| PR-268710-20 | Preservation and Access: Research and Development | University of California, Berkeley | Universal Scripts Project | 3/1/2020 - 11/30/2023 | $306,370.00 | Deborah | Winthrop | Anderson | | | | University of California, Berkeley | Berkeley | CA | 94704-5940 | USA | 2019 | Linguistics | Research and Development | Preservation and Access | 239370 | 67000 | 235910 | 67000 | The preparation of eight scripts—six historical
and two modern—for inclusion in the international Unicode standard, to aid
research using materials in historical scripts and to promote communication in
minority language communities.
Although computer and mobile
users in many parts of the world can now communicate in hundreds of languages by
using their own native writing system, there are still linguistic minority
groups, and users of historical writing systems, who cannot. This is because
the letters and symbols of these scripts are not yet part of the international
character encoding standard, known as Unicode. More than one hundred and thirty
eligible scripts are not yet included in Unicode, which directly affects
humanities research, the creation of the global digital repository of
humankind's literary and cultural heritage and, for users of modern scripts,
basic communication. This project will fund proposals for two modern and six
historical scripts (or major script additions) for inclusion in the standard,
and pave the way for electronic communication in (and about) scripts by scholars
and other user communities. |
| PR-268771-20 | Preservation and Access: Research and Development | FAIC | Building a Life Cycle Assessment Tool & Library of Preventive Conservation Methods | 3/1/2020 - 2/28/2023 | $350,000.00 | Lissa | | Rosenthal-Yoffe | Sarah | | Sutton | FAIC | Washington | DC | 20005-1704 | USA | 2019 | Interdisciplinary Studies, General | Research and Development | Preservation and Access | 350000 | 0 | 350000 | 0 | Development of an online Life Cycle Assessment
(LCA) tool and library for conservation and preservation professionals. When
completed, this tool and library would help cultural heritage institutions
evaluate the environmental and human health impacts of collection management
activities, including conservation treatment, storage, loans, and exhibitions.
The Foundation for Advancement
in Conservation (FAIC) will conducted Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) that will
help collection care professionals to make informed choices that protect health
and the environment while continuing to preserve and exhibit humanities
collections. 3,500 materials, products, and processes will be researched and
made available through an online Tool. Complex processes will captured in an
LCA Library to guide collections care decision-making. Research results will be
disseminated through articles, blog posts, presentations, workshops, and a
traveling exhibit . Key research support will be provided by Northeastern
University and the Pratt Institute. Principal Investigators are Matt Eckelman
(NEU), Sarah Nunberg (Pratt), Eric Pourchot (FAIC), and Sarah Sutton
(Sustainable Museums). |
| PR-268783-20 | Preservation and Access: Research and Development | RIT | Low-Cost End-to-End Spectral Imaging System for Historical Document Discovery | 3/1/2020 - 2/28/2024 | $350,000.00 | David | | Messinger | | | | RIT | Rochester | NY | 14623-5698 | USA | 2019 | Interdisciplinary Studies, General | Research and Development | Preservation and Access | 350000 | 0 | 347680 | 0 | A Tier II project to develop a low-cost spectral
imaging system and accompanying software to recover obscured and illegible text
in historical materials.
Most research libraries and museums hold unique or rare items on which historically significant text is no longer legible due to deterioration or erasure. Spectral imaging - the process of collecting images of objects in many wavelengths of light - has become one solution for recovering obscured and illegible text on historical materials. Unfortunately, these systems are very expensive, and require knowledge of image processing methods. Most libraries and museums cannot afford these systems, nor do they have the capacity to process the data. To mitigate this, we propose to develop a low-cost spectral imaging system with accompanying low barrier-to-entry software. |
| PR-268817-20 | Preservation and Access: Research and Development | Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois | Broadening Access to Text Analysis by Describing Uncertainty | 3/1/2020 - 5/31/2021 | $73,122.00 | William | | Underwood | | | | Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois | Champaign | IL | 61801-3620 | USA | 2019 | Interdisciplinary Studies, General | Research and Development | Preservation and Access | 73122 | 0 | 73122 | 0 | A Tier I project to study errors and paratextual
noise in optically transcribed digital library texts, and the consequences of
these errors on historical and humanistic conclusions measuring trends across
time.
The noise associated with
digital transcription has become an important obstacle to humanistic research.
While the errors in digital texts are easily observed, the downstream effects
of error on scholarship are far from clear. Consequential problems for the
humanities often spring less from the average level of error in a collection
than from the uneven distribution of noise across different periods, genres,
and social strata. Uncertainty about this problem undermines confidence in
research and discourages some scholars from using digital libraries at all. To
address these problems, we will 1) Create paired libraries of clean, manually
transcribed volumes and optically-transcribed versions of the same volumes,
with or without paratext. 2) Conduct parallel experiments in these corpora to
empirically measure the distortions affecting scholarship. 3) Construct a map
of error and share resources that help scholars estimate levels of uncertainty
in their work. |