Awards for Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants (August 2009)

I'm very happy to say that the NEH has just announced 21 new awards from our Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants program. These grants support innovative projects in the digital humanities.

These awards are part of a larger group of 184 awards announced today by the NEH. For a full state-by-state list of all the awards, please see today's press release.

Also, please note that the next deadline to apply for this program is October 6, 2009. Please consult the guidelines for more information.

Recently Announced Awards in the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program:

Alexandria Archive Institute -- San Francisco, CA
The Open Modern Art Collection of Iraq: Web tools for Documenting, Sharing and Enriching Iraqi Artistic Expressions
Nada Shabout, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: The creation of a database with community input to reassemble the partially dispersed and lost collections of the Iraqi Museum of Modern Art in Baghdad.

Apprend Foundation -- Durham, NC
CRAFTING FREEDOM ALONG NC 86:DISCOVERING HIDDEN HISTORY WITH MOBILE TECHNOLOGY
Laurel Sneed, Project Director
Outright: $25,000
To support: Research, needs assessment, and planning for an open-source mobile technology tour of North Carolina State Highway 86, exploring sites of significance in African
American history.

Brown University -- Providence, RI
Semantically Rich Tools for Text Exploration
Andrew Ashton, Project Director
Outright: $48,661
To support: Creation of a suite of software tools designed to allow humanists to analyze large collections or archives of TEI encoded texts in the new Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research (SEASR).

Buffalo and Erie County Public Library -- Buffalo, NY
Re Collecting the Depression and New Deal as a Civic Resource in Hard Times
Anne Conable, Project Director
Outright: $25,000
To support: Development of a prototype for an open source digital repository for materials relating to the history of the Great Depression and New Deal in western New York.

California State University, Dominguez Hills Foundation -- Carson, CA
New Approaches: Tradeswomen Archive Project (TAP)
Vivian Price, Project Director
Outright: $25,000
To support: A Level I planning grant to create a virtual museum and augment the holdings of a physical collection with primary artifacts about women who work in non traditional blue collar trades.

Claremont McKenna College -- Claremont, CA
Virtual Taxila: A Web Accessible, Multi User Virtual Environment (MUVE) of an Ancient Indian City
Daniel Michon, Project Director
Outright: $49,715
To support: Reconstruction of the ancient city of Taxila (located in modern Pakistan) through computer modeling, including animated and interactive "inhabitants," with public access via the Internet.

CUNY Research Foundation, NYC College of Technology -- Brooklyn, NY
Looking For Whitman: The Poetry of Place in the Life and Work of Walt Whitman, Level 2
Matthew Gold, Project Director
Outright: $33,235
To support: The piloting of a series of courses at three institutions that would engage students in online investigations of Walt Whitman's work in geographical context that would conclude with a conference on material culture and Whitman.

Dartmouth College -- Hanover, NH
Digital Humanities Start Up Grant: Metadata Games -- An Open Source Electronic Game for Archival Data Systems
Mary Flanagan, Project Director
Outright: $49,015
To support: Development of an open source computer game for the Internet that would supplement library metadata on holdings in collections with descriptions provided by the public.

Electronic Literature Organization -- College Park, MD
Electronic Literature Directory: Collaborative Knowledge Management for the Literary Humanities
Joseph Tabbi, Project Director
Outright: $47,870
To support: The development of a descriptive metadata vocabulary and the redesign of the Electronic Literature Directory website using open source content management and social networking software.

Itasca Community College -- Grand Rapids, MN
GIBAGADINAMAAGOOM: AN OJIBWE DIGITAL ARCHIVE
Timothy Powell, Project Director
Outright: $24,918
To support: A series of planning meetings to redesign a digital archive of Ojibwe historical and cultural resources to allow for multiple user interfaces and more extensive categorization of materials.

Loyola College in Maryland -- Baltimore, MD
The Journalism History Hub: Developing a Research based Interdisciplinary Social Network and Meta Conference
Elliott King, Project Director
Outright: $48,370
To support: The development of a social network and repository system, called the Journalism History Hub, to support the field of history of journalism and to serve as a model for communities from other interdisciplinary fields.

Loyola University, Chicago -- Chicago, IL
Humanities Research Infrastructure and Tools (HRIT): An Environment for Collaborative Textual Scholarship
Peter Shillingsburg, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Development of a collaborative online editing environment and tagging tool for producing electronic scholarly editions and text archives.

Marist College -- Poughkeepsie, NY
A DIGITAL PATHFINDER FOR HISTORIC SITES
Ron Coleman, Project Director
Outright: $49,981
To support: Development of a hand held GPS personal data assistant for tours of historic sites.

University of Massachusetts, Amherst -- Amherst, MA
OCRonym: Entity Extraction and Retrieval for Scanned Books
James Allan, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Development of an extraction and retrieval system for named entities people, places, organizations located across a large number of documents in order to use the system to track Optical Character Recognition (OCR) error rates in an effort to improve "noisy" OCR.

University of Montana -- Missoula, MT
Computer Based Data Processing and Management for Blackfoot Phonetics and Phonology
Mizuki Miyashita, Project Director
Outright: $24,999
To support: Development of a database to store and manage sound clips of the Blackfoot language.

University of Nebraska, Board of Regents -- Lincoln, NE
centerNet: Cyberinfrastructure for the Digital Humanities
Katherine Walter, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: A series of meetings, concluding with an international summit, to plan for future activities of an international network of digital humanities centers.

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill -- Chapel Hill, NC
Main Street, Carolina: Uncovering and Reclaiming the History of Downtown
Natalia Smith, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Development of an open source framework for accessing the UNC Library's collection of original Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, indexed to a wide range of primary source material.

University of South Carolina Research Foundation -- Columbia, SC
The Sapheos Project: Transparency in Multi image Collation, Analysis, and Representation
Randall Cream, Project Director
Outright: $49,918
To support: Development of an online collation tool to allow for analysis and display of multiple page images along with software that identifies and links to specific points, letters, words, and images on the page.

University of Southern California -- Los Angeles, CA
The Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia:--An International Digital Resource for Study, Teaching, and Research
Bruce Smith (University of Southern California) and Katherine Rowe (Bryn Mawr College), Project Directors
Outright: $24,901
To support: A collaborative effort by Cambridge University Press (CUP) and the Center for Transformative Scholarship (CTS) at the University of Southern California to develop an encyclopedia dedicated to Shakespearian studies that aggregates research data and allows users to map paths through the resources.

University of Virginia -- Charlottesville, VA
Neatline Geospatial Interpretation of Archival Collections
Bethany Nowviskie & Adam Soroka, Project Directors
Outright: $34,656
To support: Creation of an open source tool that integrates timelines and maps to literary and historical materials in archival collections to strengthen the visualization of research.

Western Reserve Historical Society -- Cleveland, OH
(AI)2 Artificially Intelligent Artifact Interpreter
Edward Pershey, Project Director
Outright: $49,384
To support: The development and evaluation of a prototype of a virtual museum docent employing Radio Frequency Identification tags and artificial intelligence for use in interactive history museum exhibitions.