Awards for Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants (August 2010)

I'm very happy to say that the NEH has just announced 28 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 201 awards announced today by the NEH.  For a full state-by-state list of all the awards, please see the press release.
 
Recently Announced Awards in the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program:   

American University -- Washington, DC 
The Map of Jazz Musicians: an online interactive tool for navigating jazz history's interpersonal network
Fernando Benadon, Project Director
Outright: $49,777
To support: The development of an online tool to map connections and collaborations among American jazz musicians.

Bank Street College of Education -- New York, NY 
Civil Rights Movement Remix (CRM-Remix) 
Bernadette Anand, Project Director
Outright: $25,000
To support: A series of workshops to plan the development of location-based smartphone applications about the African-American Civil Rights Movement based around sites in Harlem, NY.

Boston University -- Boston, MA 
Evolutionary Subject Tagging in the Humanities 
Jack Ammerman, Project Director
Outright: $13,767
To support: A two-day meeting of humanities scholars, librarians, and computational analysis experts to consider how to improve existing cataloging software that attempts to better classify interdisciplinary humanities research.

Brown University -- Providence, RI 
A Journal-Driven Bibliography of Digital Humanities 
Julia Flanders, Project Director
Outright: $49,659
To support: Development of a project led by the staff of Digital Humanities Quarterly (DHQ) to create, manage, export, and publish high quality bibliographical data across the digital humanities research domain.

Center for Civic Education -- Calabasas, CA 
Project Citizen CaseBase: Strengthening Youth Voices in an Open-Source Democracy 
Kaavya Krishna, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Development of a free online multimedia "dashboard" and database to enable sharing community activities and civic engagement programs that promote education in democracy for young people in more than 65 countries.

Columbia University -- New York, NY 
Leveraging "The Wisdom of the Crowds" for Efficient Tagging and Retrieval of documents from the Historic Newspaper Archive 
Haimonti Dutta, Project Director
Outright: $49,452
To support: A study of user-generated subject tagging to improve search capabilities for large-scale digital archives of humanities materials, using the historic newspaper collections of the New York Public Library.

Dartmouth College -- Hanover, NH 
Mapping the History of Knowledge: Text-Based Tools and Algorithms for Tracking the Development of Concepts 
Mikhail Gronas, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Text analysis of 15 editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica employing natural language processing, network analysis, and information visualization in order test computational methods for tracing changes in formation and evolution of concepts and ideas across domains of knowledge over time.

George Mason University -- Fairfax, VA 
Scholar Press 
Daniel Cohen, Project Director
Outright: $49,697
To support: The development of three tools that will aid in the dissemination of research and teaching materials for humanities scholars.

Illinois State University -- Normal, IL 
Building a Better Back-End: Editor, Author, & Reader Tools for Scholarly Multimedia 
Cheryl Ball, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Development of an open source editorial management system and reader tools for online publication of scholarly multimedia and related forms of digital scholarship for use with Open Journal System (OJS), a widely used editorial management system.

Indiana University, Bloomington -- Bloomington, IN 
Optical Music Recognition on the International Music Score Library Project 
Christopher Raphael, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Development of a prototype optical music recognition (OMR) software application and editorial platform to allow greater scholarly access to digitized music archives.

John Woodman Higgins Armory Museum, Inc. -- Worcester, MA 
Virtual Joust:  A Technological Interpretation of Medieval Jousting and Its Culture
Jeffery Forgeng, Project Director
Outright: $49,960
To support: The development of an interactive museum exhibition that uses game technology to engage visitors of the John Woodman Higgins Armory Museum in the history of medieval jousting.

Kent State University Main Campus -- Kent, OH 
The GeoHistorian Project 
Mark van't Hooft, Project Director
Outright: $49,749
To support: Educating K-12 teachers and students in the creation of local history content linked to community locations by QR codes (2-dimensional bar codes).

Lewis and Clark College -- Portland, OR 
Intellectual Property and International Collaboration in the Digital Humanities: the Moroccan Jewish Community Archives 
Oren Kosansky, Project Director
Outright: $49,950
To support: The development of a pilot website that provides interactive access to a translated, annotated, and searchable set of 50 to 75 documents of 19th and 20th century Moroccan Jewish materials.The project also will seek to create protocols and best practices for intellectual property issues for digital archival projects in developing countries.

Lower Eastside Girls Club of New York -- New York, NY 
The Lower Eastside Girls Club Girl/Hood Project 
Dave Pentecost, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Develop and test software to create 3D virtual reality performance based on local history of the Lower Eastside neighborhood where the Lower Eastside Girls Club is now located. The project will serve as a model for how humanities projects can take advantage of increasingly popular "fulldome" theaters found in museums across the nation.

Montana Preservation Alliance -- Helena, MT 
The Touchstone Project: Saving and Sharing Montana's Community Heritage 
Kathryn Hampton, Project Director
Outright: $49,146
To support: Development of the Touchstone Project, an interactive online archive of local history and cultural heritage that links local digital repositories to the online Montana Memory Project.

PublicVR -- Jamaica Plain, MA 
Egyptian Ceremony in the Virtual Temple- Avatars for Virtual Heritage 
Jeffrey Jacobson, Project Director
Outright: $49,913
To support: Development of new virtual reality technology for an exhibition on ancient Egypt at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

St. Louis University -- Saint Louis, MO 
The T-PEN Tool: Sustainability and Quality Control in Encoding Handwritten Texts 
James Ginther, Project Director
Outright: $49,708
To support: Creation of a generalized transcription tool coupled with automated mark-up techniques, based on a prototype developed for the Electronic Norman Anonymous Project (ENAP) and refined using data generated from the NEH-funded Carolingian Canon Law Project.

University of California, Riverside -- Riverside, CA 
The Early California Cultural Atlas 
Steven Hackel, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Development of a digital atlas to integrate and manage historical resources and enable analysis of historical data related to the colonization and settlement of early California.

University of California, San Diego -- La Jolla, CA 
DRAMA IN THE DELTA: Digitally Reenacting Civil Rights Performances at Arkansas' Wartime Camps for Japanese Americans 
Emily Roxworthy, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: A scholarly, historic simulation meant for public audiences exploring the racial dynamics of a wartime internment camp in the Arkansas Delta.

University of Chicago -- Chicago, IL 
Cinemetrics, a Digital Laboratory for Film Studies
Yuri Tsivian, Project Director
Outright: $45,711
To support: An online collection of tools that would allow film researchers to collect, store, and process scholarly data about film editing.

University of Georgia -- Athens, GA 
AI for Architectural Discourse 
Stefaan Van Liefferinge, Project Director
Outright: $24,965
To support: The creation of an ontology for architectural history to support humanities research that takes advantage of artificial intelligence technologies.

University of Maryland, College Park -- College Park, MD 
Professionalization in Digital Humanities Centers 
Tanya Clement, Project Director
Outright: $24,999
To support: A two-day workshop and online discussion resulting in recommendations for establishing professional standards for evaluating scholarship developed at digital humanities centers.

University of Maryland, College Park -- College Park, MD 
MITH API Workshop 
David Lester, Project Director
Outright: $24,930
To support: A two-day workshop on the use of Application Programming Interfaces to explore approaches that allow for greater sharing of content among humanities resources such as scholarly editions, digitized newspapers, and dictionaries.

University of North Texas -- Denton, TX 
Mapping Historical Texts: Combining Text-mining & Geo-visualization to Unlock the Research Potential of Historical Newspapers 
Andrew Torget, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Development of text-mining and visualization tools to study movement of information through time and space by analyzing digitized texts of historical newspapers from the NEH-funded Chronicling America archive.

University of Oregon, Eugene -- Eugene, OR 
Oregon Petrarch Open Book 
Massimo Lollini, Project Director
Outright: $49,978
To support: Development of a more interactive database driven website for the Oregon Petrarch Open Book project.

University of Richmond -- Richmond, VA 
Landscapes of the American Past: Visualizing Emancipation 
Edward Ayers, Project Director
Outright: $48,155
To support: The development of a digital atlas seeking to demonstrate how the spread of emancipation of enslaved people occurred during the US Civil War.

University of South Carolina Research Foundation -- Columbia, SC 
BRAILLESC.ORG 
George Williams, Project Director
Outright: $24,987
To support: The collection of additional oral histories, the preparation of pedagogical materials, and further development of additional accessibility features to a humanities website to allow for enhanced visitor experiences for visually-impaired users.

University of Washington -- Seattle, WA 
Collecting Online Music Project 
Ann Lally, Project Director
Outright: $18,881
To support: A planning meeting to discuss issues and possible solutions pertaining to the curation and preservation of born-digital music.