and provide funding for up to two joint symposia or workshops in the area of digital humanities.

More...

NEH Research & Development Grants

Brett Bobley — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:53:00 GMT

The NEH’s Division of Preservation and Access has just released the guidelines for the program “Preservation and Access Research and Development.” Folks working on digital humanities projects should definitely give this program a close look. The R&D program supports projects that address major challenges in preserving or providing access to humanities collections and resources. This includes funding R&D efforts to develop tools, standards, and methodologies for accessing digitized collections. In addition, you’ll see that this year the R&D program is particularly encouraging applications in the areas of digital preservation, preventive conservation, and preservation of and access to recorded sound and moving image collections.

Here at the NEH, we see the R&D program as a natural next step for some graduates of the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program. Many of the Start-Up grant projects are conducting basic research, building early prototypes, and investigating new methodologies for scholarship in areas related to digital collections. So the R&D program may very well be a logical next step to move from the planning to implementation phase.

On a related note, our Preservation and Access division recently announced the awardees from last year’s R&D category. I’m happy to say that two of the awardees were former Start-Up grantees.

The two recent R&D awardees who graduated from the Start-Up phase are:

InPhO @ Work: Providing Integrated Access to Philosophy

Indiana University, Bloomington
Project Director: Colin Allen
Award Amount: $400,000
To support: 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.

The project director, Colin Allen, received an earlier Start-Up grant in the amount of $29,164 for the first phase of the project, that was entitled InPhO: the Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project. During the Start-Up phase, Colin Allen and his project team demonstrated how a combination of machine learning and a social network of experts could be used to find relationships among articles in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The Text Image Linking Environment (TILE)

University of Maryland, College Park
Project Director: Doug Reside
Award Amount: $400,000
To support: 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.

The project director, Doug Reside, received an earlier Start-Up grant in the amount of $29,730, that was entitled Digital Tools. During the Start-Up phase, Doug Reside and his team worked on developing a prototype version 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. AXE now forms the heart of his implementation project, TILE.

Congratulations to both awardees and we look forward to seeing more Start-Up grantees move forward via the Preservation and Access Research and Development program.

Apply for Vectors-IML Summer Institute on Multimodal Scholarship

Brett Bobley — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:44:00 GMT

I just received word that the deadline for applying to the NEH-funded Vectors-IML Summer Institute on Multimodal Scholarship has been extended to March 29th.

The institute is entitled "Broadening the Digital Humanities" and was funded via our grant program "Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities."

The institute is being hosted by the University of Southern California from July 13-August 7, 2009. Application instructions [pdf] are available now, but act quickly!

Apply Early! (& Other Tips on Avoiding Problems with Grants.gov)

Brett Bobley — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:16:00 GMT

Two major application deadlines are rapidly approaching: March 26 is the deadline for the JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization program and April 8 is the deadline for the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program. Many of you may have seen the recent memo from the Director of the Office of Management and Budget describing the technical problems going on at Grants.gov, the government-wide portal for receiving grants applications.

We are working closely with Grants.gov and they do have both near and long-term plans in place for improving Grants.gov's performance. However, these improvements will likely be well after these upcoming deadlines.

It is very important to us here at the NEH that we receive your application. If you are considering applying to one of these deadlines, here are some tips:

-- Apply early. Many folks wait until the very last day to apply. That's human nature, I suppose. But if possible, I strongly suggest you try to get your application in a few days early. First of all, the system may be less busy. Secondly, should you encounter a technical issue, you'll still have time to try again, contact Grants.gov, or contact my office.

-- Consider applying during non-business hours. As you might imagine, Grants.gov is at its busiest during normal business hours. It is considerably less busy during evening hours. So, if possible, you may wish to consider uploading your application during off-hours.

-- If you encounter a problem, first check out the Grants.gov blog to see if there is a known system-wide problem. Grants.gov will use this blog to alert you to issues. If the problem doesn't appear to be system-wide, check out the Grants.gov Troubleshooting Tips page, which has some good solutions to common technical problems.

Thanks for your patience as Grants.gov works through these technical issues. We look forward to receiving your application. As always, if you have questions, drop us an e-mail at odh@neh.gov.

NEH Announces Thirteen Start-Up Grant Awards

Brett Bobley — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:39:00 GMT

I'm very happy to say that the NEH has just announced thirteen new awards (pdf) from our Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program.

These awards are part of a larger group of 197 awards announced today. For a full state-by-state list of all the awards, please see today's press release.

Congratulations to all the awardees!