NEH Announces 22 New Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants (April 2011)

The Office of Digital Humanities is happy to announce twenty-two new awards from our Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program from our October 5, 2010 deadline. These awards are part of a larger slate of 216 grants just announced by the NEH.

Congratulations to all the awardees for their terrific projects!

College of Physicians of Philadelphia ‑‑ Philadelphia, PA
Planning for an Innovative Partnership: the Medical Heritage Digital Collaborative
Lori Jahnke, Project Director
Outright: $24,978
To Support: Planning meetings and site visits to engage scholars in the planning and selection of materials for the proposed Medical Heritage Digital Collaborative of online history of medicine collections.

Florida State University ‑‑ Tallahassee, FL
Populating Prosop, A Social Networking Tool for the Past: Two Workshops
Will Hanley, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To Support: Development and testing of Prosop, an open source universal demographic history tool used to plot historical relationships of individuals in time, space, and society and to discover connections among historical networks of individuals.

Fordham University ‑‑ Bronx, NY
Compatible Database Initiative: Fostering Interoperable Data for Network Mapping and Visualization
Micki McGee, Project Director
Outright: $24,937
To Support: Workshops and the development of a consortium to generate standards for shared, interoperable data sets for humanities‑based network analysis projects.

Internet Archive ‑‑ San Francisco, CA
Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums Summit
Kristin Negulescu, Project Director
Outright: $24,150
To Support: A two‑day meeting of librarians, archivists, museum professionals, and humanities scholars to explore approaches for connecting disparate online humanities collections using the Linked Open Data model.

Ithaka Harbors, Inc. ‑‑ New York, NY
Campus Services To Support Historians
Roger Schonfeld, Project Director
Outright: $49,508
To Support: A systematic study and projection of new information services required by scholars in the field of history, also serving as a pilot for a broader program of investigation into the future of information services for the humanities.

New York Public Library ‑‑ New York, NY
Crowdsourcing Culinary History at The New York Public Library
Benjamin Vershbow, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To Support: The development of a prototype interface for a tool that would allow scholars and interested members of the general public to contribute to transcription materials related to culinary history, using the menu collection of the New York Public Library as a testbed.

North Carolina State University ‑‑ Raleigh, NC
New Methods of Documenting the Past: Recreating Public Preaching at Paul's Cross, London, in the Post‑Reformation Period
John Wall, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To Support: Research to study acoustics for sermons at St. Paul's Cross using advanced modeling and acoustic algorithms.

Richard Stockton College of New Jersey ‑‑ Pomona, NJ
A Digital Role‑Playing Game for the History of Medicine
Lisa Rosner, Project Director
Outright: $48,989
To Support: The development of a game‑based simulation for exploring the early history of the development and history of the smallpox vaccination.

Tulane University ‑‑ New Orleans, LA
MediaNOLA: Making the History of New Orleans Cultural Production Part of the Present
Vicki Mayer, Project Director
Outright: $24,937
To Support: A planning grant to assist archivists and community media practitioners in designing a multi‑media, GIS‑enhanced, interactive digital archiving site for New Orleans' cultural productions and oral histories.

University of California, Berkeley ‑‑ Berkeley, CA
A Text Analysis Tool for Examining Stylistic Similarities in Narrative Collections
Bryan Wagner, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To Support: Development of a text analysis tool for examining and visualizing grammatical and stylistic features to assist authorship identification.

University of California, San Diego ‑‑ La Jolla, CA
Real‑time 3D Archaeological Field Recording: Development of an interoperable open‑source GIS data entry system.
Thomas Levy, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To Support: The development of a prototype of an open‑source field recording tool named ArchField, which will be tested at sites in Jordan and Israel.

University of Central Florida, Orlando ‑‑ Orlando, FL
The Central Florida Mosaic Interface ‑ Stage II
Connie Lester, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To Support: Development of a user friendly natural language search capability for the prototype Central Florida Mosaic Interface database, while expanding that database to include six central Florida cities.

University of Central Florida, Orlando ‑‑ Orlando, FL
Journey Beyond the Fair
Lori Walters, Project Director
Outright: $49,715
To Support: Development of a mobile application that connects museum visitors, students, and the public to the NEH‑funded Journey To the Fair project about the history of the 1964‑65 World's Fair.

University of Florida ‑‑ Gainesville, FL
Digital Epigraphy Toolbox
Angelos Barmpoutis, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To Support: The creation of a web‑based application that will facilitate the preservation, study, and dissemination of ancient inscriptions.

University of Illinois, Urbana ‑‑ Urbana, IL
Re‑Framing the Online Video Archive: A Prototype Interface for America’s Nuclear Test Films
Kevin Hamilton, Project Director
Outright: $49,999
To Support: The development of a prototype platform for studying and exhibiting digitized historical films, using government films documenting the development of the United States nuclear weapons program.

University of Redlands ‑‑ Redlands, CA
Visualizing Flow and Movement for the Humanities
Diana Sinton, Project Director
Outright: $24,956
To Support: A workshop for GIS specialists and humanities scholars to develop methodologies toward visualizing the flow and movement of people and ideas across geographic space.

University of South Carolina Research Foundation ‑‑ Columbia, SC
History Simulation for Teaching Early Modern British History
Duncan Buell, Project Director
Outright: $49,967
To Support: The development for classroom use of a prototype game‑based simulation for exploring the social conditions of 17th‑century Britain.

University of Southern California ‑‑ Los Angeles, CA
Design of an Interactive Tabletop Device for Humanities Exhibitions
Anne Balsamo, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To Support: The development of a prototype tabletop device for museums to allow for interactive browsing of large‑scale digital collections, using the AIDS Memorial Quilt database as a test‑case.

University of Washington ‑‑ Seattle, WA
Advancing Information Design for Architectural Image Interfaces
William Jordan, Project Director
Outright: $49,673
To Support: The development of a user interface for the Brumfield Russian Architecture Collection to provide greater access to the collection.

Washington State University ‑‑ Pullman, WA
Fort Vancouver Mobile
Rudyne Grigar, Project Director
Outright: $50,000
To Support: Development of interactive mobile storytelling environment using both iPhone and Android platforms to create a story module focusing on Hawaiians who lived and worked at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site in the mid 1800s.

Weber State University ‑‑ Ogden, UT
Concentration in the Humanities
Luke Fernandez, Project Director
Outright: $41,302
To Support: A pilot project to identify and consider methods, including the modification of test software, to minimize student distraction by digital environments. The project would be conducted in conjunction with an interdisciplinary humanities course on concentration.

Wheaton College ‑‑ Norton, MA
Encoding Financial Records for Historical Research
Kathryn Tomasek, Project Director
Outright: $25,000
To Support: A meeting of historians of eighteenth‑ and nineteenth‑century America, archivists, and technical experts to discuss the development of a module for financial records for the Text Encoding Initiative to allow for additional mark‑up and analysis of those records found in manuscript collections.