Announcing 13 Digital Humanities Start-Up Awards
The NEH is proud to announce 13 brand-new awardees in our Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant category. Please check out the list of winners.
Brown University -- Providence, RI
Encoding Names for Contextual Exploration in Digital Thematic Research Collections
Julia Flanders, Project Director
Outright: $49,992
To support: The advancement of humanities text encoding and research by refining and expanding the
automated representation of personal names and their contexts.
Hofstra University -- Hempstead, NY
Melville, Revision, and Collaborative Editing: Toward a Critical Archive
John Bryant, Project Director
Outright: $23,591
To support: The development of the TextLab scholarly editing tool to allow for analysis of texts that exist
in multiple versions or editions, beginning with the Melville Electronic Library.
Lake Forest College -- Lake Forest, IL
Virtual Burnham Initiative
Davis Schneiderman, Project Director
Outright: $25,000
To support: The development of the Virtual Burnham Initiative (VBI), a multimedia project that would
examine the history and legacy of Daniel H. Burnham's and Edward H. Bennett's Plan of Chicago
(1909).
Mississippi State University -- Mississippi State, MS
Distributed Archives Transaction System
Paul Jacobs, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Development of open source web tools for accessing online digitized collections in the
humanities via a system that communicates with multiple database types while protecting the integrity
of the original data sets.
New York University -- New York, NY
MediaCommons: Social Networking Tools for Digital Scholarly Communication
Brian Hoffman, Project Director
Outright: $49,657
To support: Development of a set of networking software tools to support a "peer-to-peer" review
structure for MediaCommons, a scholarly publishing network in the digital humanities.
Independent Scholar -- Brooklyn, NY
Sophie Search Gateway
Daniel Visel, Project Director
Outright: $23,750
To support: The development of an interoperable portal within the Web authoring program, "Sophie,"
for locating and incorporating multi-media sources from the Internet Archive.
University of Alaska, Fairbanks -- Fairbanks, AK
Minto Songs
Siri Tuttle, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: The collection, digitization, organization, and archival storage, as well as dissemination
among the Minto Athabascan community, of recorded performances of Alaskan Athabascan songs.
University of Arizona -- Tucson, AZ
Virtual Vault
Douglas Gann, Project Director
Outright: $25,000
To support: Electronic access to the world's largest collection of whole pottery vessels from the
American Southwest through digital renderings of Arizona State University's Pottery Vault and relevant
prehistoric archaeological sites as well as interviews with anthropologists, conservators, and Native
American potters.
University of Maryland, College Park -- College Park, MD
Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use
Matthew Kirschenbaum, Project Director
Outright: $11,708
To support: A series of planning meetings and site visits aimed at developing archival tools and best
practices for preserving born-digital documents produced by contemporary authors.
University of Massachusetts, Boston -- Boston, MA
Online Social Networking for the Humanities: the Massachusetts Studies Network Prototype
Joanne Riley, Project Director
Outright: $24,748
To support: The development and evaluation of a social networking platform for the members of the
statewide Massachusetts Studies Project.
University of Texas, Austin -- Austin, TX
The eCommentary Machine Project
Samuel Baker, Project Director
Outright: $49,251
To support: Development of a web-based collaborative commentary and annotation tool.
University of Virginia -- Charlottesville, VA
Jefferson's Travels: A Digital Journey Using the HistoryBrowser
Scot French, Project Director
Outright: $49,827
To support: Development of an interactive web-based tool to integrate primary documents, dynamic
maps, and related information in the study of history, with the prototype to be focused on Thomas
Jefferson's trip to England in 1786.
Wheaton College -- Norton, MA
Pattern Recognition through Computational Stylistics: Old English and Beyond
Mark LeBlanc, Project Director
Outright: $41,950
To support: Development of a prototypical suite of computational tools and statistical analyses to
explore the corpus of Old English literature using the genomic approach of tracing information-rich
patterns of letters as well as that of literary analysis and interpretation.