Announcing New ODH Awards (August 2018)
The Office of Digital Humanities is pleased to announce 18 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 218 awards just announced by the NEH. Congratulations to all the award recipients as they begin these exciting new projects!
DIGITAL HUMANITIES ADVANCEMENT GRANTS (January 2018 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.
American University (Washington, DC)
Hearing Bach's Music As Bach Heard It
Project Director: Braxton Boren
Outright: $50,000
To support: The recreation of acoustic conditions of the Thomaskirche (St. Thomas Church) in Leipzig, where J.S. Bach worked as a concert master, to better understand the relationship between the acoustic clarity of the physical space and Bach’s compositions.
George Mason University (Fairfax, VA)
World History Commons
Project Director: Kelly Schrum
Outright: $325,000
Matching: $50,000
To support: Digital revitalization and content upgrades for World History Matters, a free-to-use educational web resource for teaching world history.
Georgetown University (Washington, DC)
A Linked Digital Environment for Coptic Studies
Project Director: Amir Zeldes
Co-Project Director: Caroline T. Schroeder (University of the Pacific)
Outright: $323,767
To support: The creation and expansion of a suite of language processing tools to better analyze documents written in Coptic – the language of first millennium Egypt – and other ancient Near Eastern languages.
Georgia Tech Research Corporation (Atlanta, GA)
The Digital Drawer: A Crowd-Sourced, Curated, Digital Archive Preserving History and Memory*
Project Director: Scott Robertson
Co-Project Director: Jesse P. Karlsberg (Emory University)
Outright: $86,471
To support: The development and testing of the Digital Drawer project on digitized community archives for rural Georgia audiences. The project partners include the Historic Rural Churches of Georgia and Emory University.
Indiana University (Indianapolis, IN)
Implementing an Online Text-Editing Platform for Scholarly Editions
Project Director: Andre De Tienne
Outright: $277,320
To support: The further development of the online Scholarly Text-Editing Platform for the production of print and digital critical and documentary editions.
Marian Cheek Jackson Center for Saving and Making History (Chapel Hill, NC)
The Northside Digital Commons
Project Director: Della Pollock
Outright: $79,000
To support: The development and documentation of a digital community archiving project focusing on the Northside community in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Miami University, Oxford (Oxford, OH)
Breath of Life 2.0: Indigenous Language Revitalization through Enhancement of the Miami-Illinois Digital Archive
Project Director: Daryl W. Baldwin
Co-Project Director: Gabriela Perez Baez (Smithsonian Institution)
Outright: $311,641
To support: The expansion and improvement of an existing digital archive for indigenous languages, the development of software to identify and analyze archival materials, and two training workshops for tribal representatives and scholars engaged in language revitalization efforts.
Sonoma State University (Rohnert Park, CA)
Mapping Indigenous American Cultures and Living Histories
Project Director: Janet Berry Hess
Outright: $50,000
To support: A prototype digital map of three indigenous American nations that will document their geographic ranges, languages, architectural styles, and cultural practices both before and after contact with European settlers.
SUNY Research Foundation, Albany (Albany, NY)
Picturing Urban Renewal
Project Director: David Paul Hochfelder
Co-Project Directors: Stacy Sewell (St. Thomas Aquinas College) and Ann E. Pfau (Independent Scholar)
Outright: $49,587
To support: Development of a website featuring historical photographs and maps that explores the process of urban renewal in large and small cities across New York State.
Temple University (Philadelphia, PA)
Developing the Data Set of Nineteenth-Century Knowledge*
Project Director: Peter Logan
Co-Project Director: Jane Greenberg (Drexel University)
Outright: $88,766
To support: A project to study the structure and transformation of nineteenth-century knowledge via computational analysis of several editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica from 1788 to 1911.
University of Maine, Orono (Orono, ME)
The Holocaust Ghettos Project: Reintegrating Victims and Perpetrators through Places and Events
Project Director: Anne Kelly Knowles
Co-Project Directors: Paul B. Jaskot (Duke University) and Anika Walke (Washington University in St. Louis)
Outright: $296,455
To support: The creation of a spatial model of 1,400 Jewish ghettos during the Holocaust that maps the locations of victims and perpetrators and extracts content from interviews about the experience of living in ghettos, allowing scholars to analyze the relationships between perpetrators and victims using geospatial methods.
University of Richmond (Richmond, VA)
Distant Viewing Toolkit (DVT) for the Cultural Analysis of Moving Images
Project Director: Lauren Tilton
Co-Project Director: Taylor Arnold
Outright: $99,984
To support: The development of an open source software library that will allow scholars, teachers, and students to analyze time-based media including films, news broadcasts, and television programs.
University of South Carolina, Columbia (Columbia, SC)
Evolution in Digital Discourse: Toward a Computational Tool for Identifying Patterns of Language Change in Social Media
Project Director: Seung Mo Jang
Co-Project Directors: Elaine Chun, Chin-Tser Huang, and Jijun Tang
Outright: $89,566
To support: The development of an open access, user-friendly tool to allow scholars and the public to study and document the spread and evolution of information shared over social media networks.
University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA)
Linked Open Greek Pottery
Project Director: Tyler Jo Smith
Outright: $85,382
To support: The development of a model for aggregating information about dispersed collections of ancient Greek pottery based on the concepts of linked open data to provide greater access to the collections and to allow new ways of analyzing the materials.
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (Milwaukee, WI)
Transparency to Visibility (T2V): Network Visualization in Humanities Research
Project Director: Samuel Scott Graham
Outright: $80,649
To support: The development of a set of tools to automatically extract and visualize relationships in large textual corpora, with a focus on making “hidden” relationships more visible.
INSTITUTES for ADVANCED TOPICS in the DIGITAL HUMANITIES (March 2018 deadline)
Northeastern University (Boston, MA)
Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist: Institutes on Critical Teaching and Research with Vector Space Models
Project Director: Julia Hammond Flanders
Co-Project Director: Sarah Connell
Outright: $197,385
To support: A series of four three-day institutes for a total of 72 participants on the use of word embedding models for textual analysis. The three-day institutes will be hosted by Northeastern University.
University of Florida (Gainesville, FL)
Migration, Mobility, and Sustainability: Caribbean Studies and Digital Humanities Institute
Project Director: Laurie N. Taylor
Co-Project Directors: Hélène Huet, Paul A. Ortiz, and Leah Reade Rosenberg
Outright: $231,093
To support: A week-long, residential institute followed by a series of virtual sessions on collaborative digital humanities, archival collections, and Caribbean Studies for 26 participants. The institute will be hosted by the University of Florida.
University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, PA)
Workshops on Sustainability for Digital Projects
Project Director: Alison Langmead
Outright: $215,380
To support: A series of five workshops for up to 150 participants to explore approaches to long term sustainability of digital humanities projects. The workshops will be hosted at the University of Pittsburgh, Brigham Young University, Brown University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Oklahoma State University.