Digging into Image Data to Answer Authorship Related Questions

FAIN: HJ-50001-10

Michigan State University (East Lansing, MI 48824-3407)
Dean Rehberger (Project Director: July 2009 to July 2016)

This project will pursue research using advanced computational techniques to explore humanities themes related to the authorship of large collections of cultural heritage materials, namely 15th-century manuscripts, 17th- and 18th-century maps, and 19th- and 20th-century quilts. The project team includes staff from Michigan State University, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Sheffield.

An international, multi-institutional and multi-disciplinary team of researchers from the University of Sheffield (UoS), UK; Michigan State University (MSU), MI, USA; and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), IL, USA jointly propose the exploration of authorship across three distinct but in some respects complementary digital dataset collections: 15th-century manuscripts, 17th- and 18th-century maps and 19th- and 20th-century quilts. The datasets, freely available to the investigators, represent very large and diverse collections of digitized scans or photographs in standard image file formats. The US team will consist of members from UIUC (applying to NSF) and MSU (applying to NEH). The UIUC team led by Peter Bajcsy (as US NSF project director), the MSU team led by Dean Rehberger (as US NEH project director), and the UK team led by Peter Ainsworth (as UK JISC project director). The topic of authorship serves as a common question at the intersection of humanities, arts and social sciences research that unites the proposed exploration of image analyses.