Announcing 23 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant Awards (March 2013)

The Office of Digital Humanities is happy to announce 23 awards from our Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program from our September 2012 deadline. These awards are part of a larger slate of 205 grants just announced by the NEH.

Congratulations to all the awardees for their terrific projects!

(FYI: We will also soon be announcing the awardees from our NEH/DFG Bi-Lateral Digital Humanities program soon -- just waiting for some paperwork from Germany. Stay tuned!)

Catholic University of America -- Washington, DC
HD 51640, Project Andvari: A Digital Portal to the Visual World of Early Medieval Northern Europe
Lilla Kopar, Project Director
Nancy Wicker, Project Director
Outright: $27,921
To support: A two day workshop bringing together an international group of humanities scholars, cultural heritage professionals, and technical experts to begin planning for an online resource that would facilitate access to digital collections of the art and artifacts of the early medieval period in northern Europe, drawn from a range of dispersed institutional holdings.

Cleveland State University -- Cleveland, OH
HD 51773, Mobile Museum Initiative
Erin Bell, Project Director
Mark Tebeau, Project Director
Outright: $60,000
To support: Development of a prototype of Curatescape Museums, a platform for mobile interpretation of museum collections, as well as best practices for small to mid sized museums interested in implementing mobile technologies.

Early Manuscripts Electronic Library -- Rolling Hills Estates, CA
HD 51709, Integrating Spectral and Reflectance Transformation Imaging for the Digitization of Manuscripts & Other Cultural Artifacts
Todd Hanneken, Project Director
Michael Phelps, Project Director
Outright: $60,000
To support: The establishment of best practices for the application of spectral imaging and Reflectance Transformation Imaging technologies to reveal new information about objects of study in the humanities. Activities would include the imaging of three test objects and follow up quality evaluation undertaken by humanities scholars.

Electronic Literature Organization -- Cambridge, MA
HD 51768, Pathfinders: Documenting the Experience of Early Digital Literature
Rudyne Grigar, Project Director
Stuart Moulthrop, Project Director
Outright: $52,003
To support: The development of preservation strategies for born digital literature, including capturing reading experiences of both the original authors as well as other readers, all to be incorporated in the Electronic Literature Directory.

Georgia Tech Research Corporation -- Atlanta, GA
HD 51705, TOME: Interactive TOpic Model and MEtadata Visualization
Jacob Eisenstein, Project Director
Lauren Klein, Project Director
Outright: $59,999
To support: The development of a web based tool for the visual exploration of the themes that recur across an archive, based on the text analysis technique of topic modeling combined with the archive's related metadata. A digitized archive of 19th century abolitionist newspapers would serve as the initial test case.

Independent Feature Project -- New York, NY
HD 51801, Traveling While Black
Woo Jung Cho, Project Director
Roger Williams, Project Director
Outright: $30,000
To support: A two day workshop led by Games for Change that will result in the development of a proof of concept prototype for a game based on The Negro Motorist Green Book, first published in 1936 with advice for African Americans traveling in the Jim Crow South.

Indiana University, Bloomington -- Bloomington, IN
HD 51642, Representing Early Black Film Artifacts as Material Evidence in Digital Contexts
Brian Graney, Project Director
Outright: $26,400
To support: A scholarly workshop and follow up activities that will bring together film studies scholars, moving image archivists, and library professionals to consider how digitization of early motion picture film might be improved to better capture the physical attributes of the film print.  The workshop would focus on early twentieth century films made for African American audiences.

Johns Hopkins University -- Baltimore, MD
HD 51636, Digital Prosopography for Renaissance Musicians: Discovery of Social and Professional Networks
Ichiro Fujinaga, Project Director
Susan Weiss, Project Director
Outright: $54,466
To support: The continued development of a prosopographical database tracing the social and professional networks of Renaissance musicians, using automated methods to identify individuals and biographical information within relevant sources and to establish relationships between them.

Kitchen Sisters Productions -- San Francisco, CA
HD 51791, Pop Up Archive: Standardized Preservation and Distribution of Culturally Significant Audio
Nikki Silva, Project Director
Outright: $60,000
To support: The development of open source software tools and educational materials to facilitate the dissemination and long term preservation of oral histories, radio broadcasts, and other audio content.

Lane Community College -- Eugene, OR
HD 51671, Bringing digital humanities to the community college and vice versa
Anne McGrail, Project Director
Outright: $29,271
To support: To conduct a survey of community college faculty and administrations and host a series of workshops at the Community College Humanities Association annual meeting to consider how community colleges can better participate in and contribute to the multiple ongoing conversations about digital humanities teaching and research.

Loyola University, Chicago -- Chicago, IL
HD 51718, Metadata Schema for Modernist Networks
Pamela Caughie, Project Director
David Chinitz, Project Director
Outright: $27,671
To support: A one day workshop to engage humanities scholars and technical experts in the development of a standardized metadata schema and vocabulary that describes and enables discovery of digital projects in modernist studies.

Mangalam Research Center for Buddhist Languages -- Berkeley, CA
HD 51772, The Buddhist Translators Workbench (BTW), a project of Mangalam Research Center for Buddhist Languages
Luis Gomez, Project Director
Outright: $60,000
To support: The continued development of a prototype of the Buddhist Translators Workbench, a platform for scholars and translators of classical Buddhist texts, as well as the preparation of supplementary user tutorials.

Northeastern University -- Boston, MA
HD 51728, Uncovering Reprinting Networks in Nineteenth Century American Newspapers
Ryan Cordell, Project Director
Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Project Director
David Smith, Project Director
Outright: $59,805
To support: The development of models, using tools from computational linguistics, to help track the spread of prints and reprints of poetry and short stories throughout 19th centry newspapers, using the sources found in the Chronicling America database of digitized newspapers.

Old Dominion University Research Foundation -- Norfolk, VA
HD 51670, Archive What I See Now
Michele Weigle, Project Director
Outright: $57,892
To support: The development of an open source tool that would allow web browsers to digitally archive a web page or series of pages as they appear at a particular point in time, using as case studies web resources that address humanities themes such as religious history and political dialog.

University of Arkansas, Fayetteville -- Fayetteville, AR
HD 51753, 21st Century Data, 21st Century Publications: 3D Model Publication and building the Peer Reviewer Community
Fred Limp, Project Director
Rachel Optiz, Project Director
Nicola Terrenato, Project Director
Outright: $49,719
To support: The development of a publication framework and peer reviewer community for scholarly publication of the three dimensional models and complex datasets produced by archaeological research.

University of California, Riverside -- Riverside, CA
HD 51735, FACES: Faces, Art, and Computerized Evaluation Systems, Phase II
Jeanette Kohl, Project Director
Amit Roy-Chowdhury, Project Director
Conrad Rudolph, Project Director
Outright: $60,000
To support: The refinement of additional techniques for using facial recognition software to help with the identification of human subjects in portraiture for art historical research.

University of California, Santa Cruz -- Santa Cruz, CA
HD 51719, A unified approach to preserving cultural software objects and their development histories
Noah Wardrip Fruin, Project Director
Outright: $30,000
To support: A Level 1 pilot project focusing on the preservation of software relevant to humanities scholars.

University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign -- Champaign, IL
HD 51787, Understanding Genre in a Collection of a Million Volumes
William Underwood, Project Director
Outright: $57,163
To support: The continuing development of software that would allow users to classify digitized literary works by genre, including allowing for the changing definitions of genre over time.

University of Maryland, College Park -- College Park, MD
HD 51766, Bridging communities of practice: Emerging technologies for content centered linking
Douglas Oard, Project Director
Outright: $24,650
To support: Two workshops to further explore how automated computational methods may facilitate access to cultural heritage materials by establishing structured relationships or links between digitized and born digital sources, including web and social media content.

University of Massachusetts, Amherst -- Amherst, MA
HD 51744, The Pompeii Bibliography and Mapping Resource Project
Eric Poehler, Project Director
Outright: $59,993
To support: Further development of a web based prototype platform that would allow researchers to access both geospatial and bibliographic information relevant to Pompeii.

University of Missouri, Kansas City -- Kansas City, MO
HD 51668, A Digital Studio for the Optical and Chemical Analysis Of Manuscripts and Printed Books
Virginia Blanton, Project Director
Jeffrey Rydberg Cox, Project Director
Nathan Oyler, Project Director
Outright: $59,896
To support: The analysis of a 15th century printed book and development of an online educational resource to further researchers’ understanding of how a range of imaging technologies offer new knowledge about the production and reception of books and manuscripts.

University of Virginia -- Charlottesville, VA
HD 51674, "Are We Speaking in Code?" (Voicing the Craft & Tacit Understandings of Digital Humanities Software Development)
Bethany Nowviskie, Project Director
Outright: $29,902
To support: A two day workshop that will bring together digital humanities scholars and software developers for critical discussion and hands on activities to further articulate and theorize the intellectual work behind the technical development of digital projects.

University of Virginia -- Charlottesville, VA
HD 51774, Digital Yoknapatawpha
Rafael Alvarado, Project Director
Jama Coartney, Project Director
Worthy Martin, Project Director
Stephen Railton, Project Director
Outright: $59,084
To support: The development of an expanded prototype that allows for the mapping and study of William Faulkner's fiction that took place in the imaginary county of Yoknapatawpha.