ODH Update

HHPC and T-REX in the News

Brett Bobley — Fri, 09 May 2008 17:53:00 GMT

In the May 8th edition of HPCwire, John West wrote a piece called “High Performance Humanities” that discusses the NEH’s new HHPC initiative. It was great to see coverage of the new initiative in a leading HPC publication. One of our stated goals here in the Office of Digital Humanities is to inspire collaborations across disciplines. My hope is that the computing specialists who are regular readers of HPCwire will take an interest in the many computing challenges we have here in the humanities. In a similar vein, I also note that the Text Analysis Developers Alliance has just announced a new competition called T-REX that hopes to inspire text analysis projects, including those that take advantage of high performance computing. Over the next few years it will be interesting to see what HPC can bring to humanities research.

International HHPC Synchronicity

Brett Bobley — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 14:14:00 GMT

As many of you know, on April 22, the NEH announced our HHPC (Humanities High Performance Computing) initiative. So imagine my surprise when I was reading Geoffrey Rockwell's blog post later that same day. It turns out that on the very day the NEH announced our HHPC initiative, a group of Canadian scholars and scientists were having a two-day workshop on that very subject. The workshop was called "Digital Humanities and High Performance Computing" and was sponsored by SHARCNET, a high-performance computing network in Canada. Geoffrey, if you don't know him, is an Associate Professor of Humanities Computing and Multimedia at McMaster University in Canada and one of the people behind the TAPOR text analysis portal. I sent Geoffrey a note remarking on the coincidence and he said: "It is great timing. I got the e-mail announcement of your initiative on my Blackberry at the final lunch meeting just in time to tell my dean and associate vp research that NEH was doing HHPC."

CFP: DRHA 2008: 'New Communities of Knowledge and Practice'

Jason Rhody — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:35:00 GMT

Our colleagues at JISC recently passed along a call for papers (PDF) for the Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts conference, which is to be held at the University of Cambridge from September 14-17. Given our recent work with JISC, this year's conference theme is particularly compelling: discussions of "new collaborative environments, collective knowledge and redefining disciplinary boundaries." The deadline for submissions is April 30, 2008, so act now!

NEH Learns of Successes, Challenges of the Archimedes Palimpsest

Beth Stewart — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 17:04:00 GMT

On Wednesday, April 23, NEH had the pleasure of welcoming Mike Toth and Doug Emery from the Archimedes Palimpsest project, who shared their gained wisdom after years of overseeing the conservation, preservation, digitization, and transcription of a fragile and very valuable manuscript.

NEH Announces Humanities High Performance Computing Initiative

Brett Bobley — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 13:41:00 GMT

As you may have seen in today's Chronicle of Higher Education, the NEH has just announced our new Humanities High Performance Computing initiative -- HHPC for short. Our goal is to start a conversation about how high performance computers -- supercomputers -- can be used for humanities research. We are working with colleagues at the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to provide you with information on how high performance/grid computing and data storage might be used for work in the humanities. We are also announcing a new grant competition with DOE to award time and training on their machines. I urge you to check out our HHPC Resources page for more information.

Personally, I'm very curious to see where this new initiative takes us. It started over a year ago when the Office of Science at DOE approached us about making supercomputers available to humanities researchers. We invited a number of humanities scholars and supercomputing specialists to meet with us here at the NEH last July so we could think hard about this issue. Certainly, I think that everyone in attendance agreed that there are only a limited number of humanities projects today that require high performance computing. But one of the things we learned from colleagues at NSF and DOE is that this was the also the case in the sciences in the not-too-distant past -- scientists also had to learn about supercomputers before they could begin applying them to their work. Computation has proven an effective tool for scholarship and while supercomputers may only be useful for a small slice of the humanities today, I think it is safe to say that slice will grow in size over time. So think of this HHPC initiative as way of opening doors; a way of starting conversations and getting scholars, computer scientists, and information scientists talking about ways in which their fields might work together.

NEH Posts Guidelines for NEH Fellowships at Digital Humanities Centers

Brett Bobley — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:18:00 GMT

I'm very happy to say that the NEH's Division of Research has just posted the guidelines for our new "NEH Fellowships at Digital Humanities Centers" program ("FDHC" for short). The NEH first announced this program back at the CNI conference in December of 2007, but now the full guidelines are available. I would encourage all humanities centers to check out this new program and consider applying. The deadline is September 15th, 2008. In a nutshell, FDHC allows centers to apply for funding to bring in a visiting fellow to work on one or more humanities projects.

As a bit of background, this new grant program was inspired in part by the ACLS Cyberinfrastructure report, which encourages funding agencies like the NEH to support "...national centers of excellence in digital humanities and social science, as crucial seedbeds of further innovation." (ACLS, p. 35). The NEH Division of Research had extensive conversations with digital humanities centers to find out the best ways the NEH could support their work. So I really feel like this new program responds well to specific needs articulated by the field.

Large-scale digital humanities projects are complex. They involve many different people, disciplines, and skills to pull off properly. They require not only great scholarly talent, but management talent as well to keep everyone working together on time and on budget. That, I feel, is one of the keys to a successful center. Personally, I feel like this new FDHC program is a great opportunity to foster the kinds of collaborations necessary for a successful project. This program will allow the visiting fellow to work in a team-based environment at the center -- something very common in the sciences but less so in the humanities. I'm also quite keen on the flexibility of this new grant program. The center can propose bringing in any kind of a fellow: it could be a senior humanities scholar who wants the center staff to provide assistance working on a project involving technology; it could be a technology expert the center is bringing in to help with a humanities project; it could be a promising humanities postdoc who will assist on several ongoing projects already at the center so that he/she can gain valuable experience. In other words, the center can make the case for who they need and why it is good for the humanities. So the grant can fund the creation of great humanities projects while at the same time also being a learning opportunity for both the fellow and the center staff.

Grant Workshops in Indiana

Jason Rhody — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:12:00 GMT

Last week I flew out to Indiana—my first trip to the state—to give two grant workshops, one at Indiana University in Bloomington (home to one of the largest student unions in the country), and another at IUPUI in Indianapolis (home to one of the newest student unions in the country). Grant workshops are truly a give-and-take affair. We might come to showcase grant offerings at NEH and give tips about the application process, but we also benefit enormously from the communities we visit, learning about potential and existing projects, the needs of faculty and staff, and even ways that we can improve our communication and outreach.

Part of my tour of the Bloomington campus included a visit to the relatively new Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IDAH), including a chance to sit in on their brown-bag lunch series. David Shorter, one of four IDAH fellows, discussed how technology has changed both his research methodologies and publication strategies in his work with the Yoeme tribe in Northwest Mexico. I also was provided an in-depth look at the Mellon-funded EVIA Digital Archive. EVIA stands for “Ethnomusicological Video for Instruction and Analysis,” but as with so many tools, the potential for re-use in a variety of other disciplines--certainly cinema and media studies, but also any other field of study that uses moving images—is vast. William Cowan walked me through the EVIADA toolset, which allows you to divide large collections of video data into smaller components (while maintaining the integrity of the whole); provides detailed annotation, analytical, and peer review tools; and functions as a robust digital repository useful for both research and teaching.

After a very pleasant dinner at Samira Restaurant in downtown Bloomington, I had the fortune to attend a free guest recital given by Jeremy Denk. He played Charles Ives Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-60, a stunning piece with four movements: Emerson, Hawthorne, The Alcotts, Thoreau. Since I know only a little about music (we all have short-comings), I embraced the literary theme with enthusiasm, and listened (and watched) with fascination as Denk whirled through the shifting paces of Ives’ demanding piece (demands that include the use of a 14 inch piece of wood to depress a series of keys). You can listen to and read about the “Hawthorne” and “The Alcotts” movements at Denk’s website.

On Friday, I drove back to Indianapolis to meet with IUPUI faculty and staff and discuss NEH grant programs. With a few hours left before my planned plane departure, I was able to take an impromptu tour of the Institute for American Thought, which houses a variety of scholarly editing projects including the Peirce Edition Project, the Santayana Edition, and the Frederick Douglass Papers. I wish I could have grabbed a snapshot of the Peirce work area, which included what could best be described as clothes-lines with flowing sheaves of photocopied manuscript pages hanging from them. This is where the editors piece together the order of Peirce materials, almost puzzle-like, and it brought to mind immediately a certain passage from Jack London’s Martin Eden:

Hand in hand with reading, he [Martin] had developed the habit of making notes, and so copiously did he make them that there would have been no existence for him in the confined quarters had he not rigged several clothes-lines across the room on which the notes were hung.

Through this image, London draws the reader back to Martin’s earlier work as a laundry-man, and in doing so emphasizes that each kind of labor (physical and intellectual) requires a certain mechanics, stressing the methodology and materiality very much present in Martin’s labor of the mind. The practical laundry-line rig for the Peirce Edition Project was a perfect example of long-standing scholarly enterprise that Tom Scheinfeldt (at George Mason University) recently suggested was on the rise: “organizing activities, both in terms of organizing knowledge and organizing ourselves and our work.”

Having a few hours to kick around and listen to issues in scholarly editing is wonderful in itself—at least to folks interested in such matters, including me—but (be still my geek heart) the Institute also hosts The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, with shelves and shelves of Bradbury first editions. The Institute tour was a capstone to a productive, instructive, and thoroughly enjoyable trip, despite a flight home that included the phrases “emergency landing,” “assume the brace position,” and “let me get you that voucher.”

Keep an eye on the Upcoming Dates and Events section (in the right-hand column on the main page) to see where NEH staff might appear next.

Trip to University of Nebraska-Lincoln Research Fair

Brett Bobley — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:27:00 GMT

I just returned from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Research Fair. It was a great opportunity to give the UNL faculty an update about the NEH. I also had a nice tour of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. [...]

Rise of the Digital NEH

Brett Bobley — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 19:20:00 GMT

Andy Guess wrote a nice piece in today's Inside Higher Ed called "Rise of the Digital NEH." It mentions the new Office of Digital Humanities and discusses some trends in digital scholarship.

Thoughts on the JISC/NEH Grant Announcement at the Folger

Brett Bobley — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 20:48:00 GMT

Yesterday, I attended a ceremony over at the Folger Shakespeare Library. The occasion was NEH Chairman Bruce Cole announcing the winners of the first JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants. The Director of the Folger, Gail Kern Paster, also spoke, as did the Folger's Richard Kuhta, who is the director of one of the funded projects, the "Shakespeare Quartos Archive." Also in attendance were representatives from three of the other winning projects, including Greg Crane from Tufts, Linda Frueh from the Internet Archive, and Tom Elliott from the NYU Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. For a complete description of each grant, please check out the NEH press release. All told, a very impressive group of projects. Just before the ceremony, the Folger staff set up a display of three original Shakespeare quartos, including a copy of Titus Andronicus from 1594 of which there is only one copy in the world. (Yes, they made sure that the tea and snacks were served in a different room. Spills are not an option). Very, very cool.

The ceremony was great -- I was particularly impressed with the remarks of Richard Kuhta, the project director for the "Shakespeare Quartos Archive." Richard's project is a remarkable example of collaboration. Along with co-director Neil Fraistat of MITH, Richard was able to bring together the world's leading Shakespeare libraries (Folger, Huntington, British Library, Bodleian, Shakespeare Institute, National Library of Scotland, and the University of Edinburgh) to digitize and make available Shakespeare's quartos. That's quite an impressive international group. What I liked about Richard's comments was the way in which he really nailed what the grant call was all about:

The JISC/NEH initiative gave us the opportunity and the incentive to attempt a truly international, collaborative, digital project. The guidelines challenged us to think collectively about what was possible, and to realize a shared ambition. It was exactly the prompt we needed to launch a conversation that transformed geographically distant collections into partner institutions.

When we first started talking to our colleagues at JISC over a year ago, this kind of collaboration was precisely what we had in mind. Collaboration is difficult -- it requires extra effort to be successful. It is difficult on the funding end too -- it was a lot of work to put together joint grant guidelines with a funder from another country who has different policies and procedures. Jason Rhody of my ODH staff and Helen Agüera of the Division of Preservation and Access both put in a lot of extra time working with our JISC colleagues to get all the details in place. But the effort was worth it. And my belief is that these kinds of international grant calls can be a great way to inspire humanities collaborations that might not have happened otherwise.