Announcing 17 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant Awards (March 2015)
The Office of Digital Humanities is happy to announce 17 awards from our Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program from our September 2014 deadline. These awards are part of a larger slate of 232 grants just announced by the NEH.
Congratulations to all the awardees for their terrific projects!
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Cornell University (Ithaca, NY 14853-2801)
Freedom on the Move: A Crowdsourced, Comprehensive Database of North American Runaway Slave Advertisements
Project Director: Edward Baptist
Project Director: William Block
Outright: $59,989
To support: The further design and development of a database of runaway slave advertisements from pre-1865 US newspapers drawing from several historical collections.The project would also experiment with crowdsourcing approaches to enrich the database records.
Georgia State University Research Foundation, Inc. (Atlanta, GA 30303)
Notoriously Toxic: Understanding the Language and Costs of Hate and Harassment in Online Games
Project Director: Benjamin Miller
Outright: $29,403
To support: A cross-disciplinary workshop and follow-up activities to develop a set of essays and a metadata schema to understand and describe toxic rhetoric in online spaces, with an emphasis on large-scale multiplayer computer games.
Gettysburg College (Gettysburg, PA 17325-1483)
Comparative Ethnobiology in Mesoamerica: A Digital Portal for Collaborative Research and Public Dissemination
Project Director: Jonathan Amith
Project Director: Eric Remy
Outright: $29,930
To support: Prototype development of a database and website that would aggregate indigenous linguistic information relevant to Mesoamerican flora and fauna.
Ohio State University, Main Campus (Columbus, OH 43210-1307)
Automatic Music Performance Analysis and Comparison Toolkit (AMPACT)
Project Director: Johanna Devaney
Outright: $59,843
To support: The further development of a suite of analytical tools for music scholarship, with a particular focus on the development of a tool for analyzing polyphonic performances from musical scores.
Research Foundation CUNY for the Graduate Center (New York, NY 10016-4309)
DH Box: A Digital Humanities Laboratory in the Cloud
Project Director: Matthew Gold
Outright: $59,752
To support: Development of DH Box, a web-based platform that enables researcher and student access to multiple digital humanities tools. The project is designed for institutions and individuals with minimal technical infrastructure or expertise, including community colleges and newcomers to the field.
San Diego State University Research Foundation (San Diego, CA 92182)
Building and Broadening the Digital Humanities Through a Regional Network
Project Director: Jessica Pressman
Project Director: Joanna Brooks
Outright: $29,999
To support: A year-long initiative bracketed by two workshops where faculty from teaching-intensive institutions would test best practices for teaching humanities content using digital methods in under-resourced classrooms.
Small Axe, Inc (New York, NY 10027-6598)
The sx:archipelagos Project
Project Director: Kaiama Glover
Project Director: Alex Gil, Columbia University
Project Director: David Scott, Columbia University
Outright: $29,914
To support: Development and assessment of new workflows for publication and long-term preservation of born-digital scholarship within Caribbean Studies.
Syracuse University (Syracuse, NY 13244-0001)
Onondaga Lake: Finding a Restorative Center in Digital Space
Project Director: Susan May
Project Director: Jane Read
Project Director: Philip Arnold
Outright: $29,879
To support: The development of a prototype digital map that seeks to combine scientific perspectives with non-Cartesian perspectives (such as those of the indigenous population) that don't map easily to spatial coordinates, focusing on the historical, cultural, and economic significance of Onondaga Lake near Syracuse, NY.
Texas A&M University (College Station, TX 77845-4375)
MuSO: Aggregation and Peer Review in Music
Project Director: Timothy Duguid
Outright: $29,935
To support: A two-day workshop and follow-up activities to develop the Music Scholarship Online (MuSO) project to consider approaches for federating and evaluating digital projects in music.
University of California, Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA 95064-1077)
3D Saqqara: Reconstructing Landscape and Meaning at an Ancient Egyptian Site
Project Director: Elaine Sullivan
Outright: $47,200
To support: Development of a three-dimensional model and virtual tour that would demonstrate how the ancient Egyptian cemetery at Saqqara evolved over the course of nearly three millennia--from 2950 BCE to 332 BCE.
University of Florida, Gainesville (Gainesville, FL 32611-5500)
Collecting and Archiving Big Data for Social Media Humanities Researchers
Project Director: Sidney Dobrin
Project Director: Matthew Gitzendanner
Project Director: Laurie Taylor
Outright: $60,000
To support: Development of an open-source toolkit and training materials that would allow humanities researchers to collect and analyze large-scale, publicly available data drawn from social media sites.
University of San Francisco (San Francisco, CA 94117-1050)
Discovery and Documentation of At-Risk Built Heritage
Project Director: Seth Wachtel
Outright: $60,000
To support: A pilot effort in which community and student volunteers would use easily accessible technologies to document and describe local architectural heritage. A prototype website would offer a common platform for wide participation and public access.
University of Utah (Salt Lake City, UT 84112-9055)
Poemage Prototype
Project Director: Miriah Meyer
Project Director: Katharine Coles
Outright: $60,000
To support: Development of a working prototype of a visualization tool that demonstrates the sound patterns and relationships in poetry, including and extending beyond rhyme.
University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA 22904-4195)
Cohorts of Women in Biographical Collections
Project Director: Alison Booth
Project Director: Worthy Martin
Project Director: Daniel Pitti
Outright: $59,479
To support: The development of prototype tools that would shed light on women's lives and social networks through biographical narratives and archival sources.
Vanderbilt University, (Nashville, TN 37240-0001)
Deep Mapping the Reducción: Building a Platform for Spatial Humanities Collaboration on the General Resettlement of Indians
Project Director: Steven Wernke
Project Director: Jeremy Mumford (Brown University)
Outright: $59,498
To support: Prototyping of two resources to enable geospatial scholarship on the Andean region of South America. In particular, the project would shed light on the history of indigenous communities living within the 16th-century colonial Reducción system.
WGBH Educational Foundation (Boston, MA 02135-2016)
Digital Humanities for Lifelong Learners
Project Director: Ted Sicker
Outright: $29,994
To support: A workshop and research study to investigate how best to use WGBH's archive of humanities programming to create a robust library of cross-disciplinary humanities modules for lifelong learners, emphasizing an audience over the age of 65.
Wheaton College (Norton, MA 02766-2322)
Easing Entry and Improving Access to Computer-Assisted Text Analysis for the Humanities
Project Director: Mark LeBlanc
Project Director: Michael Drout
Project Director: Scott Kleinman (California State University, Northridge)
Outright: $60,000
To support: The addition of several features to the Lexos software, including a set of instructional resources to help scholars and students understand the most appropriate uses for computational methods for text analysis.