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Announcing New ODH Awards (August 2024) 

September 5, 2024
Arthur Dove, Sun, 1943, watercolor, pen, and ink on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Suzanne M. Smith
Photo caption

Arthur Dove, Sun1943, watercolor, pen, and ink on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Suzanne M. Smith

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

These 18 projects are part of a larger slate of 240 awards announced by NEH. We are truly excited about this round of awards which demonstrate the breadth of groundbreaking work currently being done in digital humanities, including an exploration of employing solar power for archiving and projects that implement and teach AI for the humanities. Congratulations to all the award recipients on these exciting projects!

Digital Humanities Advancement Grants

This program is funded in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Projects supported through this partnership are noted in the list below. 

Level I

Level One awards offered up to $75,000 to support small research projects or early stages of larger projects. 

Bard College

Krista Caballero, Valerie Barr, Beate Liepert, and Susan Merriam

Solar-Powering the Humanities: Archiving for the Future

Development and implementation of solar-powered archival storage to reduce the environmental impact of digital preservation, as well as documentation to support adoption of this model.

Texas Tech University

David Robert Sears and Tommy Dang

Music Informatics for Radio Across the GlobE (MIRAGE)

Development and release of an open-access research database and visualization tool for musicologists and media scholars to analyze global music streamed on internet radio.

Level II

Level Two awards offer up to $150,000 to support projects that have completed an initial planning phase and are poised to scale up.

George Mason University

Deepthi Murali and Jason A. Heppler

Connecting Threads: Digitally Connecting Collections, Expanding Public Engagement

Design and launch of a digital project on the histories of global fashion using collections from multiple cultural heritage museums and the release of open-source software designed for smaller organizations to use for building their own global history projects.

University of Southern California

Kelsey Rubin-Detlev 

Encoding Empire: Exploring the Correspondence of Catherine the Great

Further development of a database of Catherine the Great’s correspondence, as well as tools for scholarly analysis and editing.

Emory University

Daniel Sinykin and Melanie Walsh (University of Washington)

Project: Post45 Data Collective: Enhancing Cultural Data Documentation, Interoperability, and Reach

Continuing work on the digital infrastructure for the Post45 Data Collective, a peer-reviewed, open-access repository for literary and cultural data after 1945.  This stage will support the development of a comprehensive data style guide and set of protocols for interoperability with complementary datasets.

Macalester College

James Von Geldern

Updating Seventeen Moments in Soviet History for Longevity, Accessibility and the Non-European Regions of the Former Soviet Union

The updating of content and upgrading of the technological infrastructure of Seventeen Moments in Soviet History multimedia web resource to enhance usability and provide for long-term sustainability.

Indiana University, Bloomington

Vesna Dimitrieska

Windows to the World: Digital Resources for Global Educators

The creation of new user experience and accessibility features for the Windows to the World educational platform and workshops for K–12 educators.

University of Pennsylvania

Seth Kulick and Neville Ryant

Bootstrapping Pipelines for the Computational Analysis of Literature

The development of training data and workflows for the computational analysis of Yiddish language and literature, as a case study for other low-resource languages.

University of South Dakota

Funded by IMLS

Lindsey Peterson and Elizabeth La Beaud (University of Southern Mississippi)

Subject Spotter: Automation & Subject Tagging Historical Texts

The development and testing of AI-based software that uses named entity recognition and large language models to automatically create subject tags for digitized cultural heritage materials to enhance search and usability. 

Cornell University

Caitlín Eilís Barrett and Kathryn Gleason

Toward an Archaeology of Lived Experience: Modeling Embodied Identities at Pompeii

The creation of a virtual model and garden of a Pompeian house using excavation, LiDAR scanning, and integrated 3D-GIS to investigate the ways that people of different genders, ages, and physical conditions experienced domestic space.

Northeastern University

Jacob Murel

Investigating the Effect of Material Versus Digital-born Features in Automatic Handwriting Detection for Early Printed Books

Design and development of computer vision techniques and tools to improve detection of handwritten marginalia in digitized texts.

Level III

Level Three awards offer up to $350,000 in outright funds, and an additional $100,000 in matching funds. They support the expansion of mature projects with an established user base and strong dissemination plans.

University of Pennsylvania

Funded in part by IMLS

Dot Porter and Alberto Campagnolo (Université Catholique de Louvain)

VCEditor 2.0 Project

Further development of VCEditor, a software platform that enables rare book and manuscript experts to collate and visualize digitized codices.

Dartmouth College

Jesse Casana 

The Archaeology of Indigenous Agricultural Landscapes: Digital Approaches to Documentation, Mapping, and Interpretation

Further development of a set of remote sensing methods for archaeological sites by conducting surveys at multiple locations in the United States and collecting data on Indigenous land use features.

University of Oregon 

Mattie Burkert

Extending the London Stage Database

Continued development and revitalization of the London Stage Database, an online resource that brings together multiple sources documenting the history of British theater.

Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities

Michigan Technological University

Donald Lafreniere, Sarah Fayen Scarlett, Dan Trepal, Krysta Ryzewski (Wayne State University), and Mark Rhodes

Deep Maps and Community Histories: Advancing Transdisciplinary and Public-Facing Scholarship in the Spatial Humanities

A two-week residential institute followed by a series of virtual sessions on geospatial technologies and digital deep mapping for publicly engaged scholarship. The institute will be hosted at Michigan Technological University.

University of Colorado, Colorado Springs

Helen Davies

Illuminating the Past: A Summer Institute on Multispectral Imaging and Cultural Heritage Preservation

A professional development institute, including travel and supplies, to educate participants on multispectral imaging and related methods to enhance analysis of humanities collections. 

University of Kansas

Kathryn Conrad and Sean Kamperman

AI & Digital Literacy: Toward an Inclusive and Empowering Teaching Practice

An in-person institute hosted by the University of Kansas, focused on teaching critical AI literacy to secondary, community college, and college-level humanities instructors.

Columbia University        

Matthew Connelly and Courtney Chartier

Archives as Data II

An in-person institute to provide training to archivists and historians in analyzing digitized and born-digital records using open-source tools and methods developed at Columbia University’s History Lab.