The further development of a database and web portal that would aggregate indigenous linguistic information relevant to Mesoamerican flora and fauna.

This project will develop a web portal, Documenting the Ethnobiology of Mexico and Central America, designed to forge an innovative web-based environment for multidisciplinary and multiethnic collaboration among anthropologists and linguists studying traditional ecological knowledge; biologists interested in collections mostly from poorly explored areas; and Indigenous communities and scholars who want to document and preserve traditional knowledge of local flora and fauna. This project will expand Symbiota, a widely used open source content management system for curating specimen- and observation-based biodiversity data, for use by humanities scholars and professionals by developing standards for tagging ethnobiological data, data that crosses thresholds separating the humanities, social science and natural science. By making available research on native nomenclature, classification, and use of flora and fauna, it will disseminate material key to understanding the cultural history of Indigenous Mexican populations.

The further development of the Global Medieval Sourcebook, an open-source resource for transcriptions, translations, and contextual information about digitized medieval texts from Europe, North Africa, and Asia. This project adds new content, expands the available languages, integrates TEI markup, and develops new pedagogical features.

The Global Medieval Sourcebook, a teaching and research resource, will present transcriptions of original medieval texts and their translations in an accessible, user-friendly, downloadable, open-source format. It will include information about each text, including a scholarly and user-friendly commentary on the text and translation. Links to online manuscripts and other relevant materials will enable scholars to use the site as a research portal and will provide essential context to students and teachers. Texts will be searchable by genre, author, date, language, keywords, and themes. Additionally, with teachers and students in mind, we will create and upload audio files of specialists reading the texts in their original language. Currently we are able to cover the following languages: Middle High German, Old French, Old and Middle English, and Medieval Chinese, Arabic, and Persian. In the next two years, we will expand to include medieval Spanish and Italian, with Slavic languages anticipated for addition in the next phase.

The study of how four Indigenous communities, with whom this team collaborated on a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to digitally repatriate archival materials, have used those materials in culture and language revitalization efforts.

This grant proposes to study how four Indigenous partners built digital archives based on Indigenous epistemologies and how they are using the materials for cultural and language revitalization. The grant will also support DH projects being constructed by the four communities using the digitally repatriated materials, which reflect how DH tools and theories take on very different forms when incorporated into Indigenous knowledge systems.

The continued development of a prototype of an analytical tool and database to allow humanities scholars and students to comparatively study architectural floor plans. The test case would be a collection of floor plans by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright from the Alexander Architectural Archives at the University of Texas, Austin.

Currently, those who design and study the built environment are hindered by an inability to examine large datasets of architectural drawings. Despite advancements in image recognition, no integrated system is capable of storing, reading, and analyzing floor plans. To solve this problem, this project is developing the Building Database & Analytics System (BuDAS) to partially automate the process of floor plan analysis. This project is seeking funding to expand the prototype into an integrated open source system with image recognition software for automatic floor plan detection, a database for the storage and management of data, and advanced query and graphing tools. BuDAS will allow users to compare thousands of plans to discover common design elements, examine spatial relationships over time, and mine for patterns across datasets. These findings will allow for a deeper understanding of the trends and patterns of space usage and the relationship between buildings and human experience.

Development of a working prototype for an open-access, curated, and classroom-sourced digital anthology of British and American literature in English (1650-1800).

Literature in Context is a TEI-encoded digital anthology of British and American literature in English (1650-1800) designed for use by students, teachers, and the general public. The project will innovate by taking full advantage of the affordances of digitization to create an Open Educational Resource that incorporates annotation, interactivity, digitized page images of original editions, and other contextual media materials. It also develops templates, assignments, and resources to help instructors at the college level engage students in the task of editing and annotating literary texts that can be added to the collection. Literature in Context provides a mechanism for the thoughtful, collaborative dissemination of our shared humanistic heritage. By including students in the production of the anthology, the project will foreground how the public construction of knowledge is essential to understanding the modern world.

The development of tools to allow humanistic researchers to analyze recorded literary and cultural materials ranging from poems, radio plays, and books to political speeches and sermons.

Audio archives provide tremendous resources for studying texts-in-performance, performance styles, and media history and formats. Such research requires tools that work well on low-quality, noisy audio common in humanities research, e.g., poetry readings, radio plays, and talking books, the datasets for this project. The proposed project will develop, provide access to, and support humanistic research using two state-of-the-art, open-source, user-friendly tools, Gentle and Drift. Drawing on advanced speech recognition and signal processing algorithms, Gentle and Drift visualize and quantify prosodic, expressive features of speech, including pitch range, intonation patterns, intensity, and rhythm. The project will also train a network of scholars in using these tools, and solicit and apply their feedback to develop new features to fit their needs. In so doing, the project will provide practical tools, broaden the community of users and develop new digital humanities research on sound.

Major infrastructure improvements to the multi-institutional Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery.

Over the past two decades, archaeologists have struggled to discover how the web can help them collaborate across institutional boundaries to generate accurate and commensurate data, share them publicly, and analyze them to advance our understanding of human history. This proposal from the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery, based at Monticello, offers linked social and digital strategies that can meet these challenges in the archaeological study of early-modern slave societies. The project seeks Level III funding to enhance proven open-source software (www.daaacrc.org) and training programs that provide our collaborators with flexibility in how they collect data and share it with diverse stakeholders. The project will optimize search and navigation on the DAACS website (www.daacs.org) to accommodate a 10-fold increase in the number of archaeological sites represented. The project would demonstrate how a core facility like DAACS can leverage collaboration among researchers working in diverse institutions.

Digital revitalization and content upgrades for World History Matters, a free-to-use educational web resource for teaching world history.

World History Commons, a Level III grant, will provide an essential digital resource for teaching and research in world and global history, reviving and expanding World History Matters, the award-winning, NEH-funded collection of world history websites now almost twenty years old. Using robust, modular, and extendable open-source software, this Open Educational Resource (OER) will preserve and enhance widely-used resources while introducing new humanities scholarship and pedagogy. World History Commons represents a ground-breaking collaboration between the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, the World History Association, and Monash University (Australia) which runs one of the largest world history programs in the southern hemisphere. World History Commons will provide a free, centralized, digital, world history platform with high quality, peer-reviewed resources for high school and higher education students, teachers, and scholars.

The expansion and improvement of an existing digital archive for indigenous languages, the development of software to identify and analyze archival materials, and two training workshops for tribal representatives and scholars engaged in language revitalization efforts.

The Miami-Illinois Digital Archive (MIDA) is critical to the educational development of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma’s language revitalization efforts: it is the only software for the organization, storage, retrieval and analysis of digital surrogates of archival language documentation. The proposed Breath of Life 2.0: Creating a ‘Second Breath’ for Indigenous Language Revitalization (BoL 2.0) project will enhance the proven functionality of MIDA by providing a stable and secure data platform to share this powerful tool with Native American communities engaged in archivally-based research and analysis for language revitalization. The resulting Indigenous Languages Digital Archive will be disseminated in two one-week training workshops for alumni from the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages who seek to engage in the type of advanced archivally-based research that has enabled languages such as Miami-Illinois to be spoken again after decades of silence.

The development of an open source software library that will allow scholars, teachers, and students to analyze time-based media including films, news broadcasts, and television programs.

This project allows scholars to work with large-scale collections by building an open source software library to facilitate the algorithmic production of metadata summarizing the content (e.g., shot angle, shot length, lighting, framing, sound) of time-based media. The software allows scholars to explore media in many forms, including films, new broadcasts, and television, revealing how moving images shape cultural norms.

The further development of the online Scholarly Text-Editing Platform for the production of print and digital critical and documentary editions.

Following a successful NEH start-up grant, we propose to implement a cloud-based Scholarly Text-Editing Platform (STEP). That platform is a complete workflow environment designed by scholarly editors, interface specialists, and web and application developers, for facilitating the production of print and online critical or documentary scholarly editions. STEP helps (1) facilitate rigorous TEI-XML transcriptions through timesaving encoding methods; (2) import digitized images of original documents; (3) compile textual apparatus lists; (4) enable the online scholarly editing, annotating, and formatting of texts in an interface that keeps track of and archives every iteration of a document through multiple stages of corrections and editorial interventions; (5) link edited texts and their components both to the digitized documents and to their critical editorial apparatus; and (6) streamline the conversion of edited texts to laid-out and hyperlinked texts for online or print publication.

The development of a model for aggregating information about dispersed collections of ancient Greek pottery based on the concepts of linked open data to provide greater access to the collections and to allow new ways of analyzing the materials. 

Linked Open Greek Pottery: Kerameikos.org is an international effort to define the intellectual concepts of Archaic and Classical Greek pottery following the methodologies of Linked Open Data (LOD). These concepts include categories such as shapes, artists, styles, and production places. When linked externally to other LOD thesauri, such as the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus, Kerameikos.org allows for the normalization and aggregation of disparate museum and archaeological datasets into an information system that facilitates broader public access (e.g., Pelagios Commons). Beyond the definition of pottery concepts, following open web standards, Kerameikos.org will standardize and document an ontology and model for exchanging pottery data, provide easy-to-use interfaces to visualize geographic and quantitative distributions of Greek pottery, and publish a series of data manipulation web services enabling archaeologists and museum professionals to contribute data to this ecosystem.

Development of a website featuring historical photographs and maps that explores the process of urban renewal in large and small cities across New York State.

We are applying for a Level I Digital Humanities Advancement grant for the amount of $49,587 to develop a design, technical plan, and prototype for the Picturing Urban Renewal website. This innovative website will place in space and time historic photographs of major redevelopment projects in four New York cities. It will encourage active looking as a way of learning about urban history and encourage users to compare how urban renewal transformed these four cities, for better and worse. This project makes two key contributions to urban and public history: (1) By focusing on the visual record, particularly pre-demolition and construction-era photographs, we foreground the human experience of redevelopment. 2) By comparing the impact of urban renewal on cities of varying sizes and economic fortunes, we fill an important gap in the scholarly literature, which emphasizes urban centers almost to the exclusion of the small and mid-sized towns and cities.

The creation of a spatial model of 1,400 Jewish ghettos during the Holocaust that maps the locations of victims and perpetrators and extracts content from interviews about the experience of living in ghettos, allowing scholars to analyze the relationships between perpetrators and victims using geospatial methods.

This project will implement a place-based model of the Holocaust to bridge the long-standing divide in Holocaust Studies between victims and perpetrators by locating them together in places targeted by ghettoization. We will do this by combining three approaches from the digital and spatial humanities. First, we will create an historical GIS of 1,400 ghettos, extracting key information from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s authoritative Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos. This will enable the first systematic, comparative analysis of Jewish ghettos, forced labor, and mass murder in Eastern Europe, 1939-1945. Second, we will use methods from corpus and computational linguistics to extract and analyze content related to ghettoization in 1,800 transcripts of video interviews with Holocaust survivors from USHMM and the USC Shoah Foundation. Third, we will employ geovisualization as a mode of analysis and to convey the relationships we find between Nazi actions and victims’ experiences.

The development of an open educational resource (OER) for college-level and advanced high school students based on content from the popular textbook Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s History. The OER will also integrate interactive materials from an existing website, History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web.

ASHP/CML proposes to create an open education resource (OER) that integrates the narrative of its textbook Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s History with enhanced, interactive resources from the website History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web. This new project—Who Built America? / OER—will offer instructors and students a multi-layered resource that provides a linear and analytical historical narrative, and the digital means to look beyond the text to understand how its narrative was constructed. The project encompasses three goals: to create an open digital version of Who Built America? that extends and updates its distinctive narrative for college and advanced placement students; to update, expand, and enhance the resources in the textbook and History Matters so these vital materials remain available; and to integrate the textbook narrative, primary sources, and teaching resources in a multi-layered OER.

A project to research and assess the state of archival records of American incarceration before 1970, leading to a two-day workshop for historians and data experts to plan for the creation of a digital archive to facilitate new scholarship across numerous humanities disciplines.

The digitization of American prison records now makes it possible to conduct large-scale analysis of incarceration in the United States, from the early nineteenth century to the present. This opportunity could not be timelier: for the past decade, scholars and policymakers have debated the causes and consequences of the phenomenon of “mass incarceration” in the United States. A new digital history of incarceration in the US before the 1970s, by revealing broad geographical and sociological patterns, the impact of historical contingencies, and the human face of individual prisoners’ lives, can make a significant contribution to our understanding of this issue. For this Level I application, we will employ a research assistant to assess existing digital sources on the history of criminal justice in the United States, and then gather for a two-day workshop to plan the creation of a new database and website.

The creation of a large-scale compendium and research platform for silent films that are currently housed in separate collections and a suite of tools to be used by scholars studying the transition of visual culture from stage to screen.

This Level III Digital Humanities Advancement Grant project aims to produce a digital compendium of over 400 films from the silent film era that document the transition of visual culture from stage to screen. It will combine highly-influential and rare works archived in the Paper Print collection of pre-1930 cinema at The Library of Congress with films at the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam to create a digital resource designed for film scholars around the world. The compendium will be built by merging two pieces of software: The Media Ecology Project's Semantic Annotation Tool and the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture's Scalar. The resulting platform will provide an open software and data framework scholars can use to compare disparate types of data in a single interface. This valuable tool will unite a wide and growing variety of data and invite scholars to gather and post ideas, asking and answering new questions about key historical features in the evolution of motion pictures.

The planning for future integration of three independent digital projects focused on African Americans during the Civil War and Reconstruction through convening a meeting of scholars, genealogists, and technical experts to create a blueprint for next stages of collaboration.

“Freedom’s Movements” brings together three extant projects--(1) Visualizing Emancipation, (2) African American Civil War Soldiers, and (3) Last Road to Freedom. Project Directors for this grant began collaborations in 2015, each project director providing feedback and their expertise in extending the work of the other projects, driven by the complementary nature of their work. By 2017, it became clear that a partnership between these projects could be beneficial. This Level I proposal is the first fruit of that more robust partnership.

The creation of an improved, open source method for visualizing patterns and themes in music and the development of course modules for undergraduate students at HBCUs.

Innovations in music visualization render new possibilities for understanding music. One example is Wattenberg’s Shape of Song, a defunct web app. The arc diagram visualization technique for Shape of Song is brilliant, but ultimately the project did not live up to its potential because of a poor understanding of how composers develop musical themes, a central object of inquiry for music theorists. Algorithmic Thinking, Analysis and Visualization in Music (ATAVizM), identifies and implements major improvements over Shape of Song: (1) pattern recognition based on heuristics from music theory, (2) theme identification by users integrated into the application, and (3) visualization enhancements that make arc diagrams utilitarian for research and teaching. The team will also design and implement a course module at Emory, Georgia State University, Morehouse College, Spelman College and the University of Georgia.

Further research in enhanced optical character recognition techniques for historical print books and automatic discoverability of handwritten marginalia drawing upon the collections of the Internet Archive.

Most past digitization projects have focused on transcribing documents individually. With the availability of library-scale digital collections, we propose a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (Level II) to develop computational image and language models to discover multiple copies and editions of similar texts and to correct each text using these comparable witnesses. We provide evidence that this collational transcription system can significantly improve optical character recognition on historical books. We also propose to use these collated editions to discover annotated passages in large digitized book collections. This approach will therefore not only mitigate the errors that reader annotations introduce into the OCR process but will also produce the first automatically generated database of handwritten annotations, Ichneumon. Methods and software developed by this project will thus benefit future research on automatic collation, book history, and historical reading practices.

The design and production of a 3D environment re-creating Isabella d’Este of Mantua’s (1474-1539) art and music “studiolo” for use with virtual reality headsets, laptops, and visualization walls.

The Italian Renaissance is famed for art, architecture, music, and learning. The integrated experience of these achievements is difficult to grasp, given the dispersal of physical evidence and the disciplinary confines of our learning. It is also often gendered as male. This online, virtual reality project for study of one of Renaissance Italy's most stunning art spaces and collections -- the studiolo of Isabella d'Este (1474-1539) -- will address both of these problems with cross-disciplinary tools for approaching the period through one of its most important women. Its immersive, interactive character will convey the human scale, cognitive density, and aesthetic specificity of a Renaissance art space and capture the multi-sensory complexity of interiors meant to dazzle visitors with humanist ideals. Individual and collaborative work in this environment will foster new approaches to studying and teaching the multi-media Renaissance and provide models for analogous projects in other periods.

A workshop on Library Circulation Histories to be hosted by Ball State University's Center for Middletown Studies. The workshop will bring together representatives from eleven library and reading history digital projects along with additional scholars and digital humanities developers to investigate making historical library circulation data more accessible for humanities research.

Ball State University's (BSU) Center for Middletown Studies, in conjunction with BSU's Digital Scholarship Lab, seeks a Level I Digital Humanities Advancement Grant to support the Library Circulation Histories Workshop, to be held March 6-7, 2020. The project period will run from September 1, 2019 to August 31, 2020. The aim of the Workshop is to make historical library circulation data more accessible and more analytically powerful. The Workshop assembles scholars and developers representing eleven (or more) library and reading history projects to share insights and develop new strategies or increasing the value for these already powerful research tools. Topics addressed will include the use of computational text analysis, network analysis, ethical issues, and data aggregation. The Workshop will result in published articles in a special issue/section of one or more journals, an online video recording of the conference, and a white paper on best practices.

The further development of the Bodies and Structures series on East Asian history and geospatial studies. As part of the project, the Scalar publishing platform would be improved to allow for the incorporation of additional spatial visualizations.

Cartographic maps visualize only a small part of the historical relationships and experiences that constitute spatial history. Yet they remain the mainstay of digital spatial history projects. Bodies and Structures captures the multivocality of spatial history. Built in the open-source platform Scalar, the site enables scholars and students to analyze the historical, multivocal nature of space and place in East Asia and beyond. We are applying for a Level II grant for September 2019-August 2021 to greatly enhance the site’s utility for teaching and research in modern East Asian history and the spatial humanities. During this period, we will enhance Scalar’s capacity for analytical visualizations and user-directed engagement; add twelve modules to expand the project’s geo-historical scope and provide new disciplinary perspectives; and use the new Scalar tools to design new maps and visualizations that locate the modules in the site’s new spatial historical environment.

Planning and early stages of development for an open-access portal of linguistic and cultural documentation of indigenous societies in Mexico and Central America.

Mesolex: Lexicosemantic Resources for Mesoamerican Languages (Level 1) is the first phase in creating an open-access portal of linguistic and cultural documentation of Indigenous societies in Mexico and Central America. The portal will have two basic modules. Mesoamerican Lexicons will disseminate lexical databases including both dictionaries and semantically specific lexicons (e.g., local names for flora; toponyms; body parts). This project will create a standardized data structure able to ingest lexical materials from a wide range of sources. It will also develop powerful search engines to discover data and flexible designs for language-specific online display. Mesoamerican Narratives will develop software to place audio or video recordings in native languages online, accompanied by transcriptions and translations that will be highlighted line-by-line in synchronization with audio or video playback. This Level 1 grant focuses on database design and creating the necessary software.

The further development of the VESPACE (Virtual Early modern Spectacles and Publics, Active and Collaborative Environment) project. This stage would focus on the development of an interactive prototype suitable for additional user testing.

The VESPACE (Virtual Early modern Spectacles and Publics, Active and Collaborative Environment) project seeks to model an eighteenth-century Paris Fair theatre through an immersive, playable simulation that allows users to explore the sensory and social worlds of this under-studied early modern cultural space. In order to reconstruct this vibrant facet of public theatre in Enlightenment Europe’s largest city, VESPACE brings together specialists from across the humanities, working in fields including theatre, history, literature, dance, sound studies, and architecture, working alongside computer scientists and engineers in the fields of game design, social interaction simulation, and virtual reality modeling of cultural patrimony. This application is for a LEVEL II Digital Humanities Advancement Grant to support work to develop a playable prototype during the two-year grant performance period (September 1, 2019-August 31 2021).