Announcing 32 New Start-Up Grant Awards (July 2011)

The Office of Digital Humanities is happy to announce thirty-two new awards from our Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program from our February, 2011 deadline. These awards are part of a larger slate of 249 grants just announced by the NEH.

Congratulations to all the awardees for their terrific projects!

Alexandria Archive Institute--San Francisco, CA
HD 51425, Gazetteer of the Ancient Near East
Eric Kansa, Project Director
Outright: $49,707
To support: The creation of the Gazetteer of the Ancient Near East, a geospatial index of archaeological sites and ancient historical places in the Near East, through the use of the Pleiades project software.

Cleveland State University -- Cleveland, OH
HD 51456, Mobile Historical
Mark Tebeau, Project Director
Outright: $49,990
To support: Development of Mobile Historical, a software application that enables users to publish humanities information to mobile devices.  

CUNY Research Foundation, City College -- New York, NY
HD 51459, Spanish Paleography Digital Teaching and Learning Tool
Ramona Hernandez, Project Director
Outright: $49,993
To support: The development of a platform that will enable researchers to employ and teach advanced techniques in analyzing and reading four centuries of Spanish writing styles.

Dartmouth College -- Hanover, NH
HD 51394, ACTION (Audio visual Cinematic Toolbox for Interaction, Organization, and Navigation): an open source Python platform<
Michael Casey, Project Director
Mark Williams, Co-Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: The development of a platform that would support the computational analysis of film and other audio video materials.--The platform would allow such features as the automatic detection of shots and scenes, the analysis of soundtracks, and overall content analysis.

Indiana University, Bloomington -- Bloomington, IN
HD 51372, Incorporating Annotated Video into Omeka
William Cowan, Project Director
Outright: $49,999
To support: The enhancement of Indiana University's "Annotator's Workbench" into an Omeka plug in, allowing for detailed annotation in video archival collections.

Indiana University, Indianapolis -- Indianapolis, IN
HD 51362, An Open Source Scholarly Text Editing Platform for the Critical Editions in the Institute for American Thought
David Pfeifer, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: The creation of a platform based on the Drupal content management system that would support the development of scholarly editions. The core test case is the NEH funded Charles Peirce edition, with input from editors of other critical editions housed at the Institute for American Thought.

Ithaca College -- Ithaca, NY
HD 51431, Untangling the Web of Historical Thinking: What the Structures of Student Produced Wikis Reveal
Michael Smith, Project Director Ali Erkan, Project Director Outright: $50,000
To support: Curriculum design that incorporates a study to examine how students' use of wikis can help them reach and cross conceptual thresholds in their understanding of historical knowledge.

Mangalam Research Center for Buddhist Languages -- Berkeley, CA
HD 51383, Buddhist Translators Workbench (BTW)
Stefan Baums, Project Director
Outright: $25,000
To support: The creation of a prototype for a platform allowing group collaborative translation, with Abidharma source texts serving as the initial test collection.

MediaAction -- Kodiak, AK
HD 51494, Rural Alaska Cultural Media Project
Marie Acemah, Project Director
Outright: $39,675
To support: The development and testing of a cultural media making curriculum for rural Alaskan students that incorporates instruction in ethnographic methodologies and the use of the Omeka presentation platform as a means of enhancing Alaskan public history.

Michigan State University -- East Lansing, MI
HD 51378, Digging Digitally: Creating a More Dynamic Archaeological Field Journal Archive
Jon Frey, Project Director
Outright: $23,914
To support: The development and testing of a digital field journal for use in archaeological investigations with a particular focus on adapting existing software for use on portable electronic devices.

Milwaukee Public Museum -- Milwaukee, WI
HD 51380, Proposing Holograms as an Innovative Exhibition Technology for Egyptian Mummies
Carter Lupton, Project Director
Outright: $24,632
To support: Development of a proof of concept for a 3 D high definition holographic exhibit of an Egyptian mummy unwrapping at the Milwaukee Public Museum.

Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts -- Minneapolis, MN
HD 51490, Enhancing the Humanities Through Innovation: The Extended Collection Project
Katherine Milton, Project Director
Outright: $25,000
To support: Development of a pilot program for training docents in using digital tours and resources.

Museum of the City of New York -- New York, NY
HD 51480, Improving Digital Record Annotation Capabilities with Open sourced Ontologies and Crowd sourced Workers
Lacy Schutz, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: The development of methods and tools to facilitate the description of digitized primary sources by combining "crowdsourcing" tactics with linked open data and semantic Web technologies.

New York Public Library -- New York, NY
HD 51427, MOVER [a Multimodal Open Source Variorum eBook Reader]
Doug Reside, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: The development of a prototype mobile application to allow users to study multimedia variorum editions of musical theater plays.

Ohio State University, Main Campus -- Columbus, OH
HD 51348, Meeting the Earthworks Builders: A flash based video game
Christine Morris, Project Director
Outright: $49,990
To support: The development of an educational computer game targeted to grades 4 - 8 about American Indian earthworks, building on the scholarship of John Hancock's NEH funded EarthWorks project.

Reed College -- Portland, OR
HD 51352, Enhancing Dance Literacy: Dance Notation Through Touch Technology
Hannah Kosstrin, Project Director
Outright: $25,000
To support: Development of a software program for touch technology tablets such as the iPad that would allow for scholarly dance notation.

Stone Soup Productions, Inc. -- Washington, DC
HD 51389, The American Guide Game
Andrea Kalin, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Development of a web based game that would teach players about the Federal Writers' Project and America during the Great Depression.

SUNY Research Foundation, College at Purchase -- Purchase, NY
HD 51419, Creative Telecollaboration and Language Acquisition Curriculum
Marc Brudzinski, Project Director
Outright: $49,989
To support: A program of foreign language instruction that incorporates computer assisted learning technologies. The project will enable undergraduates to coordinate with students in Marseille and Bogota on assignments that will allow for immersion style learning about French and Spanish language and culture.

Texas A & M University, Commerce -- Commerce, TX
HD 51398, Remixing Rural Texas:--Local Texts, Global Context
Shannon Carter, Project Director
Outright: $24,966
To support: The development of a prototype for facilitating the "remixing" of various types of digitized primary sources for Web presentations on the history of race and race relations in rural Texas.

University of California, Los Angeles -- Los Angeles, CA
HD 51465, Immersive Coordinates: Digital Anatolia
Christopher Johanson, Project Director
Outright: $49,566
To support: The development of a software platform, using two archaeological digs in Turkey as test cases, to present findings from archaeological sites with particular attention given to data management, curation, and publication.

University of California, Santa Barbara -- Santa Barbara, CA
HD 51433, RoSE Research oriented Social Environment: Bibliographical Knowledge as Social Knowledge
Alan Liu, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: The further development of a digital environment that explores the use of social networking approaches to connect humanities bibliographical resources with humanities scholars and students.

University of Houston -- Houston, TX
HD 51400, Vwire: Digital Content Management through Spatial Arrangement  a Tool for Visual Argumentation in the Humanities
Daniel Price, Project Director
Outright: $49,931
To support: The development of a virtual research tool, using Teotihuacan stone masks as exemplars, to allow scholars to order, share, and discuss interpretations of digital images datasets based on their visual characteristics.

University of Illinois at Chicago -- Chicago, IL
HD 51357, CoCensus: Collaboration Exploration of Census Data in a Museum
Leilah Lyons, Project Director
Outright: $49,999
To support: A prototype museum exhibit that would allow visitors to interact with dynamic visualizations of census data.

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill -- Chapel Hill, NC
HD 51343, Gnovis: Flowing Through the Galaxy of Knowledge
Lucia Binotti, Project Director
Outright: $49,913
To support: Advanced development of multiple flexible and re usable user interfaces that would allow for the display of large amounts of data organized semantically.--Two core datasets will serve as the focus of the start up activities: historical composers of music, and a corpus of Renaissance Spanish literature.

University of Southern California -- Los Angeles, CA
HD 51377, Mobile Shakespeare Scripts
Bruce Smith, University of Southern California, Co-Project Director
Katherine Rowe, Bryn Mawr, Co-Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: The creation and testing of a prototype dynamic script interface for theater professionals, humanities scholars, and students to allow for the study of a lifecycle of theatrical performance as it moves from play to script to production.

University of Texas, Austin -- Austin, TX
HD 51472, Bibliopedia
Geraldine Heng, Project Director
Outright: $49,994
To support: A project focused on the concept of "linked data" that would develop a data mining and cross referencing tool allowing search across many humanities repositories of primary and secondary sources, such as JSTOR and the Library of Congress.--The prototype will use the medieval travel narrative The Travels of Sir John Mandeville as its test case.

University of Texas, Austin -- Austin, TX
HD 51475, A Thousand Words: Advanced Visualization for the Humanities
Robert Turknett, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Development of a general purpose interface for large scale displays that use the computer language Processing in order to visualize large amounts of humanities materials.

University of Virginia -- Charlottesville, VA
HD 51455, Less Networked Speaker Communities and Digital Language Archives
Lise Dobrin, Project Director
Outright: $23,912
To support: A conference of linguistics scholars, technology specialists, and cultural community representatives to explore ways of enabling speakers of endangered languages to participate in the ongoing development and stewardship of digital language archives.

University of Washington -- Seattle, WA
HD 51488, The Svoboda Diaries Project: From Digital Text to "New Book"
Walter Andrews, Project Director
Outright: $48,913
To support: The development of a new publishing model for on demand publication for scholarly editions, using a collection of personal diaries from 19th century Iraq.

Wake Forest University -- Winston Salem, NC
HD 51432, ACTIV ES: a novel Spanish language corpus for linguistic and cultural comparisons between communities of the Hispanic world
Jerid Francom, Project Director
Outright: $25,000
To support: The planning and development of a preliminary Spanish language corpus that will draw from three communities in Spain, Mexico, and Argentina.

Wheaton College -- Norton, MA
HD 51403, Developing a User Experience for TAPAS (the TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service)
Scott Hamlin, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: A series of workshops to develop and test a prototype interface for the TAPAS (TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service) Project, an online service that allows for the storage, sharing, and analysis of TEI encoded texts.

Yale University -- New Haven, CT
HD 51421, Photogrammar Project Laura Wexler, Project Director
Outright: $49,982
To support: Development of a website that would offer new ways of organizing, searching, and visualizing the archive of 160,000 photographs produced by the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA OWI) from 1935 to 1943.