Announcing New ODH Awards (January 2022)

The Office of Digital Humanities is pleased to announce fifteen awards through our Digital Humanities Advancement Grants program and twelve awards through the NEH/AHRC New Directions for Digital Scholarship at Cultural Institutions program, a collaboration with the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities, Division of Research Programs, and Division of Preservation and Access, and the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council.

These projects are part of a larger slate of 208 awards announced by the NEH. Congratulations to all the award recipients as they begin these exciting new projects! [View a map of awardees]

Digital Humanities Advancement Grants

This program is funded in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Projects supported through this partnership are indicated by an asterisk (*) in the list below.

University of Arizona

Outright: $324,573

Project Director(s): Jennifer Jenkins

Project Title: Tribesourcing Southwest Film: Digital Repatriation

Project Description: A series of workshops in Arizona, New Mexico, and California and the development of a digital curriculum on the creation of culturally-appropriate descriptive metadata and narration for Native American films based on the Tribesourcing Southwest Film website.

Boise State University

Outright: $100,000

Project Director(s): Kelly Arispe

Project Title: Evaluating the Practices and Impact of Digital Scholarship on World Language Pedagogy

Project Description: An evaluative study on the impact of teaching world languages using Open Educational Resources (OERs) in K–12 classrooms across Idaho.

Trustees of Indiana University

Outright: $325,000

Project Director(s): John Walsh; J. Stephen Downie

Project Title: Tools for Open Research and Computation with HathiTrust: Leveraging Intelligent Text Extraction (TORCHLITE)

Project Description: The development of web-based tools and documentation to allow both novice and expert users to interact with data from the HathiTrust Digital Library.

Northeastern University
Outright: $99,957

Project Director(s): Ellen Cushman; Julia Flanders

Project Title: Translating Cherokee Manuscripts*

Project Description: The further development of user interfaces for collective translation of the collections in the Digital Archive for American Indian Languages Preservation and Perseverance (DAILP), a digital archive of Cherokee-language manuscripts and lexical resources.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Outright: $50,000

Project Director(s): Cagri Zaman; Caroline Jones

Project Title: Immersive Storytelling Platform for Examining Spatial History

Project Description: Prototype development of a new digital tool that will allow users to identify and study objects and landscapes appearing in moving-image scenes.

Michigan State University
Outright: $99,908

Project Director(s): Elizabeth Sneller

Project Title: Building and Disseminating an App for Ethnographic Remote Audio Recording

Project Description: The development and testing with humanities scholars of an open-source, mobile recording app for collecting “audio diaries” for use in research and public engagement.

Lindenwood University
Outright: $49,938

Project Director(s)(s): Geremy Carnes; Margaret Smith

Project Title: Expanding Access to the Digital Humanities in St. Louis

Project Description: Developing a workshop and building a network for supporting and disseminating methods in digital humanities pedagogy for secondary and post-secondary institutions in the St. Louis, Missouri, region.

Saint Louis University
Outright: $225,000; Match: $50,000

Project Director(s): Daniel Nickolai

Project Title: iSpraak: A web-based application for second-language pronunciation instruction, assessment, and research

Project Description: Scaling up development and dissemination of the iSpraak application as a free and open-source language pronunciation instruction and learning tool.

Montclair State University
Outright: $39,176

Project Director(s): John Soboslai

Project Title: Seeing What Takes Place: Exploring Immersive Experiences of Religious Rituals

Project Description: Convening a group of religious studies scholars and technologists to research best practices and evaluate the appropriateness of recording and interpreting religious rituals in extended reality (XR) for teaching religion.

Association of University Presses, Inc.
Outright: $49,680

Project Director(s): John Sherer; Erich van Rijn

Project Title: Understanding the Impact on Print Revenue When University Press Books are Open Access

Project Description: A survey of scholarly presses and the preparation of a report on revenue models for open access publishing.

New York University
Outright: $50,000

Project Director(s): Tega Brain; Ahmed Ansari; Elaine Ayers; Laura Briscoe

Project Title: Inverting the Wunderkammer: Rethinking the Digital Humanities through Botanic Histories and Archives

Project Description: Convening of a series of participatory design workshops to enhance discovery and use of the Mitten Collection of moss for humanities research.

Carnegie Mellon University
Outright: $324,931

Project Director(s): Christopher Warren; Max G'Sell; Samuel Lemley; Matthew Lincoln

Project Title: Secret Printing: Freedom and the Press before Freedom of the Press*

Project Description: The scaling-up of tools and methods to allow scholars to identify and decipher illicit printing in documents predating and associated with the First Amendment.

Vanderbilt University
Outright: $49,289

Project Director(s): Markus Eberl

Project Title: Changing Communities of Ancient Builders: Machine Learning-based Analysis of Mortars from Caesarea Maritima

Project Description: The creation of machine learning methods to identify microartifacts from archaeological sites.

Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia
Outright: $44,570

Project Director(s): Jennifer Stertzer; James McClure; Bayard Miller

Project Title: Planning a Federated Early North American Weather Records Digital Resource*

Project Description: A series of meetings to develop a prototype for a federated digital resource on North American weather and climate data collected during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

University of Richmond*
Outright: $324,693

Project Director(s): Lauren Tilton; Taylor Arnold

Project Title: Digital Public Humanities Software for Visualizing Image Collections

Project Description: The creation of software to easily allow non-programmers to develop interactive public humanities digital projects.

New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions

These awards represent partnerships between institutions based in the United States and the United Kingdom. Amounts listed below are for the NEH portion of each collaborative award; the UK partners will be receiving funding through the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council.

University of Arizona
Outright: $50,000

Project Director(s): Jennifer Jenkins

Project Title: Indigenous Knowledges: A Digital Residency Exchange and Best Practices Pilot

Project Description: The development of a reciprocal, consultative model for collaborative digital decolonizing of Indigenous materials between a U.S. tribal college library (Kinyaa'áanii Charlie Benally Library at Diné College) and a UK cultural heritage collecting institution (Wellcome Collection). The UK partner is the University of Kent.

University of Arkansas, Fayetteville
Outright: $49,999

Project Director(s): Carla Klehm; Christopher Angel; Angelia Payne; Malcolm Williamson

Project Title: Digital Storytelling on African Urbanisms

Project Description: The assessment and expansion of the metsemegolgolo digital archive for use in teaching digital storytelling to K–12 and college students in Southern Africa and across the Global South. The UK partner is the University of Cambridge.

Yale University
Outright: $150,000

Project Director(s): Peter Leonard; Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass; Yer Vang-Cohen

Project Title: Enriching Exhibition Scholarship

Project Description: The development of methodologies and workflows to create structured metadata about art exhibitions and objects from catalogs, historic newspapers, and social media. The UK partner is the University of Edinburgh.

University of Notre Dame
Outright: $150,000

Project Director(s): Robert Goulding

Project Title: Unlocking Digital Texts: Towards an Interoperable Text Framework

Project Description: The development of a proof of concept for an Interoperable Text Framework, which will standardize the format of digital texts to make them easier to present, analyze, and reuse. The lead UK partner is the University of Oxford.

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Outright: $50,000

Project Director(s): Audrey Bennett

Project Title: I Don't See What You Mean: Designing Creative, Accessible Museum Experiences

Project Description: The development and testing of a one-day workshop for museum practitioners that will use the Inclusive Co-Created Audio Description model to change how museum workers understand and implement digital accessibility for blind, partially blind, and sighted audiences. The UK partner is the University of Westminster.

Trustees of Princeton University
Outright: $150,000

Project Director(s): Christina Lee; Anuradha Vedantham

Project Title: The Library of The Convent of San Pablo (Manila, 1762)

Project Description: A project to digitize a collection of more than 1,500 rare manuscripts, maps, and early printed materials that were taken in the eighteenth century from the Convent of San Pablo in Manila, Philippines, and dispersed throughout the Philippines, United States, and United Kingdom. The UK partner is SOAS University of London.

SUNY Research Foundation, Farmingdale State
Outright: $150,000

Project Director(s): Mary Caulfield

Project Title: Designing Mixed Reality Heritage Performances

Project Description: The creation of research-based performances and toolkits about the eighteenth-century slave trade in Deerfield, Massachusetts, and London for cultural heritage sites in the U.S. and UK. The UK partner is Brunel University London.   

Cornell University
Outright: $50,000

Project Director(s): Tao Goffe

Project Title: Towards an Integrated Colonial Archive: Humanities, Law and British Indentureship

Project Description: The creation of an interactive website that brings together collections in the United States and United Kingdom to facilitate scholarship on colonialism and indentureship. The UK partner is Birkbeck College.

Bucknell University
Outright: $43,875

Project Director(s): Diane Jakacki

Project Title: Evolving Hands: Building Workflows and Scalable Practices for Handwriting

Project Description: The development and publication of training materials and documentation for the automatic transcription of historical manuscripts, based on three case studies from the Gertrude Bell Archive, the Records of Early English Drama, and archival collections held at Bucknell University. The UK partner is Newcastle University.

Rice University
Outright: $149,995

Project Director(s): Daniel Domingues da Silva

Project Title: Towards a Digital Archive of the Atlantic Slave Trades: Unlocking the Records of the South Sea Company

Project Description: The development of the Digital Archive of the Atlantic Slave Trades, an open-access resource that will digitize, transcribe, translate, and semantically link manuscript materials documenting the South Sea Company and its contribution to the trans-Atlantic and intra-American slave trades. The UK partner is Lancaster University.

George Mason University
Outright: $49,999

Project Director(s): T. Kelly; Deepthi Murali

Project Title: Subaltern Histories of Global Textiles: Connecting Collections, Expanding Engagement

Project Description: Data collection, analysis, and construction of a prototype website to explore the use of Indian-style textiles in the African diaspora in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The UK partner is the University of Edinburgh.

University of Wyoming
Outright: $150,000

Project Director(s): Isadora Helfgott; Paul Flesher

Project Title: Finding a Place: Advancing Digital Methods to Unlock the Use of Digitized Book Illustrations in Cultural Institutions

Project Description: A research project on identifying and analyzing patterns in book illustration (c. 1750–1940) using digitized books from collections in Wyoming, Wales, and England. The UK partner is Cardiff University.