Awards for Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants (March 2010)

I'm very happy to say that the NEH has just announced 18 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 286 awards announced yesterday by the NEH.  For a full state-by-state list of all the awards, please see the press release.
 
Recently Announced Awards in the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program:   

City of Philadelphia, Department of Records -- Philadelphia, PA
Historic Overlays on Smart Phones
Joan Decker, Project Director
Outright: $49,885
To support: The development of prototype mobile phone applications that would allow users to see historic photographs of Philadelphia in the actual city locations by pointing the phone camera at the building, a technique known as "augmented reality." This project draws on the extensive records from the NEH-supported PhillyHistory.org database.

Early Manuscripts Electronic Library -- Rolling Hills Estates, CA
The Nyangwe Diary of David Livingstone: Restoring the Text
Adrian Wisnicki, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Creation of a digital image archive and online scholarly edition of David Livingtone's Nyangwe field diary (1871) by adapting imaging technology originally pioneered with medieval parchment palimpsests.

George Mason University -- Fairfax, VA
Crowdsourcing Documentary Transcription: an Open Source Tool
Sharon Leon, Project Director
Outright: $49,215
To support: The development of an open source tool that would allow scholars to contribute document transcriptions and research notes to digital archival projects, using the Papers of the War Department as a test case.

Georgia Tech Research Corporation -- Atlanta, GA
Gesture, Rhetoric, and Digital Storytelling
Douglas (Fox) Harrell, Project Director
Outright: $24,998
To support: The refinement of a system for describing how different cultures use gesture as part of storytelling traditions along with the development of a prototype mobile application to capture that non‑verbal communication as part of a digital narrative.

Pennsylvania State University, Main Campus -- University Park, PA
Learning as Playing: An Animated, Interactive Archive of 17th‑19th Century Narrative Media For and By Children
Jacqueline Reid‑Walsh, Project Director
Outright: $48,672
To support: Development of an animated, interactive, web‑based archive of selected 17th ‑19th century moveable flap books by and for children on the theme of transformation.

Sweet Briar College -- Sweet Briar, VA
African‑American Families Database: Community Formation in Albemarle County, Virginia, 1850‑1880
Lynn Rainville, Project Director
Outright: $24,963
To support: A pilot study for a collaborative online African‑American Families Database recording and displaying genealogical and geographical data tracking generations of 19th‑century descendants of individuals on two antebellum slave lists.

University of Arizona -- Tucson, AZ
Poetry Audio/Video Library Phase 2
Hale Thomas‑Hilburn, Project Director
Outright: $49,078
To support: The development of a Web‑based application to make the entire collection of recorded poetry readings at the University of Arizona Poetry Center available to the general public and searchable through an array of presentation modes.

University of California, Berkeley -- Berkeley, CA
Berkeley Prosopography Services: Building Research Communities and Restoring Ancient Communities through Digital Tools
Niek Veldhuis, Project Director
Outright: $49,942
To support: Development of the Berkeley Prosopography Service (BPS), an open source digital toolkit that extracts prosopographic data from TEI encoded text and generates interactive visual representations of social networks.

University of California, Los Angeles -- Los Angeles, CA
Software Interface for Real‑time Exploration of Three‑Dimensional Computer Models of Historic Urban Environments
Lisa Snyder, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: The prototype development for a generalized, extensible platform that will allow for real‑time exploration, annotation, and tours in 3D computer models, using the NEH‑funded Digital Karnak as the test case.

University of California, San Diego -- La Jolla, CA
Interactive Visualization of Media Collections for Humanities Research
Lev Manovich, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: The development of analysis and visualization software, available through a web interface and as a desktop client, for research on a wide variety of digitized cultural heritage materials, such as theatre performance, dance, film, literature, art, and computer games.

University of Chicago -- Chicago, IL
Dictionnaire Vivant de la Langue Francaise (DVLF): Expanding the French Dictionary
Robert Morrissey, Project Director
Outright: $49,581
To support: Development and testing of an interactive site for an online dictionary of French that engages users in creation of the dictionary's output.

University of Georgia Research Foundation, Inc. -- Athens, GA
Telecollaborative Webcasting: Strengthening acquisition of humanities content knowledge through foreign language education
Victoria Hasko, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: Development of innovative online applications employing high definition video to enhance collaborative foreign language instruction among U.S. and Russian foreign language students.

University of Nebraska, Board of Regents -- Lincoln, NE
Sustaining Digital History
William Seefeldt, Project Director
Outright: $49,116
To support: A series of planning meetings with the editors of several print journals in history to explore various models of digital scholarship and publishing.

University of New Mexico -- Albuquerque, NM
Digital Documentation and Reconstruction of an Ancient Maya Temple and Prototype of Internet GIS Database of Maya Architecture
Jennifer von Schwerin, Project Director
Outright: $49,832
To support: This project brings together an international team of archeologists, technologists, and cultural heritage site managers to develop a test implementation of a new online platform for virtual environments of significant cultural sites, using the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Copan, Honduras as a testbed.

University of Virginia -- Charlottesville, VA
ARTeFACT Movement Thesaurus
Bradford Bennett, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: The development and testing of a tool and accompanying thesaurus to make film searchable for dance movements.

University of Virginia -- Charlottesville, VA
New Digital Tools for Restoring Polychromy to 3D Digital Models of Sculpture
Bernard Frischer, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To support: The development of a set of tools that would allow for the accurate inclusion and display of color for Classical sculpture, using the "Augustus of Prima Porta" in the Vatican Museums as a case study.

University of Virginia -- Charlottesville, VA
Supercomputing for Digitized 3D Models of Cultural Heritage
David Koller, Project Director
Outright: $48,549
To support: The development of new algorithms and software to process large‑scale, data‑intensive 3D models of cultural heritage materials on supercomputers.

Washington State University -- Pullman, WA
Mukurtu: an Indigenous archive and publishing tool
Kimberly Christen, Project Director
Outright: $49,606
To support: Development of an online, open source archiving and publishing tool for use with cultural collections of Indigenous communities.