Announcing 22 New Start-Up Grant Awards (March 2012)

The Office of Digital Humanities is happy to announce 22 new awards from our Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program from our September, 2011 deadline. These awards are part of a larger slate of 208 grants just announced by the NEH.

Congratulations to all the awardees for their terrific projects!

Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum Foundation -- Springfield, IL
HD-51556, Is That You, Mr. Lincoln?: Applying Authorship Attribution to the Early Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln
Daniel Stowell, Project Director
Patrick Juola, Co-Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: The application of several automated authorship attribution tests to determine if Abraham Lincoln may have written anonymous or pseudonymous newspaper articles early in his political career.

Bard College -- Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
HD-51565, The Distributed Text: An Annotated Digital Edition of Franz Boas’ Pioneering Ethnography 
Aaron Glass, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Early-stage development of a digital edition of Franz Boas' The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, which will be annotated extensively by joining distributed collections from archival and museum collections.

CUNY Research Foundation, College of Staten Island -- Staten Island, NY
HD-51543, A prototype of a syntactically annotated corpus of Appalachian English
Christina Tortora, Project Director
Outright: $44,169
To support: The continued development of a database of syntactically annotated Appalachian English that aligns speech files to text transcriptions.

Long Island University -- Brookville, NY
HD-51531, The Pathways to Freedom Digital Narrative Project
Deborah Mutnick, Project Director
Outright: $25,000
To support: The planning and alpha-level prototyping of a web and mobile-based resource that would facilitate public access to digital content on the African-American Civil Rights Movement created by collaborative, interdisciplinary teams of undergraduate students.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- Cambridge, MA
HD-51509, Annotation Studio:  multimedia text annotation for students
James Paradis, Project Director
Outright: $49,979
To support: The development of an open-source, web-based annotation tool to assist students in interpreting literary texts and other humanities sources.

Michigan State University -- East Lansing, MI
HD-51561, Building an Open-Source Archive for Born-Digital Dissertations
Liza Potts, Project Director
Outright: $25,000
To support: A three-day workshop to explore relevant issues and identify requirements for the development of an archive for the preservation of dissertations that incorporate interactive or dynamic digital media.

National Hispanic Cultural Center -- Albuquerque, NM
HD-51506, Digital Dialectic: Forging New Paths of Inquiry in the Humanities
Shelle Sanchez, Project Director
Outright: $49,472
To support: The development of software and related curricula to allow for the in-depth examination and analysis of visual humanities content within both immersive digital dome and web-based environments. The project will useas a model Mundos de Mestizaje, a contemporary fresco that highlights Hispanic history and cultural dialog.

New School -- New York, NY
HD-51513, Digital Video Navigation and Archival Content Management Tools for Non-linear Oral History Narratives
Peter Asaro, Project Director
Outright: $49,986
To support: This project builds on advances in HTML 5 to allow non-linear, hypertextual connections within audio and video archives of humanities materials, with the Oral History of Robotics archive serving as a test case.

New York Public Library -- New York, NY
HD-51618, NYC Chronology of Place, a Linked Open Data Gazetteer
Matthew Knutzen, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: The development of a gazetteer for New York City -- a digital dictionary of place names which will allow scholars, students, teachers, and the public to find and connect historic information about the city from the NYPL collection.

North Georgia College -- Dahlonega, GA
HD-51539, Encouraging digital scholarly publishing in the Humanities
Bonnie Robinson, Project Director
Outright: $24,923
To support: A workshop for directors of university presses and experts in publishing and peer review working toward developing a sustainable model to increase both institutional and technical support for publishing born-digital, book-length scholarly monographs in humanities topics, especially for small university presses.

SUNY Research Foundation, Buffalo -- Amherst, NY
HD-51570, Tesserae: A Search Engine for Allusion
Neil Coffee, Project Director
Outright: $49,835
To support: The early stage development of a computational tool to detect and analyze literary allusions, with an initial focus on Latin and ancient Greek.

Tufts University -- Medford, MA
HD-51548, Digital Humanities in the Classroom: Bridging the Gap between Teaching and Research
Marie-Claire Beaulieu, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: The early-stage development of a collaborative transcription, translation, and editing platform for Latin and ancient Greek texts. With this project, undergraduate and graduate students would participate in the creation of digital editions for inclusion in the Perseus Digital Library.

University of Arkansas, Fayetteville -- Fayetteville, AR
HD-51590, Mapping archaeological landscapes through aerial thermographic imaging
Jesse Casana, Project Director
Outright: $49,999
To support: Research into the best techniques for using aerial thermographic imaging to support archeological research, with tests to be run at sites in Cyprus, Dubai, and South Dakota.

University of California, Riverside -- Riverside, CA
HD-51625, FACES: Faces, Art, and Computerized Evaluation Systems
Conrad Rudolph, Project Director
Outright: $25,000
To support: A Level 1 project that will test the use of facial recognition software in the context of art history, with a long-term goal of assisting in the identification of human subjects in portraiture.

University of California, Santa Barbara -- Santa Barbara, CA
HD-51581, English Broadside Ballad Archive(EBBA): "Ballad Illustration Archive"
M. Patricia Fumerton, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: The adaptation of image-oriented computer vision software in order to facilitate more effective cataloging and discovery of similar but distinct illustrations found within the English Broadside Ballad Archive.

University of Houston -- Houston, TX
HD-51560, The Visual Page
Natalie Houston, Project Director
Outright: $49,955
To support: A book history project that seeks to identify and analyze visual features of books such as margins, spacing, and typeface, using as a test case approximately 60,000 page images from 300 books of Victorian poetry printed between 1860 and 1880.

University of Maryland, College Park -- College Park, MD
HD-51568, Active OCR: Tightening the Loop in Human Computing for OCR Correction
Travis Brown, Project Director
Outright: $41,906
To support: The development of a proof-of-concept correction tool to improve optical character recognition in humanities text collections.

University of Maryland, College Park -- College Park, MD
HD-51573, ANGLES: A web-based XML Editor
James Dickie, Project Director
Outright: $49,929
To support: The further development of a web-based editing tool for scholarly editors and students to use to prepare humanities texts with markup based on the Text Encoding Initiative.

University of Maryland, College Park -- College Park, MD
HD-51627, Topic Modeling for Humanities Research
Jennifer Guiliano, Project Director
Outright: $24,808
To support: A workshop and follow-up activities for 50 participants on the use of topic modeling with large-scale humanities datasets as a method of analysis for humanities scholarship.

University of South Carolina Research Foundation -- Columbia, SC
HD-51559, Making the Digital Humanities More Open
George Williams, Project Director
Outright: $49,339
To support: The development of a tool to make digital texts in the humanities accessible to visually impaired readers by converting text into braille.

University of Southern California -- Los Angeles, CA
HD-51571, Essays in Visual History: Making Use of the International Mission Photography Archive
Jon Miller, Project Director
Outright: $25,000
To support: A workshop in the summer of 2012 that would design the template and protocols guiding the creation of visual essays that would draw from the extensive collections of the International Mission Photography Archive.

Wright State University Main Campus -- Dayton, OH
HD-51538, The Scholar's Dashboard: Creating a multidisciplinary tool via design and build workshops (OhioLINK)
John Magill, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: A series of three two-day workshops that will bring together collaborative teams of scholars, librarians, and technologists to identify and design a range of potential tools and features to augment use of the digitized cultural heritage materials within the OhioLINK Digital Resource Commons.