ODH in the News

With the announcement of our most recent round of 22 funded Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants projects and the continued accomplishments of many other ODH projects, we have seen a number of news stories in recent weeks featuring ODH grantees. Some highlights include:

• USA Today's Technology Live and tech news site Ars Technica featured the recently-funded project “FACES: Faces, Art, and Computerized Evaluation Systems,” led by art historian Conrad Rudolph at the University of California-Riverside. The FACES project will experiment with ways to apply facial recognition technology to the identification of portraiture by initially comparing the death masks of prominent 15th-century figures to portrait sculpture busts thought to depict them.
• The Associated Press featured recently funded Start-Up Grant project, “Is That You, Mr. Lincoln?: Applying Authorship Attribution to the Early Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln.” The project, which is led by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in collaboration with researchers at Duquesne University, will use computational methods to determine with greater certainty whether or not anonymous newspaper columns from Lincoln’s years in the Illinois state legislature were actually written by the future president.  
• Writing for Inside Higher Ed, Noah Wardrip-Fruin discusses the potential for a broader view of the digital humanities. In his essay, Wardrip-Fruin discusses "Media Systems," an upcoming workshop at the University of California-Santa Cruz that received ODH (as well as NSF, NEA, and Microsoft) funding and will bring together digital humanists, digital artists, and computer scientists in a dialogue about the creation and analysis of media-enabled systems.
• An article by Jennifer Howard of the Chronicle of Higher Education highlighted two ODH-funded projects from the New York Public Library. Harnessing the power of crowdsourcing, NYPL’s “What’s on the Menu?” has found enormous success as visitors have transcribed individual dishes on over 13,440 digitized menus from the collection. The article also mentions the newly funded “NYC Chronology of Place, a Linked Open Data Gazetteer,” which seeks to create a digital compendium of place names that can be related to materials in the NYPL collections, and “Map Warper,” a project funded through the Division of Preservation and Access Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program.