Announcing New 2017 ODH Grant Awards

The Office of Digital Humanities is pleased to announce 31 awards through our Digital Humanities Advancement Grants program and our Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program. These awards are part of a larger slate of 245 grants just announced by the NEH. Congratulations to all the awardees as they begin these exciting new projects!

Digital Humanities Advancement Grants (January 2017 deadline)

This program is supported in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.  Projects supported through this partnership are indicated by an asterisk (*) in the list below.

Association of Research Libraries (Washington, DC)
Integrating Digital Humanities into the Web of Scholarship with SHARE: An Exploration of Requirements
Project Director: Judy Ruttenberg
Co-Project Director: Cynthia Hudson-Vitale, Washington University in St. Louis
Outright: $75,000

To support: A series of activities to adapt the SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE) platform that enhances the discoverability of scholarship for use by humanities faculty and librarians.

Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System (Madison, WI)
Investigating the Golden Age of Podcasting through Metadata and Sound*
Project Director: Jeremy Wade Morris
Co-Project Director: Eric Hoyt
Outright: $74,972

To support: Prototype development and adaptation of open-source software tools to facilitate large-scale search and analysis of podcasts.

Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA)
Text in Situ: Reasoning about Visual Information in the Computational Analysis of Books
Project Director: Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
Co-Project Director: David Bamman, University of California, Berkeley
Outright: $325,000

To support: Implementation of three studies and creation of software tools that computationally analyze visual information about printed books. Partners include the Folger Shakespeare Library and the HathiTrust Research Center.

Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA)
Supporting Cultural Heritage Research in Historic Photography Archives with Machine Learning and Computer Vision*
Project Director: Golan Levin
Co-Project Director: David Newbury
Outright: $72,458

To support: The development of a set of prototype image identification tools and techniques to allow enhanced access to large photography archives. The Carnegie Museum of Art’s Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive of African American life in Pittsburgh would serve as the test collection.

Cleveland State University (Cleveland, OH)
Curating East Africa: A Platform and Process for Location-Based Storytelling in the Developing World
Project Director: J. Mark Souther
Co-Project Director: Meshack Owino
Outright: $74,939

To support: Expansion of the Curating Kisumu project, which brings together collaborators from the United States and Kenya to develop a mobile website interpreting regional history and culture in East Africa.

Cornell University (Ithaca, NY)
Freedom on the Move: Advancing a Crowdsourced, Comprehensive Database of North American Runaway Slave Advertisements
Project Director: Edward E. Baptist
Co-Project Director: William C. Block
Outright: $324,581
Matching funds: $50,000

To support: Implementation of Freedom on the Move, a public history resource that will offer a unified access point to 100,000 runaway slave advertisements published in American newspapers through the end of the Civil War. In addition, the project will develop tools for students to engage with primary sources by transcribing the advertisements.

Cornell University (Ithaca, NY)
Building a Decision Tree for Watermark Identification in Rembrandt's Etchings - The WIRE Project
Project Director: Andrew Weislogel
Co-Project Director: C. Richard Johnson
Outright: $74,994

To support: Development of a prototype tool to enhance museum and art historical research into the printmaking practices of Rembrandt and other artists.

Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH)
Exploring Archaeological Landscapes through Advanced Aerial Thermal Imaging
Project Director: Jesse J. Casana
Outright: $324,930

To support: A series of six case studies in locations in the United States and internationally to further methods in aerial thermography, an imaging process that allows non-destructive photography and data collection for archaeological sites.

George Mason University (Fairfax, VA)
Transcribing and Linking Early American Records with Scripto and Omeka S
Project Director: Sheila Brennan
Outright: $180,000
Matching funds: $50,000

To support: An update and redesign of Scripto, which is a free, open-source tool used for collaborative online transcriptions of documents and multimedia files. This update will ensure it is compatible with Omeka S, a platform for publishing linked open data and integrating collections. In addition to this, the team will migrate the holdings in an important archive (The Papers of the War Department) to Omeka S and develop guidance to assist other cultural heritage organizations in managing their own community transcription projects.

James Madison University (Harrisonburg, VA)
Circulating American Magazines: Making Lost Historical Data from the Audit Bureau of Circulations Publicly Available*
Project Director: Brooks E. Hefner
Co-Project Director: Edward Timke, University of California, Berkeley
Outright: $50,904

To support: The creation of web-based tools to visualize magazine circulation and readership data for historically significant magazines dated between 1880 to 1972. This will allow scholars and students to easily access information about circulation that has, to date, been “virtually invisible” due to an arcane and difficult-to-navigate cataloging system.

Johnson C. Smith University (Charlotte, NC)
Mapping the Historic West End:  The Digital History of African American Neighborhoods in Charlotte, North Carolina
Project Director: Brandon Lunsford
Outright: $69,039

To support: The creation of content to populate a digital interactive map of a 150-year-old African American neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina that is undergoing significant social change and gentrification. The project is intended to allow community residents to participate in a large-scale effort to document and engage with the city’s history.

Louisiana State University and A & M College (Baton Rouge, LA)
V-ESPACE: Virtual Early Modern Spectacles and Publics, Active and Collaborative Environment
Project Director: Jeffrey M. Leichman
Co-Project Director: Françoise Rubellin, Université de Nantes
Outright: $39,982

To support: The early-stage development of a virtual reality environment that re-creates an 18th-century theater at the Paris Fair. The environment is intended to provide users with an immersive experience that will allow them to learn about social and political issues, discourse, and status during the time of the Enlightenment.

Macalester College (St. Paul, MN)
Grenzenlos Deutsch: an Inclusive Curriculum for German Studies
Project Director: Brigetta Abel
Co-Project Director: Amy Young, Central College
Outright: $69,837

To support: The creation of a digital open educational resource for German language and culture. The applicants aim to produce an alternative to traditional textbooks by developing an interactive and immersive environment for language and culture that makes use of videos and interviews with native and near-native German speakers.

Northeastern University (Boston, MA)
Mining Citation in Digital Humanities: A central bibliography of Digital Humanities Quarterly
Project Director: Julia Hammond Flanders
Outright: $74,123

To support: The further development of a centralized bibliography, a revised editorial workflow, and pilot citation analysis study for the scholarly journal Digital Humanities Quarterly.

Ohio State University (Columbus, OH)
Named Entity Recognition For The Classical Languages For The Building Of A Catalog Of Ancient Peoples
Project Director: Brian Daniel Joseph
Co-Project Directors: Christopher Brown, Micha Elsner, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe
Outright: $74,808

To support: The creation of a catalog of individuals and groups of individuals mentioned in ancient sources, in part to focus attention on the historical role played by those other than the “great actors” (the important individuals, states, or empires singled out in historic texts). To do so, they will use Named Entity Recognition, a computational linguistics method which identifies people and place names in texts and then sorts them into pre-defined categories, allowing further study and analysis.

Old Dominion University Research Foundation (Norfolk, VA)
Visualizing Webpage Changes Over Time*
Project Director: Michele C. Weigle
Co-Project Directors: Michael Nelson, Old Dominion University; Deborah Kempe, Frick Art Reference Library; Pamela Graham, Columbia University; Alexander Thurman, Columbia University
Outright: $75,000

To support: The development of prototypes for a set of open-source visualization tools to ease navigation of web archive collections. Partners include the New York Art Resources Consortium and Columbia University Libraries.

Salem State University (Salem, MA)
Networking the Regional Comprehensives*
Project Director: Roopika Risam
Outright: $39,305

To support: The formation of a network of digital humanities practitioners at regional comprehensive universities. The network is intended to facilitate collaboration and sharing of knowledge and resources among faculty, librarians,and students across the United States at smaller universities that offer less institutional support for computationally-intensive humanities projects.

St. John's University, Collegeville (Collegeville, MN)
Ensuring Access to Endangered and Inaccessible Manuscripts
Project Director: Columba A. Stewart
Outright: $323,958
Matching funds: $42,430

To support: Further development of the virtual Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, a digital portal that provides online access to manuscript collections from Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. This phase of the project would support development of the platform’s underlying technical framework as well as features to enhance the researcher experience.

St. Lawrence University (Canton, NY)
Diviner, a digital platform*
Project Director: Ellen Rocco
Outright: $73,500

To support: The development of a digital platform to assist small historical societies and other local humanities institutions, including public media organizations, in curating their federated collections on the web.

Trustees of Davidson College (Davidson, NC)
Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde
Project Director: Suzanne W. Churchill
Co-Project Directors: Susan B. Rosenbaum, University of Georgia; Linda Arbaugh Kinnahan, Duquesne University
Outright: $74,960

To support: A multimedia research project, including a public crowdsourcing component, exploring the work of early 20th century artist and writer Mina Loy.

Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA)
The Philadelphia Playbills Project*
Project Director: William G. Noel
Co-Project Director: Laura E. Aydelotte
Outright: $75,000

To support: A proof-of-concept effort to transcribe and disseminate textual data from a collection of theater playbills documenting 19th-century American theater history.

University of California, Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA)
Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative Framework Update
Project Director: Robert Keith Englund
Outright: $75,000

To support: An infrastructure update of the established Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative that focuses on improving sustainability and enhancing accessibility for both new users and the existing user community.

University of Central Florida, Orlando (Orlando, FL)
Documenting and Triaging Cultural Heritage (DATCH): Damage Assessment and Digital Preservation
Project Director: Scott Branting
Co-Project Directors: Lori C. Walters, Joseph Kider
Outright: $74,916

To support: The development of open source software that will allow archaeologists, historians, and archivists to conduct rapid needs assessment of cultural heritage in conflict and non-conflict situations. The software will, when used in conjunction with mixed reality hardware (which merges both real and virtual worlds), allow users to quickly identify and document damage to structures and sites by providing overlays that compare real-time conditions against previously collected images.

University of South Florida (Tampa, FL)
Reconstructing the First Humanities Computing Center
Project Director: Steven E. Jones
Outright: $75,000

To support: The digital re-creation of the laboratory of pioneering digital humanities scholar Father Roberto Busa to study the methods used by his team in early computational work with scholarly texts.

University of Virginia (Charlottesville, VA)
The Development of Digital Documentary Editing Platforms
Project Director: Jennifer Stertzer
Co-Project Directors: Cathy Moran Hajo, New York University; Erica Cavanaugh, University of Virginia
Outright: $18,236

To support: A workshop for scholarly editors and software developers to discuss how the Omeka and Drupal digital platforms can better serve the needs of documentary editions.

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Blacksburg, VA)
Viral Networks: An Advanced Workshop in Digital Humanities and Medical History
Project Director: Edward T. Ewing
Outright: $40,000

To support: An advanced workshop on incorporating digital humanities tools into medical history research. Preceded by a series of virtual meetings and activities, the two-day workshop will be held at the National Institutes of Health and will result in an open access publication of scholarly essays.

York County Community College (Wells, ME)
Go Local: Building Capacity for Public History in York County, Maine*
Project Director: Dianne Fallon
Outright: $21,000

To support: A series of planning and development activities to help York County Community College and local historical societies in southeastern Maine develop their own digital public history projects.

Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities (March 2017 deadline)

CUNY Research Foundation, Graduate School and University Center (New York, NY)
Expanding Communities of Practice
Project Director: Lisa Rhody
Outright: $246,856

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

Duke University (Durham, NC)
Virtual and Augmented Reality for the Digital Humanities Institute (VARDHI)
Project Director: Victoria Szabo
Co-Project Director: Philip J. Stern
Outright: $248,641

To support: A two-week institute and follow-up activities for twelve participants on the theory and application of virtual and augmented reality technologies to humanities research. Duke University would serve as the host for the institute.

Louisiana State University and A & M College (Baton Rouge, LA)
Textual Data and Digital Texts in the Undergraduate Classroom
Project Director: Lauren Coats
Co-Project Director: Emily McGinn, University of Georgia
Outright: $90,000

To support: A one-week in-person institute hosted at Mississippi State University on approaches to computational textual analysis and how these techniques may be incorporated into the classroom. This institute will be followed by a series of virtual sessions focused on digital pedagogy and the humanities.

Tufts University (Medford, MA)
Digital Editions, Digital Corpora and new possibilities for the Humanities in the Academy and Beyond
Project Director: Gregory R. Crane
Co-Project Directors: Anke Lüdeling, Humboldt-Universitat of Berlin; Monica Berti, Leipzig University
Outright: $169,916

To support: An intensive two-week institute and follow up workshop for 30 humanities scholars on the application of new methods for annotating textual sources for digital editions and digital corpora of historical languages. The institute would be hosted at Tufts University.