Announcing New ODH Awards (July 2020)
The Office of Digital Humanities is pleased to announce 16 awards through our Digital Humanities Advancement Grants program and 5 awards through our Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program.
These projects are part of a larger slate of 238 awards announced by the NEH. Congratulations to all the award recipients as they begin these exciting new projects!
DIGITAL HUMANITIES ADVANCEMENT GRANTS (January 2020 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.
University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ)
Social Networks of Athenian Potters (SNAP): Networks, Tradition and Innovation in Communities of Artists
Project Directors: Eleni Hasaki and Diane Cline (George Washington University)
Outright: up to $49,946
To support: The development of methods to study communities of potters in Ancient Greece to better understand the role that individuals played and how artistic ideas were transmitted over space and time.
Regents of the University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)
Multilingual BookNLP: Building a Literary NLP Pipeline Across Languages
Project Director: David Bamman
Outright: up to $324,874
To support: The expansion of the BookNLP platform for studying the linguistic structure of textual materials to allow for the analysis of resources in Spanish, Japanese, Russian and German.
University of Southern California (Los Angeles, CA)
Using Virtual Reality to Explore 15th Century Illuminated Manuscripts
Project Directors: Lynn Dodd and Sabina Zonno
Outright: up to $50,000
To support: The creation of a virtual reality experience of a fifteenth-century illuminated manuscript to allow users to engage with the content of the manuscript and also gain an appreciation for handling rare materials.
Florida International University (Miami, FL)
Visualizing Colonialism and Haitian Sovereignty: Documenting Haiti’s Forts*
Project Directors: Hadassah St. Hubert and Miguel Asencio
Outright: up to $50,000
To support: A series of workshops and training sessions on digital cartography in Florida and Haiti, with a goal of creating the first detailed map of Haitian patrimonial structures.
Purdue University (West Lafayette, IN)
The Stayed and Stolen: Building an Immersive Virtual Environment of Cape Coast Castle
Project Directors: Kim Gallon and Christos Mousas
Outright: up to $99,755
To support: Development of an interactive virtual reality experience of Cape Coast Castle, in Cape Coast Ghana, one of the most important sites out of the 40 slave castles or commercial fortresses that dot the coastline of Ghana. This immersive experience centers Africa in the transatlantic slave trade, for use by scholars, teachers, students, and the public.
Michigan Technological University (Houghton, MI)
Advancing Deep Mapping Infrastructure for Community-Driven Spatial Humanities: The Keweenaw Time Traveler
Project Directors: Donald Lafreniere, Sarah Fayen Scarlett, Karla Kitalong, Robert Pastel, and Daniel Trepal
Outright: up to $324,985
To support: Improvements to an online historical atlas for Michigan’s Copper County from 1880 to 1950, with rich data about people, buildings, and historical environments from one of the nation’s oldest and largest copper mining regions.
Regents of the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN)
Mapping Racial Covenants in the United States: A Technical Toolkit
Project Director: Kirsten Delegard
Outright: up to $324,473
Matching: up to $49,987
To support: To expand and refine a set of digital tools and workflows to generate and map datasets of racial covenants from communities across the United States within one web platform.
University of Missouri, Kansas City (Kansas City, MO)
Unlocking the Mysteries of a Medieval Chant Book with Multispectral Imaging
Project Directors: Jeffrey Rydberg-Cox, Virginia Blanton, Yugyung Lee, Zhu Li, and Nathan Oyler
Outright: up to $324,317
To support: The refinement and dissemination of a new method for multispectral imaging of early modern manuscripts and print materials, drawing upon special collections held by the University of Missouri, Kansas City, the Linda Hall Library of Science, and the University of Kansas.
University of Missouri, Kansas City (Kansas City, MO)
A Knowledge Graph for Managing and Analyzing Spanish American Notary Records*
Project Directors: Viviana Grieco and Praveen Rao
Outright: up to $100,000
To support: The development of methods to make it easier for scholars to research historical records, with a focus on seventeenth-century notary records from Argentina.
CUNY Research Foundation, Graduate School and University Center (New York, NY)
Manifold in the Classroom: Digital Publishing for Open Pedagogy
Project Directors: Matthew Gold and Douglas Armato (University of Minnesota Press)
Outright: up to $325,000
Matching: up to $50,000
To support: Expanding the technical infrastructure in the Manifold digital publishing platform to enable the creation and publication of free open educational resources in the humanities.
East Carolina University (Greenville, NC)
Castle to Classrooms: Developing an Irish Castle in Virtual Reality
Project Director: Thomas Herron
Outright: up to $93,121
To support: The design and testing of teaching modules built in virtual reality for an existing 3-D digital model of Kilcolman Castle, Ireland, home of English poet Edmund Spencer.
Cleveland State University (Cleveland, OH)
PlacePress: A WordPress Plugin for Publishing Location-based Tours and Stories
Project Directors: J. Mark Souther and Erin Bell
Outright: up to $79,568
To support: The development, testing, and release of PlacePress, a plugin for WordPress, for designing and launching digital public humanities projects.
University of Oregon (Eugene, OR)
Time Online II: The Time Charts of Joseph Priestley
Project Directors: Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton (Princeton University)
Outright: up to $99,985
To support: The digital reconstruction of historical infographics, specifically the timelines originally designed by British polymath Joseph Priestley in the eighteenth century.
Pennsylvania State University, Main Campus (University Park, PA)
Seeing Constable’s Clouds: An Application of Machine Learning to Art Historical Research*
Directors: Elizabeth Mansfield and James Wang
Outright: up to $48,487
To support: The development of computational methods to analyze formal details in paintings, focusing on cloud studies by John Constable and his emulators, documentary photographs, and fine art photographs.
University of Texas, Austin (Austin, TX)
Computational Tools for Diachronic and Cross-cultural Study of Literature: Multilingual Stylometry and Phylogenetic Profiling
Project Directors: Pramit Chaudhuri and Joseph Dexter (Dartmouth College)
Outright: up to $324,971
To support: The extension of a textual analysis tool kit for stylistic and authorship studies that was originally developed for Latin and ancient Greek to now include capabilities for working with Old English and Bengali resources.
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Blacksburg, VA)
Connecting the Interstates
Project Directors: LaDale Winling and Thaisa Way (Dumbarton Oaks)
Outright: up to $45,819
Description: A series of scholarly planning meetings to explore the possibilities and challenges of a large-scale digital mapping effort on the U.S. Interstate Highway System.
INSTITUTES FOR ADVANCED TOPICS IN THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES (March 2020 deadline)
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville (Fayetteville, AR)
SAROI: Spatial Archaeology Residential and Online Studies
Project Directors: Carla Klehm, Jackson Cothren, and W. Fred Limp
Outright: up to $250,000
To support: An online and in-person mentorship and training program to facilitate collaboration among scholars at the Spatial Archaeology Residential and Online Institute, devoted to large-scale archeological analysis of objects, structures, sites, and landscapes.
Regents of the University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN)
Building Capable Communities for Crowdsourced Transcription
Project Directors: Evan Roberts, Samantha Blickhan (Adler Planetarium), and Benjamin Wiggins
Outright: up to $249,856
To support: An institute to help cultural organizations plan, develop, and launch crowdsourcing projects focused on engaging communities with their collections.
Princeton University (Princeton, NJ)
New Languages for NLP: Building Linguistic Diversity in the Digital Humanities
Project Directors: Natalia Ermolaev and Andrew Janco (Haverford College)
Outright: up to $239,983
To support: An institute to help humanities scholars learn how to create linguistic data and apply statistical models to new languages.
Santa Fe Institute (Santa Fe, NM)
Foundations and Applications of Cultural Analytics in the Humanities
Project Directors: David Kinney and Simon DeDeo (Carnegie Mellon University)
Outright: up to $247,932
To support: An online course on computational and quantitative methods for cultural analysis of large-scale digital sources to be followed by more advanced in-person workshops for early career scholars.
Ithaka Harbors, Inc. (New York, NY)
The Text Analysis Pedagogy (TAP) Institute
Project Director: Nathan Kelber
Outright: up to $248,518
To support: A series of workshops, to be hosted at the University of Virginia and the University of Arizona, on approaches for teaching computational text analysis.