The addition of several features to the Lexos software, including a set of instructional resources to help scholars and students understand the most appropriate uses for computational methods for text analysis.

The rapid digitization of texts presents both new opportunities and real barriers of entry to computer-assisted explorations of texts. The Lexos software developed by the Lexomics Project provides a simple, web-based workflow for text processing, statistical analysis, and visualization designed to address these barriers. The project will support Lexos' core strength as an entry-level tool while seeking to position it as an innovative intervention in Digital Humanities conversations about the interplay of machine learning and text analysis. The project will embed dialogue about the use of computational methods to study humanities data in the tool itself through our "In the Margins" feature to collect and disseminate discussions of the problems, solutions, and best practices for using computational methods for text analysis.

Prototype development of a database and website that would aggregate indigenous linguistic information relevant to Mesoamerican flora and fauna.

In 1983 Catherine Fowler completed a pioneering study of Uto-Aztecan cultural history, focused on locating the Proto-Uto-Aztecan homeland by linking reconstructed PUA biological terms to the historic distribution of biological species labeled by these terms. Others have studied loan patterns in biological nomenclature among non-genetically related languages to develop models of migration and linguistic and cultural convergence in prehistoric periods. These two complementary approaches require an immense dataset of biological terminology from diverse languages. To achieve this dataset for Mesoamerica, an area characterized both by extensive migration and great biodiversity, this project will create an innovative portal to facilitate the exchange of information on Indigenous nomenclature, classification and use of biotaxa. This portal will enable a community of scholars to share material that would otherwise languish for years before, if ever, being disseminated in a print publication.

Development of an open-source toolkit and training materials that would allow humanities researchers to collect and analyze large-scale, publicly available data drawn from social media sites.

The MassMine project team representing participants from the Department of English, George A. Smathers Libraries (Libraries), and Research Computing at the University of Florida (UF) requests $60,000 to finish the version 1.0 release, develop a robust training program, and promote the MassMine open source software. MassMine enables researchers to collect their own social media data archives and supports data mining, thus providing free access to big data for academic inquiry. MassMine further supports researchers in creating and defining methods and measures for analyzing cultural and localized trends, and developing humanities research questions and data mining practices. The primary aims of this project are to: 1) refine the MassMine tools to support collection, acquisition, and use of available social media and web data; and, 2) develop a training program and corresponding online resources for supporting the broad use of MassMine by humanities researchers, regardless of experience.

A year-long initiative bracketed by two workshops where faculty from teaching-intensive institutions would test best practices for teaching humanities content using digital methods in under-resourced classrooms.

Digital Humanities (DH) offers vast pedagogical opportunities for teachers and students, but implementation may be seemingly untenable at certain institutions, particularly large public teaching schools grappling, after years of budget cuts, with impacted class sizes and overburdened faculty. Similarly, R1 institutions or liberal arts colleges might possess a single DH expert but lack infrastructural support, limiting DH pedagogy to individual classrooms. Since our emergent information economy requires citizens to work with digital technologies and also critique them, students who do receive access to DH learning are placed at a disadvantage. We need to determine ways to distribute DH research and pedagogy widely, across a spectrum of institutional types and student populations, including students learning at night in community colleges, students taking 300-person lecture classes at large public universities, students from primarily underrepresented groups, and ESL learners. Towards this goal, we propose a workshop for faculty from regional institutions to develop pedagogical strategies and share resources.

The further development of a suite of analytical tools for music scholarship, with a particular focus on the development of a tool for analyzing polyphonic performances from musical scores.

This project proposes to develop a core technology for a suite of automatic software tools for quantitatively analyzing musical performances for which a corresponding musical score is available and an encoding format for storing the analyses, entitled the Automatic Music Performance and Comparison Toolkit (AMPACT). A musical performance can convey both the musicians' interpretation of the written score as well as emphasize, or even manipulate, the emotional content of the music through small variations in timing, dynamics, and tuning. The target audience for AMPACT is music scholars are who are interested in performing empirical analyses of recorded performances but who lack the technical skills or the time necessary to develop their own tools or implement existing algorithms. The proposed project will allow the researchers to develop an algorithm for analyzing polyphonic performances for which musical scores are available.

The development of a prototype digital map that seeks to combine scientific perspectives with non-Cartesian perspectives (such as those of the indigenous population) that don't map easily to spatial coordinates, focusing on the historical, cultural, and economic significance of Onondaga Lake near Syracuse, NY.

Onondaga Lake is small and obscure, but its story touches on indigenous wars and the Great Law of Peace, the writing of the US Constitution, the development of American industry and transportation, legal and technical innovations for environmental recovery, and creative urban planning. We propose a prototype digital atlas of the lake that combines the idea of space as a spiritual center in indigenous and local knowledge with the more decentered idea of space inherent in digital mapping. Our project will employ existing software and experiment with a variety of storytelling and data collection methods, methods of representing "blank spaces" on the map due to environmental change or privacy issues, and ways to use the map to foster ongoing dialogue about contested space and contested terms, such as "restoration." We will apply research about the compatibility of traditional, local, specialized, and scientific knowledge to create a tool for respectful communication.

The further design and development of a database of runaway slave advertisements from pre-1865 US newspapers drawing from several historical collections.  The project would also experiment with crowdsourcing approaches to enrich the database records.

'Freedom on the Move' (FOTM) creates a digital resource from an estimated 100,000 runaway slave advertisements from pre-1865 U.S. newspapers. Placed by enslavers when enslaved people attempted to escape, these ads included extensive information about fugitives. They comprise the richest source of information about enslaved individuals in the United States, yet no comprehensive collection of them exists. FOTM will collect these ads and use crowdsourcing to parse their data into a database, enabling sophisticated new analyses of the history of U.S. slavery. A crowdsourcing interface will provide a site for public engagement with an enduring national trauma, supporting lessons for K-12, university, and museum education. The database will be freely available for browsing and exportable for research. NEH start-up funding will enable us to build tools for incorporating large-scale data from contributors, creating a prototype for future expansions of this and similar digital resources.

A cross-disciplinary workshop and follow-up activities to develop a set of essays and a metadata schema to understand and describe toxic rhetoric in online spaces, with an emphasis on large-scale multiplayer computer games.

A one-year collaboration and two-day working group meeting of scholars from English, Linguistics, Law, Psychology, Education, Game Studies, Communication, and Justice Studies in consultation with industry experts from game development, documenting: 1) best practices for studying and moderating online toxicity, 2) conceptual and legal frameworks for addressing online hate speech, dangerous speech, and toxic speech, 3) patterns of toxic language in digital media, 4) next steps for building a reference corpus of toxicity types and a descriptive taxonomy, and 5) a humanistic perspective on consequences of online toxicity and its moderation procedures.

Development and assessment of new workflows for publication and long-term preservation of born-digital scholarship within Caribbean Studies.

The Caribbean is the site of some of the most radical and diverse theoretical and material engagements with the digital. The sx:archipelagos project seeks to channel that activity by providing an innovative two-tiered platform to support digital scholarship in, for, and about the Caribbean Each layer of sx:archipelagos will contribute something new to both Caribbean Studies and to the digital humanities, first via the creation and documentation of a new cost-efficient workflow for the production of text-based scholarly outputs; and second, via the creation and support of a flexible multimodal environment for the production of unique works of digital scholarship. By the close of the grant period we expect to generate: 1) five scholarly articles produced using Markdown; 2) a workflow analysis and position paper documenting the process and results of our experiment in online publishing; 3) one peer-reviewed digital project and corresponding narrative of its construction. We will post our white paper and multimodal exhibition to an inaugural, beta iteration of the platform.

Employing computational linguistics and natural language processing techniques to study how Holocaust survivors use spatial terms to describe their experiences. Testimonies from the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation Center collection would provide the sources for the preliminary study.

First-person accounts are central to understanding the Holocaust. Our project will be the first to examine survivors' testimony for the spatiality of individuals' experiences. Drawing on video interviews with survivors, we will analyze the language survivors use in speaking of places, events, movement, relationships, and their perceptions of space and time. We will focus on how their social networks were fragmented and reformed and the spatial characteristics of work places and work relationships experienced by forced laborers in ghettos and labor camps. We will do this through a hybrid methodology that combines close listening with spatial visualization and corpus and computational linguistics methods that we will apply to interview transcripts. The dictionary of spatial and relational terms this will produce, along with our visual conceptualizations of the topologies of experience, will enable us to link survivors to Nazi-controlled spaces represented in our existing GIS datasets.

A research project on how techniques originally developed for computational biology, such as sequence alignment, can illuminate influences and stylistic attributes among classical Latin and Greek texts.

Literary scholarship has long been preoccupied with identifying verbal and stylistic relations among texts (“intertextuality”). This project is a collaboration between literary critics, systems biologists, and computer scientists to develop new computational tools for the study of such intertextual relations. These tools will enable researchers to trace connections among Latin and Greek texts at much a higher order of scale and efficiency than manual searches: 1) a sequence alignment tool, inspired by a core technique in genomics, which identifies verbal parallels that are close but inexact (the commonest kind of intertextuality); 2) a digital Greek-Latin thesaurus to enable identification of parallels across languages by meaning; 3) a set of tools for classification of texts according to various stylistic metrics, especially useful for studies of quotation and attribution; 4) phylogenetic methods to chart the evolutionary histories of classical texts and their traditions of reception.

A set of experiments with 3D printing and a three-day workshop in which scholars explore the philosophical and practical implications of fabrication and “making” in a humanities context.

This project brings together scholars at various stages of their careers from across the Humanities and Digital Humanities to participate in an intensive three-day 3D Making and Critique workshop and follow-on research. The project's goal is to materially brainstorm printed artifacts that serve as critical investigations, while providing time for reflection upon the broader social and environmental contexts of the 3D printing process. The intended results of the project will be to produce and disseminate early-stage critical objects, to generate reflexive theory and critique about 3D printing and making practices, to connect Humanities scholars across both the making and critical bodies of humanistic scholarship, and to create an action plan for collaborative written and made scholarship targeted for publication in open-access presses and exhibitions.

Pilot implementation of Project Andvari, an online portal to aggregate digital collections of northern European, early medieval art and artifacts from a range of cultural institutions.

The aim of Project Andvari is to provide a free digital portal for integrated access to dispersed collections of northern European art and artifacts of the early medieval period (4th–12th centuries). Funding is requested to support development, testing, and implementation of a pilot platform that will harvest and aggregate existing metadata records and digital surrogates of objects maintained in the collections of three international partner institutions with representative datasets that participate in linked open data initiatives. Ultimately, Project Andvari will facilitate interdisciplinary research in art, archeology, history, and literary and religious studies, allowing users to study visual culture across media and beyond traditional geographical and disciplinary boundaries. The innovative application of aggregated search methods and enhanced metadata will promote discovery and comparative analyses of artifacts in ways that have not previously been feasible.

A two-day workshop and follow-up activities for early modern literature scholars, linguists, and computer scientists to consider how the Bookworm textual analysis tool could be used with the Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership corpus.

We propose a workshop on how to extend and customize a graphical user interface (GUI) for Bookworm, the well-established open-source text analysis and visualization tool. Hosted by Rice University's Humanities Research Center, the workshop will focus on applying Bookworm to the Early English Books Online (EEBO) corpus and leverage expertise in various disciplines including history, linguistics, genomics, and bioinformatics to design a powerful, intuitive, open-source text analysis package to allow novice users instant access to the utility and promise of digital text analysis.

The development of a platform that supports the sharing of humanities content through mobile tours in both exterior and interior spaces, building on Curatescape and Wordpress platforms.

While there is no shortage of digital experience options for cultural heritage institutions, the number of realistic options for today’s small-­- and medium-­-sized institutions is unfortunately slim, and museums of all sizes still struggle to deliver engaging mobile experiences. TourSites for WordPress: Digital Tour Experiences for Multisite Museum Networks will create a digital platform that combines WordPress and Curatescape into a new opportunity for the field. This project builds on previous collaborations between the Ohio History Connection and the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities and leverages their respective expertise to create a new set of tools specifically for the WordPress Network environment. The open-­-source platform created by this project will enable any institution to create digital tour experiences across multiple locations, maintain those networks with efficient use of resources and connect the public to stories, people and places in innovative ways.

A pilot study on how analyzing patron responses to a citywide reading program can help scholars and librarians better understand which book genres and styles prove most meaningful to the community.

“Reading Chicago Reading” aims to put new data-intensive predictive tools in the hands of public librarians and digital humanities scholars in order to enhance their ability to serve public needs and interests. We take as our starting point the Chicago Public Library’s popular and muchimitated “One Book One Chicago” program, in which books are annually selected for city-wide promotion. Our project combines circulation data, social media postings, text analysis, branch-bybranch demographics, and history of the events of themselves to recover quantitative, predictive factors that link texts to reader response. The multi-disciplinary project brings together expertise in library science, text mining, predictive modeling and machine learning, literature, and urban sociology, and builds on existing collaborations with the Chicago Public Library.

Prototype development of a web-based resource documenting handwritten inscriptions found within the ruins of the early Roman Empire, with a focus on the town of Herculaneum as a pilot case.

We propose to develop tools to study and analyze handwritten, informal, ancient inscriptions (graffiti) for the Ancient Graffiti Project. Thousands of these messages from Herculaneum and Pompeii convey voices at every level of ancient society. Handwritten inscriptions differ from inscriptions on stone. First, since graffiti are found in situ, original geospatial and contextual data are available. Graffiti also include drawings, which are difficult to locate in text-based search engines. Consider how to search for a dog attacking a stag. These tools include 1) representation of graffiti in their spatial context at multiple granularities, 2) a system of controlled vocabularies and filters to make figural graffiti (drawings) searchable and retrievable, and 3) a schema of medium-specific metadata for handwritten inscriptions. With these tools, users will be able to study both inscribed texts and images, as well as research questions specific to ancient graffiti.

Further development of Beyond Citation, a web-based guide to research databases in the humanities. During this phase, the project would result in thematic guides to databases in fields such as art history, history, and literature, as well as a prototype tool for use by research libraries.

Although humanities scholars widely use academic databases from publishers such as ProQuest or Gale, knowledge of how proprietary databases work is limited because their structures are dynamic and not transparent. Scholars therefore may not be aware of and cannot account for how database structures affect their interpretations of search results or text. Lack of information is an obstacle to scholarly inquiry because databases shape the questions that can be asked and the arguments that can be made through search interfaces and algorithms. Beyond Citation is a research platform that aggregates information about academic databases so that scholars can understand the significance of the material they glean. By making accessible essential information about the structures and content of databases, Beyond Citation takes an important step in updating the scholarly apparatus to encourage critical thinking about academic databases and their impact on research and scholarship.

Using Character Description Language software in the mapping of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese scripts and the augmentation of a standard database of characters open to members of international standards bodies and to the public.

The CDL project is directed in particular at resolving long-standing problems with the digitization of the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese scripts (CJKV, or often simply shortened to CJK). The proposed start-up project will promote the collaborative use of the innovative CDL font technology, for the building of international computing standards essential to the stable function of all modern software, and for the accurate digitization and preservation of CJK documents and libraries. The CDL project benefits all computer users with an interest in CJK texts, or with an interest in dealing with CJK partners, since CDL has core applications for information input, storage, and retrieval. CDL improves data-management practices in the development of international standards and in the usage of end-users. CDL ensures the integrity of those standards, enriches the possibilities for end-user content creation, and therefore brings new richness to online digital humanities resources.

The beginning stages of a jazz research digital library, located at North Carolina Central University, comprising photographs, oral histories, music, and text.

The development of a Jazz Research Digital Library is of great significance in the preservation and documentation of perhaps America's greatest cultural contribution to the world. Jazz is considered America's true "classical" music, a genre created and developed by African American musicians. The jazz art form is in crisis mode. Increasingly larger numbers of African American youth are not exposed to jazz and have no knowledge of its significance to their heritage. One of our objectives is to restore jazz to its rightful place of cultural importance in the African American community, particularly the youth. The youth of today are our performers, critics, authors, historians, and listening audiences of the future and action must be taken to preserve and provide access to jazz resources for our youth. We will seek to address this dilemma by creating a Jazz Research Institute which will comprise several components but will initially focus on the Jazz digital Library.

A robust web-based multimedia resource combining folk legends on saints and biblical figures, songs and religious rituals, and iconography of Russian Orthodoxy.

Russian Orthodoxy has been the source of a great deal of speculation about the extent of duoeverie (dual faith). Since the fall of the Soviet Union, scholars have undertaken the study of folk religion in earnest, but there is as yet no comprehensive study of the interrelations between various folk genres. Typically folklorists study either oral literature (e.g., legends and songs), or folk ritual and iconography. This separation of genres inhibits a full understanding of the complexity of the complete religious belief system. Our multimedia critical edition will feature an innovative cross-disciplinary approach combining the study of legends on saints and biblical figures, songs and religious rituals, and folk iconography into a single, comprehensive research project that will be published in a new digital framework designed to integrate text and multimedia into a coherent whole.

Planning for a "digital collaboratory" engaging humanities scholars, scientists, technology specialists, and native Hawaiian culture experts in the development of a geospatially-referenced database of the island of Hawaii.

The Kohala Center and Redlands Institute propose a ?digital collaboratory? that will foster cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural research and incorporate a geographically-referenced knowledge management system for humanities scholars, scientists, planners, teachers, students and the general public. The overriding purpose is to create an environment in which knowledge grounded in indigenous epistemologies can be integrated with information grounded in Western scientific epistemology, using the Island of Hawai?i as a test bed. We wish to explore how GIScience and the associated spatial-temporal toolbox can provide this bridging opportunity. This initial project phase explores the spatial element of Hawaiian epistemology, engaging experts from various disciplines in an intensive collaborative effort to uncover a means of representing interconnected cultural and scientific information in the digital environment provided by GIS and knowledge management systems.

Digital laser scanning and three-dimensional quantification, as well as the creation of digitally-generated models, of ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets.

The Brooklyn College Archaeological Research Center and the Brooklyn College Digital Morphology Laboratory are applying for funding from the NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants Program to investigate the feasibility of using laser scanning and 3D quantification and analysis of the cuneiform signs on a series of ancient Near Eastern tablets as a pilot study (1) to determine whether specific ?hands? can be identified ; (2) to investigate whether the same technology and research design can be used to match unconnected tablet fragments and to determine whether or not they are parts of the same text; (3) to reconstruct and compare the seals on the tablets and, (4) to reproduce exact larger-scale replicas of tablets and seals in epoxy resin for study and exhibit.

A pilot program for a model high resolution archaeological database in Greece and the United States consisting of photographs, video, field notes, laser scans, architectural data, and simulations relating to the ancient Roman colony of Corinth.

We propose to seek funding to implement a pilot program as a proof of concept for the larger initiative that would fully deploy the synchronized data storage and acquisition between the United States and Greece. This project will also establish the a model suitable to expand the program to include collections not only in Greece and at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, but other centers of archaeological data around the world.

The creation of an interactive GIS (Geographical Information System) database of early maps of the African coastline, 1434-1504.

Digital technology applied to a historically significant collection of maps will not only allow collective display, but will create a research resource enabling entirely new modes of scholarly investigation. New knowledge can be gained through use of GIS software. The project is significant to many humanistic fields and will be openly available to scholars and teachers.