Announcing New ODH Awards (August 2019)

The Office of Digital Humanities is pleased to announce 22 awards through our Digital Humanities Advancement Grants and our Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities programs. 

These projects are part of a larger slate of 215 awards just announced by the NEH. Congratulations to all the award recipients as they begin these exciting new projects!

DIGITAL HUMANITIES ADVANCEMENT GRANTS (January 2019 deadline)

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.

Ball State University (Muncie, IN)

Library Circulation Histories *
Project Director: James Connolly
Outright: up to $49,900

To support: A workshop to bring together representatives from eleven library and reading history digital projects along with additional scholars and digital humanities developers to investigate making historical library circulation data more accessible for humanities research.

College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, VA)

Transkribus and the Georgian Papers Programme Tabular-Formatted Manuscripts *
Project Director: Deborah Cornell
Co-Project Director: Zhenming Liu
Outright: up to $100,000

To support: A project to explore the application of the open-source Handwritten Text Recognition tool, Transkribus, to machine-driven transcription of handwritten materials of tabular formats, such as financial records and inventories, using materials from the Georgian Papers Programme.

Gettysburg College (Gettysburg, PA)

Mesolex: Lexicosemantic Resources for Mesoamerican Languages
Project Director: Jonathan Amith
Outright: up to $48,698

To support: Planning and early stages of development for an open-access portal of linguistic and cultural documentation of indigenous societies in Mexico and Central America.

George Mason University (Fairfax, VA)

Datascribe: Enabling Structured Data Transcription in the Omeka S Web Platform
Project Director: Jessica Otis
Co-Project Director: Lincoln Mullen
Outright: up to $324,733

To support: The creation of a structured data transcription module for the Omeka S platform that will make it easier for scholars working with quantitative data (such as government forms or institutional records) to transcribe them into structured data that can be analyzed or visualized.

Louisiana State University and A & M College (Baton Rouge, LA)

Interactive VR Simulation of an Eighteenth-Century Paris Fair Theatre: VESPACE
Project Director: Jeffrey Leichman
Outright: up to $99,995

To support: The further development of the VESPACE (Virtual Early modern Spectacles and Publics, Active and Collaborative Environment) project. This stage would focus on the development of an interactive prototype suitable for additional user testing.

North Carolina State University (Raleigh, NC)

Using Scalar to Deep-Map Modern East Asian History Project Description
Project Director: David Ambaras
Co-Project Director: Kate McDonald (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Outright: up to $99,995

To support: The further development of the Bodies and Structures series on East Asian history and geospatial studies. As part of the project, the Scalar publishing platform would be improved to allow for the incorporation of additional spatial visualizations.

President and Fellows of Harvard College (Cambridge, MA)

Imperiia: An Information Ecosystem for Russian History *
Project Director: Kelly O’Neill
Outright: up to $99,783

To support: The further development of a map-based platform and enhanced set of tools to better integrate spatial history and Russian studies, allowing scholars to make connections between disparate sources and identify new research questions and areas of study.

Rhizome Communications, Inc. (New York, NY)

Early Online Communities in Context
Project Director: Michael Connor
Outright: up to $45,722

To support: The development of a context-rich, interactive reconstruction of “The Thing,” a significant early online community, and support scholarship based on this reconstruction.

Shift Design, Inc (New Orleans, LA)

Redesigning Historypin for Open-Source Digital Humanities
Project Director: Hali Dardar
Outright: up to $49,824

To support: The planning for a revitalization of the community-sourced history mapping platform Historypin.org and to migrate its underlying code to an open-source framework.

Stone Soup Productions, Inc. (Washington, DC)

Project Maestro
Project Director: Andrea Kalin
Outright: up to $100,000

To support: The further development of a platform for middle and high school humanities teachers to incorporate content-based games into their classrooms.

South Carolina Department of Natural Resources (Columbia, SC)

SnowVision: A Machine Learning-Based Image Processing Tool for the Study of Archaeological Collections
Project Director: Karen Smith
Co-Project Directors: Song Wang (University of South Carolina, Columbia), Colin Wilder (University of South Carolina, Columbia), and Jun Zhou (University of South Carolina, Columbia)
Outright: up to $323,668 (co-funded by the NEH Division of Research Programs)

To support: The expansion and extension of a set of machine learning-based tools designed to assist scholars with identifying and classifying artifacts from archaeological sites based on design motifs.

Trustees of Tufts College (Boston, MA)

Beyond Translation: New Possibilities for Reading in a Digital Age
Project Director: Gregory Crane
Outright: up to $325,000
Matching: up to $50,000

To support: An expansion of the widely used Perseus Digital Library to integrate reading tools that are designed to facilitate the study of ancient texts and the ability to conduct searches for relevant words and phrases.

University of Chicago (Chicago, IL)

Intertextual Bridges: Search and Navigation across Heterogeneous Collections
Project Director: Robert Morrissey
Outright: up to $99,497

To support: The development of a prototype platform that will allow scholars to combine distant and close reading methods to discover relationships between texts and identify texts in collections for further study.

University of Nevada, Reno (Reno, NV)

Ethical Visualization in the Age of Big Data: Contemporary Cultural Implications of Pre-Twentieth-Century French Texts
Project Director: Christopher Church
Co-Project Director: Katherine Hepworth
Outright: up to $49,581

To support: A two-day workshop and follow up activities on approaches to developing ethical data visualization techniques and interactive cartographic interfaces with a particular focus on text mining colonial-era French newspapers.

University of North Carolina, Greensboro (Greensboro, NC)

MassMine Advancement Grant for Sustainable Data-Driven Humanities Research
Project Director: Aaron Beveridge
Outright: up to $324,865

To support: The continuing development of the MassMine platform, an opensource toolkit that allows humanities scholars to collect large-scale, publicly available data drawn from social media sites for research and teaching.

Yale University (New Haven, CT) 

Development of a Multi-Camera, Computer Operated Photogrammetric  Imaging System for Enhancing Digital Preservation and Access
Project Director: Nelson Rios
Outright: up to $99,355

To support:  The further development and refinement of a system to carry out photogrammetric 3D reconstruction quickly, inexpensively, and without the need for specialized equipment

INSTITUTES for ADVANCED TOPICS in the DIGITAL HUMANITIES (March 2019 deadline)

CUNY Research Foundation, Graduate School and University Center (New York, NY)

Digital Humanities Research Institutes: Further Expanding Communities of Practice
Project Director: Lisa Rhody
Outright: up to $249,978

To support: A ten-day residential institute and follow-up activities for 15 participants to develop core humanities computational research and project development skills hosted at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

George Mason University (Fairfax, VA)

Digital Methods for Military History
Project Director: Abigail Mullen
Outright: up to $126,947

To support: A two-week long institute that will teach participants how to create datasets, visualize data, and create maps, with the overarching goal of creating a cohort of military historians who are able to use digital tools and methods to examine issues at the intersection of war and society.

University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)

Building Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining
Project Director: Rachael Samberg
Outright: up to $165,034

To support: A four-day summer workshop at the University of California, Berkeley, and follow-up activities for 32 participants on the ethical and legal issues around data mining of large-scale textual collections for humanities research.

University of Central Florida, Orlando (Orlando, FL)

Understanding Digital Culture: Humanist Lenses for Internet Research
Project Director: Anastasia Salter
Outright: up to $129,102

To support: A five-day institute for 25 participants organized by and hosted at the University of Central Florida for using digital methods to research digital culture.

University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA)

Advanced Digital Editing: Modeling the Text and Making the Edition
Project Director: David Birnbaum
Outright: up to $249,456 (co-funded by the NEH Division of Research Programs)

To support: A two-week summer institute on the theory and development of digital scholarly editions for 25 participants to be hosted at the University of Pittsburgh.

Georgia Tech Research Corporation (Atlanta, GA)

Object Lessons: Current Topics for a General Readership
Project Director: Ian Bogost
Co-Project Director: Christopher Schaberg (Loyola University, New Orleans)
Outright: up to $25,123

To support: A supplement to the Object Lessons workshop aimed at helping scholars turn their research into books and articles aimed at the general public.