ODH Update

Ithaka Releases "Sustainability at a Glance" Briefing Papers

Brett Bobley — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:20:00 GMT

Ithaka has just released "Sustainability at a Glance" -- three new briefing papers on the topic of the sustainability of online educational resources. Each briefing paper is written for a different audience: One for curators, archivists and librarians; one for university librarians; and one for digital project managers.

These three briefing papers are a follow-on from Ithaka's earlier Case Studies in Sustainability, funded in part by the NEH.

This sustainability work is of particular importance to digital humanities projects, addressing the critical question "how do you sustain a digital humanities resource once the grant runs out?"

Please spread the word and, as always, do get in touch if you have any comments or feedback.

NEH Announces Awards for JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Program

Jason Rhody — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 19:50:00 GMT

I'm very happy to say that the NEH has just announced 3 new awards from our JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration grant program. This program is jointly funded by the NEH and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), a joint committee of the U.K. further and higher education funding bodies. Within the NEH, the program is jointly administered by both the Office of Digital Humanities and the Division of Preservation and Access. For more information, please consult today's press release. Congratulations to the three awardees:

American Museum of Natural History -- New York, NY
Digitizing Darwin's Library
David Kohn, Project Director
Outright: $119,999
To support: The digital reconstruction of Charles Darwin's working library as it stood at the end of his life, to include the presentation of the complex array of annotations throughout his working texts.

Arizona State University -- Tempe, AZ
TAG: Transatlantic Archaeology Gateway
John Howard, Project Director
Outright: $134,879
To support: To support: The development of tools for trans‑Atlantic cross‑searching and semantic interoperability between the two major archives of born-digital archaeological data in the United States and United Kingdom.

Yale University --New Haven, CT
A Virtual Manuscript Reading Room
Ann Okerson, Project Director
Outright: $103,168
To support: A pilot project to create an archive of and gateway to important manuscripts, related manuscript catalogs, and historical dictionaries in Arabic and Persian (19,800 pages) held separately in the collections at Yale University and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

Sign Up for NEH-Funded Institute "Networks and Network Analysis for the Humanities"

Brett Bobley — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:42:00 GMT

With funding from the NEH program Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, the Institute for Pure & Applied Mathematics at UCLA is hosting a summer institute entitled "Networks and Network Analysis for the Humanities." The institute will be held next summer, from August 15 - 27, 2010.

The institute will focus on the study of large corpora to see how complex networks enable ideas, language, and texts to move across time and space. As the organizer's note, "In recent years, attention has been drawn in both the academic and popular press to the ubiquity of networks in everyday life, from communications networks to investment networks to power transmission networks to social networks. As a result of this increasing awareness, the study of the different types of networks that link us together, and the analysis of the structure of those networks has risen to greater and greater prominence not only in the mathematical and social sciences but also in the Humanities. The institute, housed at UCLA, features lectures and tutorials from some of the leading scholars in network analysis and visualization."

This interdisciplinary institute will feature prominent guest lecturers from across the humanities, mathematics, and computer science.

For more details, UCLA has a flyer [pdf] about the institute as well as a Web site with application materials. Applications due by November 1, 2009.

DFG/NEH Symposia & Workshops Guidelines Now Available

Jason Rhody — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:05:00 GMT

The guidelines for the DFG/NEH Bilateral Symposia and Workshops program are now available on the NEH website (the DFG version of the guidelines can be found here in PDF format). The application deadline is October 29, 2009. As always, feel free to contact us with questions, requests to read drafts (six weeks prior to deadline, please), or if you just want to chat about a project idea.

Remember also that the DFG/NEH Enriching Digital Collections program (guidelines) has a deadline of October 8, 2009. The Start-Up Grant program (guidelines) deadline is October 6, 2009.

More...

Deadlines for the Scholars' Lab/ NEH Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship

Jennifer Serventi — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 18:05:00 GMT

Deadlines for the Scholars' Lab/ NEH Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship are fast approaching:

Tracks 1 & 2 (Stewardship & Software, to be held November 15-18, 2009), deadline: September 1st

Track 3 (Scholarship, to be held May 25-28, 2010), deadline: December 1st

To learn more about the Institute and to apply for funding to attend, please visit: http://lib.virginia.edu/scholarslab/geospatial/ . Also see Brett Bobley's ODH Update post of August 10, 2009 at http://bit.ly/123k7f .

*** IMPORTANT NOTE: If you applied between August 13 and August 21, you should confirm that they have received your application by contacting them at nehgisinstitute@collab.itc.virginia.edu ***

More...

Awards for Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants (August 2009)

Brett Bobley — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:09:00 GMT

I'm very happy to say that the NEH has just announced 21 new awards from our Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants program. These grants support innovative projects in the digital humanities.

These awards are part of a larger group of 184 awards announced today by the NEH. For a full state-by-state list of all the awards, please see today's press release.

Also, please note that the next deadline to apply for this program is October 6, 2009. Please consult the guidelines for more information.

Recently Announced Awards in the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program:

Alexandria Archive Institute -- San Francisco, CA
The Open Modern Art Collection of Iraq: Web tools for Documenting, Sharing and Enriching Iraqi Artistic Expressions
Nada Shabout, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: 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.

Apprend Foundation -- Durham, NC
CRAFTING FREEDOM ALONG NC 86:DISCOVERING HIDDEN HISTORY WITH MOBILE TECHNOLOGY
Laurel Sneed, Project Director
Outright: $25,000
To support: Research, needs assessment, and planning for an open-source mobile technology tour of North Carolina State Highway 86, exploring sites of significance in African
American history.

Brown University -- Providence, RI
Semantically Rich Tools for Text Exploration
Andrew Ashton, Project Director
Outright: $48,661
To support: 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).

Buffalo and Erie County Public Library -- Buffalo, NY
Re Collecting the Depression and New Deal as a Civic Resource in Hard Times
Anne Conable, Project Director
Outright: $25,000
To support: Development of a prototype for an open source digital repository for materials relating to the history of the Great Depression and New Deal in western New York.

California State University, Dominguez Hills Foundation -- Carson, CA
New Approaches: Tradeswomen Archive Project (TAP)
Vivian Price, Project Director
Outright: $25,000
To support: A Level I planning grant to create a virtual museum and augment the holdings of a physical collection with primary artifacts about women who work in non traditional blue collar trades.

Claremont McKenna College -- Claremont, CA
Virtual Taxila: A Web Accessible, Multi User Virtual Environment (MUVE) of an Ancient Indian City
Daniel Michon, Project Director
Outright: $49,715
To support: 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.

CUNY Research Foundation, NYC College of Technology -- Brooklyn, NY
Looking For Whitman: The Poetry of Place in the Life and Work of Walt Whitman, Level 2
Matthew Gold, Project Director
Outright: $33,235
To support: The piloting of a series of courses at three institutions that would engage students in online investigations of Walt Whitman's work in geographical context that would conclude with a conference on material culture and Whitman.

Dartmouth College -- Hanover, NH
Digital Humanities Start Up Grant: Metadata Games -- An Open Source Electronic Game for Archival Data Systems
Mary Flanagan, Project Director
Outright: $49,015
To support: 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.

Electronic Literature Organization -- College Park, MD
Electronic Literature Directory: Collaborative Knowledge Management for the Literary Humanities
Joseph Tabbi, Project Director
Outright: $47,870
To support: 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.

Itasca Community College -- Grand Rapids, MN
GIBAGADINAMAAGOOM: AN OJIBWE DIGITAL ARCHIVE
Timothy Powell, Project Director
Outright: $24,918
To support: A series of planning meetings to redesign a digital archive of Ojibwe historical and cultural resources to allow for multiple user interfaces and more extensive categorization of materials.

Loyola College in Maryland -- Baltimore, MD
The Journalism History Hub: Developing a Research based Interdisciplinary Social Network and Meta Conference
Elliott King, Project Director
Outright: $48,370
To support: 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.

Loyola University, Chicago -- Chicago, IL
Humanities Research Infrastructure and Tools (HRIT): An Environment for Collaborative Textual Scholarship
Peter Shillingsburg, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Development of a collaborative online editing environment and tagging tool for producing electronic scholarly editions and text archives.

Marist College -- Poughkeepsie, NY
A DIGITAL PATHFINDER FOR HISTORIC SITES
Ron Coleman, Project Director
Outright: $49,981
To support: Development of a hand held GPS personal data assistant for tours of historic sites.

University of Massachusetts, Amherst -- Amherst, MA
OCRonym: Entity Extraction and Retrieval for Scanned Books
James Allan, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Development of an extraction and retrieval system for named entities people, places, 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.

University of Montana -- Missoula, MT
Computer Based Data Processing and Management for Blackfoot Phonetics and Phonology
Mizuki Miyashita, Project Director
Outright: $24,999
To support: Development of a database to store and manage sound clips of the Blackfoot language.

University of Nebraska, Board of Regents -- Lincoln, NE
centerNet: Cyberinfrastructure for the Digital Humanities
Katherine Walter, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: A series of meetings, concluding with an international summit, to plan for future activities of an international network of digital humanities centers.

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill -- Chapel Hill, NC
Main Street, Carolina: Uncovering and Reclaiming the History of Downtown
Natalia Smith, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: 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.

University of South Carolina Research Foundation -- Columbia, SC
The Sapheos Project: Transparency in Multi image Collation, Analysis, and Representation
Randall Cream, Project Director
Outright: $49,918
To support: 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.

University of Southern California -- Los Angeles, CA
The Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia:--An International Digital Resource for Study, Teaching, and Research
Bruce Smith (University of Southern California) and Katherine Rowe (Bryn Mawr College), Project Directors
Outright: $24,901
To support: A collaborative effort by Cambridge University Press (CUP) and the Center for Transformative Scholarship (CTS) at the University of Southern California to develop an encyclopedia dedicated to Shakespearian studies that aggregates research data and allows users to map paths through the resources.

University of Virginia -- Charlottesville, VA
Neatline Geospatial Interpretation of Archival Collections
Bethany Nowviskie & Adam Soroka, Project Directors
Outright: $34,656
To support: 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.

Western Reserve Historical Society -- Cleveland, OH
(AI)2 Artificially Intelligent Artifact Interpreter
Edward Pershey, Project Director
Outright: $49,384
To support: 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.

Sign Up for NEH-Funded Enabling Geospatial Scholarship Institute

Brett Bobley — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 14:01:00 GMT

With funding from the NEH program Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, the University of Virginia's Scholars Lab is hosting a three-track Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship in November 2009 and May 2010. This Institute will bring scholars, cultural heritage professionals, and software developers together to support and develop geospatial projects and methods in the humanities. The institutes will support travel and lodging for 40 attendees as well as Institute faculty members. Dedicated funding is available for graduate students as well as faculty attendees.

Schedule:

Round 1 — November 15-18, 2009 — Charlottesville, VA

Track 1: Stewardship
Library, museum, GIS and digital humanities center professionals
Rich geospatial content and open, flexible access in support of humanities scholarship

Track 2: Software
Web developers, designers, systems administrators, and information scientists
Spatially enabling web projects and building service-oriented GIS infrastructure

Round 2 — May 25-28, 2010 — Charlottesville, VA

Track 3: Scholarship
Humanities scholars and advanced graduate students
Space and place in next-generation digital humanities scholarship

For more details and to sign up, see the institute's website.

Sign Up For NEH-Funded Advanced Text Encoding Seminars

Brett Bobley — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:25:00 GMT

With funding from the NEH program Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, Brown University’s Women Writers Project is presenting a series of training seminars in text encoding using TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) markup. The seminars are “…intended to provide a more in-depth look at specific encoding problems and topics for people who are already involved in a text encoding project or are in the process of planning one. Each event will include a mix of presentations, discussion, case studies using participants' projects, hands-on practice, and individual consultation.”

The full seminar schedule is as follows:

University of California, Santa Barbara
Hosted by the English Broadside Ballad Archive and the Transliteracies Project September 14-16, 2009 This seminar is now full.

University of Maryland, College Park
Hosted by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities January 20-22, 2010 This workshop will focus on the encoding of manuscript materials.
Application deadline (extended): August 10, 2009 Applicants will be notified by September 1.

Brown University
Hosted by the Center for Digital Scholarship April 8-10, 2010 This workshop will focus on the encoding of contextual information.
Application deadline: November 1, 2009
Applicants will be notified by December 1.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Hosted by the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities July 2010 (precise date and deadlines TBA) This workshop will focus on the encoding of manuscript materials.

University at Buffalo
Hosted by the Digital Humanities Initiative at Buffalo October 2010 (precise date and deadlines TBA) This workshop will focus on the encoding of manuscript materials.

University of Maryland
January 2011 (precise date and deadlines TBA) This workshop will focus on the encoding of contextual information.

Travel funding is available of up to $500 per participant.

For more information and to apply, please visit:
http://www.wwp.brown.edu/encoding/seminars/

Important Tip on Writing Your Application to Address a General Audience

Brett Bobley — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:07:00 GMT

The next Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant deadline is October 6, 2009. If you are considering applying, I want to pass on some important advice. Applicants often ask: "To what audience should I address my proposal?" The answer is: a general one. Your application will be read by a variety of people including peer reviewers, NEH staff, and members of the NEH’s National Council on the Humanities.

Hence, I wish to strongly emphasize the importance of writing your application in a clear fashion that can be understood by a non-technical audience. We realize that your project may be technical in nature and that part of the application will have to address complex technology issues. But particularly in your abstract and in the first portion of your narrative, it is very important that you write to a general audience that is familiar with the humanities, but may have no specific knowledge of technology or how your project fits into the humanities in a larger sense. This is your opportunity to make the “big picture” case for how your project advances the humanities.

Let me draw your attention to a few key sentences in the program guidelines that address this:

1) In section IV, in the description of the proposal abstract, it says:

Provide a one-paragraph (up to one thousand characters) abstract written for a nonspecialist audience that states clearly the importance of the proposed work and its relation to larger issues in the humanities.

2) Also in section IV, in the description of the contents of your narrative, it says:

Provide a clear and concise explanation of the start-up activities and the ultimate project results, noting their value to scholars, students, and general audiences in the humanities.

3) In section V, in the description of the evaluation criteria, the very first criterion is:

The intellectual significance of the long-term project for the humanities.

As these sentences indicate, it is really key that your proposal makes the case for the humanities significance of your project. As part of the review process, your application will be read by numerous people with different backgrounds, from different disciplines, with varying degrees of familiarity with the methodologies used in digital scholarship. So you must make your case to this wider audience. For example, if you were trying to describe your project to your provost, dean, or college president, how might you make the case? You may find it helpful to think about the classic "elevator pitch" -- that is, how might you briefly describe this project to someone outside your field who you've just met. Try to think about this as you craft your abstract and narrative.

While this tip is specifically talking about the Start-Up Grants, it really applies more broadly to all NEH grants. But with digital projects, you may have to take particular care to ensure that a non-technical reader understands why your project is important to the humanities.

Grant Program: Fellowships at Digital Humanities Centers

Brett Bobley — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 17:09:00 GMT

I want to bring to your attention an excellent grant opportunity from the NEH's Division of Research. The Fellowships at Digital Humanities Centers (FDHC) program supports collaborations between digital centers and individual scholars. The program's four goals are to 1) support innovative collaboration on outstanding digital research projects; 2) expand digital literacy and expertise; 3) promote the work of digital humanities centers; and 4) encourage broad and open access to the humanities.

Each fellow must be "sponsored" by a center. The center sends in the grant application. The award provides funds for both a stipend for the fellow and a portion of the center's costs for hosting the fellow.

The intellectual cooperation between the scholar and the center may take many different forms and may involve humanities scholars of any level of digital expertise. Fellows may work exclusively on their own projects in consultation with center staff; collaborate on projects with other scholars affiliated with the center; function as "apprentices" on existing center projects; or any combination of these.

For more information, I urge you to consult the guidelines and talk with the FDHC staff at fdhc@neh.gov. Deadline is September 15, 2009.