A series of planning activities to create a network of scholars (or “hub”) to surface works by women writers through digital methods and also provide support, mentorship, and peer-review services for women in the digital humanities.

The project team is seeking a Level I Digital Humanities Advancement Grant to plan a digital recovery hub that will operate as a network of scholars grounded in diverse feminist methods under the umbrella of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW). The hub will provide a much-needed resource for project consultation and technical assistance for scholars engaged in the recovery of the works of American women writers from all periods. The hub's broader goals are to: 1) reinvigorate the value of digital scholarship as a recovery method by extending traditional editing projects with network mapping, spatial analysis, and the distant reading of massive datasets; 2) provide support for projects at a variety of levels; 3) act as a feminist peer reviewing body for in-process work; and 4) build a community of use to help recovery projects reach broader audiences by interfacing with SSAWW’s membership and journal Legacy.

The development of a pilot database and visualization tools that will allow users to search a large collection of paintings by pigment and to determine the time and location where particular works of art were painted based on the availability of pigments.

Mapping Color in History [MCH] brings together the scientific data drawn from existing and on-going material analyses of pigments in Asian painting in a historical perspective. As a digital portal with a searchable online database, MCH will not only document pigments and their material properties, but also enable an in-depth historical analysis of pigment data through a search tool that will identify specific examples and their locations in both time and space. It takes an object-based method for data collection instead of a pigment-based organization scheme. By developing a database model that can normalize fragmentary and uneven data, MCH will help scholars to bring together disparate data that is difficult to find or compare. A Level II NEH grant will support the completion of a pilot database of historical pigments linked to paintings, locations, times and a visualization tool that will allow users to search the database for entries that match a particular pigment.

A collaboration between Marshall University and the American Foundation for the Blind to develop enhanced accessibility features and related user documentation for the Clio project, a platform that allows educators and cultural institutions to design mobile tours for exploring local history and culture.

Our team of humanities scholars and developers will work with the American Foundation for the Blind to make Clio accessible. The team will share lessons learned and hopes to become a model for other public-facing digital humanities projects.

The development and testing of a prototype of an interactive three-dimensional simulation of the Newark Earthworks, one of Ohio’s Hopewell ceremonial centers.

People the world over build monuments to connect land and sky, structuring human experience of the cosmic through their creations. When built of earth, these monuments degrade in ways that obscure the intended earth-sky connection and meaning ascribed to it. We overcome some of these challenges by employing recent digital technologies to virtually reconstruct one of the most significant earthworks built by the American Indian people of the Hopewell Culture. With a Level II grant, Virtual World Heritage Ohio develops a full digital model and virtual exploration prototype of the Octagon Earthworks--a Hopewell culture site on the U.S. Tentative List for World Heritage. The publicly accessible prototype builds upon the existing CERHAS reconstructions, expanding avenues for humanities scholarship while broadening public understanding of and appreciation for these significant American Indian monuments.

Planning for the revitalization of the MayaArch3D project and documentation for using 3D WebGIS data in digital scholarship.

This level I project revitalizes and enhances the 3D WebGIS component of the MayaArch3D Project, which integrates 3D models of cities, terrain, and objects with associated, geo-referenced data for humanities scholarship. First, we will review the existing code of the 3D WebGIS. Second, we will define concrete steps to (1) make the system more customizable and extensible (2) add functionality for dynamic interchange of 3D models (3) develop a friendlier UX (User Experience), and (4) revamp the infrastructure to store and call up 3D models from an open source repository. Broader project outcomes enhance the humanities in several ways: (1) documentation for a customizable open source 3D WebGIS (2) 3D WebGIS for data management and preservation for cultural heritage, (3) 3D WebGIS to foster scholarly collaboration , and (4) contribute to 3D digital data preservation and access by designing infrastructure in collaboration with libraries.

A workshop for scholars and practitioners to develop standard methods for digitally notating dance and other movement-based arts to enable easier preservation and analysis.

A Level I proposal for a three-day workshop that draws together a small group of experts in the areas of (traditional) dance notation and digital data modeling. This working group aims to lay the groundwork for the creation of a digital notation format for the movement-based arts that can interoperate with other media-based tools.

The redesign of the Lakeland Digital Archive using minimal computing approaches and the creation of tutorials to teach other community organizations how to build and maintain digital public humanities projects.

Residents of Lakeland, a 130-year-old African American community adjacent to the University of Maryland (UMD) have worked for more than 10 years to document, preserve, and share their cultural heritage. Their ambition has been to capture a history that covers African American life in the long 20th century in their own voices as community members. This project will develop a working prototype of the Lakeland Digital Archive to demonstrate how digital humanities methods such as minimal computing can enhance community-led projects by empowering them to build digital publications that are resilient, shareable online and off, and amenable to models of shared governance. Continuing an existing community-university partnership, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) will collaborate on this Level II grant with the Lakeland Community Heritage Project (LCHP) and other local partners.

To expand and refine a set of digital tools and workflows to generate and map datasets of racial covenants from communities across the United States within one web platform.

Through a process of experimentation over the last four years, Mapping Prejudice has developed a powerful, new methodology that combines optical character recognition (OCR), crowd-sourcing and geographic information science (GIS), to map racial covenants found in property deeds at an unprecedented level of granularity. This has allowed the project to create a comprehensive spatial dataset of racial covenants for Hennepin County, Minnesota (Minneapolis and the surrounding suburbs)—the first such dataset in the country. The Mapping Prejudice team will leverage what it has learned from mapping racial covenants in Hennepin County to open up new opportunities for public engagement and research on the history of segregation and the urban environment in the United States.

Improvements to an online historical atlas for Michigan's Copper County from 1880-1950, with rich data about people, buildings, and historical environments from one of the nation's oldest and largest copper mining regions. 

The Keweenaw Time Traveler Project (Level III) is an online historical atlas that includes over 12.9 million variables about the historical environments, buildings, and populations that lived and worked in Michigan’s Copper Country from 1880-1950. A group of interdisciplinary scholars together with our active heritage community is expanding the project to include 1) creating links between historical data sets to permit following populations and environments as they change through time, 2) modeling best practices in the spatial humanities by expanding the capabilities of our existing historical atlas through public-participatory design charrettes, and 3) creating guided activities, lesson plans, public programming, and replicable code for other communities to build their own historical atlas. The result will be a publicly-generated data-rich historical atlas in which community members can discover, explore, and contribute their own information about the regions history and heritage.

The refinement and dissemination of a new method for multispectral imaging of early modern manuscripts and print materials, drawing upon special collections held by the University of Missouri, Kansas City, the Linda Hall Library of Science, and the University of Kansas.

This Level III Digital Humanities Advancement Grant project has three goals: 1) to use a multispectral imaging system to study palimpsests in a medieval chant book owned by LaBudde Special Collections at the University of Missouri Kansas City Libraries; 2) to develop an alternative, deep learning model that will allow us to derive visible light multispectral images from normal RGB images; and 3) to apply both methodologies comparatively, testing their efficacy on the UMKC chant book and on two additional heritage documents held by other libraries in the Kansas City region. Should this alternative be viable, it will dramatically reduce the cost and lower the economic barriers for other scholars, archivists, and librarians who would like to use multispectral analysis for their materials. In effect, it would allow humanities centers, libraries, and archives the ability to conduct their own investigations with these techniques using readily available and affordable equipment.

A series of workshops and training sessions on digital cartography in Florida and Haiti, with a goal of creating the first detailed map of Haitian patrimonial structures.

This is a collaborative effort between humanities scholars, libraries, and archives at Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) at Florida International University and Institut de Sauvegarde du Patrimoine National (ISPAN) in Haiti to use cartographic approaches to bring visibility to Haiti’s fortresses. For this NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Level 1 grant, we propose to hold two workshops and trainings, one in Miami, Florida and one Cap Haitian, Haiti, that will focus on developing a list of recommendations to create the first detailed map of Haitian patrimonial structures. There are currently no digital maps of cultural heritage in Haiti and most digital cartography projects have focused on disaster mapping. Our expected results will evaluate what a map application look like in Haiti’s context and defining what is useful for Caribbean scholars.

The digital reconstruction of historical infographics, specifically the timelines originally designed by British polymath Joseph Priestley in the 18th century. 

Timelines are powerful and intuitive tools of data visualization, but their visual clarity masks technical and historical complexity. As project investigators Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton argue in their book, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline, the measured, linear timeline format that is so familiar today first emerged only in the eighteenth century at the start of the period of rapid innovation that established the main visual vocabulary of our contemporary infographic environment. Our project, “Time Online II: The Time Charts of Joseph Priestley,” studies the foundational time charts of the eighteenth century and derives from them lessons for both history and information design. We achieve this by reverse engineering eighteenth-century time charts to understand their rules and by employing tools from digital cartography to reconstruct them as interactive devices for the Web.

The development of methods to study communities of potters in Ancient Greece to better understand the role that individuals played and how artistic ideas were transmitted over space and time.  

With a NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Level I Grant, our team will produce a network-based model for studying communities of potters in ancient Greece. Our project, Social Networks of Athenian Potters (SNAP), employs Social Network Analysis (SNA) to map for the first time in a relational database the ties among potters in Archaic and Classical Athens (600-400 BCE). The social network graphs (sociograms) and their digital platform offer an innovative approach to explore artists’ roles based on their position and how communities of potters are structured in periods of traditional practice versus experimentation. Our goals for the 12-month grant period are to: 1) complete all data collection to populate existing database and data formatting for Social Network Analysis for the Athenian potters; 2) disseminate our preliminary results through a project website, a workshop, and an open-access publication; and 3) plan its digital platform for our relational database.

The creation of a virtual reality experience of a 15th-century illuminated manuscript to allow users to engage with the content of the manuscript and also gain an appreciation for handling rare materials.

In this Level I proposal, we will build a virtual experience of a 15th century illuminated manuscript that is held in USC's Special Collections and place the model in a virtual version of a convent room similar to that in which it was originally used. This unique experience will allow participants to not only explore the manuscript by holding it rather than viewing it in a glass case, but also have the opportunity to learn about the consequences physical use of an object may have for its preservation. Additionally, the virtual version provides an opportunity for the participant to see the details and textures of the manuscript, the parchment, the binding, the ink, the gilding, and the painting at an extraordinary level of detail that cannot be achieved except in the virtual realm.

The creation of an online resource to increase accessibility to recordings of works by Black choreographers along with tools to make it easier to study dance by providing the ability to search and create connections across collections.

In keeping with the values of “experimentation, reuse, and extensibility,” this Level II proposal, titled “Dancing Digital,” leverages artist/scholar Gesel Mason’s existing collection No Boundaries: Dancing the Visions of Contemporary Black Choreographers and the open-source software CollectiveAccess to create a working prototype for an online resource that 1) provides online access to important full-length recordings of works by historically-underrepresented Black choreographers, 2) models how to imaginatively combine these full length recordings of dance with innovative features and supporting materials that enrich dance study across humanities disciplines, 3) creates a scalable, open-source, digital framework that broadens the focus from one choreographer’s work to the possibility of an interconnected field-wide archive, and 4) documents and shares the process, constructing a road map for other artists and organizations seeking to provide access to their collections.

Refinement of machine learning methods to improve automatic handwritten text recognition of Persian and Arabic manuscripts and make these sources more accessible for humanities research and teaching.

The Automatic Collation for Diversifying Corpora (ACDC) project will significantly improve the accuracy of handwritten text recognition (HTR) for Arabic-script manuscripts by developing a collation tool to automatically create large amounts of training data from existing digital texts and manuscript images without time-consuming human annotation of individual manuscripts. The ACDC project will accomplish this task by extending the capabilities of the text alignment tool passim and the HTR engine Kraken to align very poor initial HTR transcriptions of diverse manuscript exemplars with existing digital texts in order to automatically produce training data in a “distantly supervised” manner. The ACDC tool’s acceleration of the training data production process will enable, for the first time, the creation of generalizable Arabic and Persian HTR models required for the digital transcription of large-scale Persian and Arabic manuscript collections.

Technical improvements to the Mukurtu Content Management System and the addition of two additional community hubs for Native American and Native Alaskan communities located in southern California and Alaska.

This project seeks to expand the digital and human infrastructure necessary for the ongoing development, deployment, support, and training related to Mukurtu CMS—a free and open source content management system and community digital access platform built with and for Indigenous communities globally. Now in its second decade of development, Mukurtu CMS is an established digital platform used to empower and sustain the ethical circulation, curation, management and preservation of cultural heritage materials and traditional knowledge, including endangered languages and digitally repatriated cultural materials. The proposed project will expand the current Mukurtu Hubs program from four to six regional hubs, and extend the Mukurtu CMS software to provide increased capacity, infrastructure and support to Native American and Native Alaskan communities as they seek to manage, share, and provide access to their valuable cultural, linguistic and historic materials.

Research into the application of natural language processing techniques to study the evolution of language in Buddhist Sanskrit texts.

This application is for a Level II DHAG. The project has two objectives: 1) to advance research in Indian Buddhism by developing semi-automated methods to study the vocabulary of Buddhist Sanskrit texts; and 2) to contribute to the Digital Humanities by refining computational methods that leverage representations of words as numerical vectors. These vector representations of language, called "word embedding models," have found wide application in industry and are gaining traction in Humanities research. Due to their technical complexity, however, the full potential of cutting-edge word embedding techniques is rarely deployed in the Humanities, and best practices for reliably applying them to the study of historical texts are yet to be drafted. This project brings together Natural Language Processing experts and Buddhist Sanskrit scholars to devise and test new methods for harnessing the power of latest-generation word embedding techniques for historical textual scholarship.

The development and testing of virtual reality-based philosophical thought experiments for both classroom teaching and research.

Philosophers present hypothetical scenarios called “thought experiments” to analyze philosophical concepts. This project modifies, extends, and disseminates ongoing work to develop VR scenarios based on the popular “trolley problem” thought experiment, a hypothetical dilemma involving a choice between five deaths and one death. By presenting thought experiments in VR (instead of written presentations), we can address previous concerns that thought experiments are too abstract to be of much use in theorizing, research, and education, and that they do not accurately reflect widespread philosophical beliefs. The scenarios will be disseminated, along with a pilot study data set, via an online and modifiable repository for VR thought experiments. The project will conclude with a symposium to discuss challenges, opportunities, and recommendations for humanities-based research using VR and to promote the use of and ongoing additions to the repository.

Development of augmented reality software for rapidly documenting cultural heritage artifacts from archaeology and related disciplines while doing fieldwork.

The Documenting and Triaging Cultural Heritage (DATCH) project will, building on the successful prototype created using funding provided by an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Level II grant, further develop DATCH open-source software for field assessment and documentation of built and movable cultural heritage using augmented reality hardware. It will permit real-time overlay comparisons of cultural heritage against earlier documentation and enable creation of to scale drawings, even in the field without a network connection. An internet connection will allow additional features, such as video calls with subject experts, to facilitate rapid needs assessments of heritage sites and enable on-site multi-disciplinary collaborations. With our goal of creating a cross platform system for head-mounted augmented reality devices, DATCH will continue to be developed in Unity and field-tested with different versions of Microsoft’s HoloLens and Magic Leap One.

Redesign and redevelopment of the collaborative public digital humanities platform, Historypin.

This project will improve three key elements of the Historypin platform to provide further support for historical geospatial exploration and analysis for scholarly research and public programming in the humanities. The 2-year project will implement new site designs that enable easier use for digital humanities scholars and small cultural heritage organizations that were developed in user studies during a recent Phase I award. We’ll focus on three humanities project areas, including: Preservation, Place and Narrative; Collaboration in University Digital Humanities; and Collaborative Public History Programs. Each project area will be showcased by programs run by members of our Digital Humanities Advisory Panel and explore particular humanities questions.

The development of a Linked Open Data (LOD) web application to provide access to the data for contextualizing the digitized manuscripts of St. Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula that are hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles.

This proposal seeks Level III funding for the Sinai Manuscripts Data Portal, a web-based Linked Open Data application in support of a comprehensive data program that will both define and provide access to the rich data that describe and contextualize the manuscripts of St. Catherine’s Monastery.

A set of software tools and instructional materials that will facilitate the computational analysis of musical scores. 

Musicology research is a humanistic endeavor well suited to computational methods. Yet, despite the work of a small niche of scholars, most humanistic music scholarship is conducted via traditional, non-digital techniques. This research vacuum has been largely filled by those pursuing digital music research from a largely engineering perspective - the field of Music Information Retrieval. Unfortunately, this research often lacks crucial humanistic knowledge and perspective. We seek NEH funding to produce a set of software tools and pedagogical materials for computational musicology analysis which are appealing and accessible to musicologists and music theorists. Our project is based off a well-established computational musicology framework, humdrum. Our project modernizes and expands the humdrum ecosystem (consisting of a toolkit and unique data format), introducing a new software package called humdrumR (hum-drummer), and will include online computational musicology tutorials.

The development of a database of the enslaved and free Black builders and defenders of Nashville's Civil War Fortification through the use of community-driven linked data using the Spatial Historian platform.

This proposal requests funds to build a searchable database of aggregate data and transcribed microfilm collections of the enslaved and free Black builders and defenders of Nashville's Civil War Fortifications. The project proposes to take a linked data approach to upload community-sourced material about the Civil War in Nashville and make them available under a Creative Commons license using the Spatial Historian, a customizable historical and geospatial information system. The system allows for the extraction and analysis of the documents to integrate simultaneously the collection of data, extraction of content, and analysis and visualizations of the information according to customizations which are dictated by the public history and heritage community’s needs. The resulting product will be a website by and for public historians that allows for dynamic querying of the data, network and map visualizations, and the linking of data to other repositories of slavery and the US military.

A series of workshops to identify best practices for automatically collecting and archiving online data about musical events.

Our project responds to a new crisis in American music scholarship: the digital revolution has led to the digitization or dissolution of traditional archival sources (like newspapers and magazines) crucial to studying local music scenes. And while existing web archiving projects capture some relevant content, they are biased towards established genres and artists and miss most events advertised solely through social media—a difficult dataset to capture, yet essential to understanding 21st-century music-making. This project thus convenes fourteen interdisciplinary humanities scholars and technologists to: 1) explore and propose best practices for automatically collecting and archiving digital music event data by geographic location; 2) develop a pilot sample of music-related social media data and; 3) build upon previous Digital Humanities work to analyze the datasets and reveal their humanistic potential for future scholarship.