A four-day workshop for thirty school teachers focused on digital resources on the American Revolution and the Civil War.

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History seeks funding for a digital humanities workshop in American history for elementary and secondary school teachers. The four-day seminar, to be held in New York City in August of 2007, will introduce participants to the rich variety of public domain primary source material available on the Internet, including documents from the Gilder Lehrman Collection. Guided by well-known scholars, participants in the seminar will examine primary sources from the American Revolution and the Civil War, and explore ways in which they can use free, widely available software in the classroom to create multimedia historical documentaries with their students. Most importantly, the seminar will demonstrate how teachers can harness students' enthusiasm for digital technology while at the same time immersing them in primary sources from American history.

A digital humanities collaboration on Celtic studies that will allow multiple users to contribute to, discuss, edit, and utilize a common body of information.

Our work to find solutions for overcoming some of the challenges in the field of Celtic Studies in the United States has led us to envision adopting and extending emerging technological tools, especially digital libraries and social collaborative software. The Finding the Celtic project will be an exemplar of a next-generation digital humanities collaboratory (a virtual workspace that allows multiple users to contribute to, discuss, edit and utilize a common body of information) that exploits information visualization techniques.

Two planning conferences, one in Riverside, California, the other in Bangkok, Thailand, to lay the foundations for the interactive mapping of Asian Buddhist monastic centers in Thailand and the creation of a digital resource using state of the arts tools.

The Thai Digital Monastery Project seeks to begin creating a digital interactive virtual library for enthusiasts, students, and scholars interested in exploring a selection of the over 30,000 monasteries in Thailand. Working closely with the Thai royal family, monastic ecclesia, and Mahamakut University the PI, Justin McDaniel and his collaborators will explore the application of new open-source technologies to create an integrated digital research environment in which participants can walk through three dimensional and 360 degree immersive spaces. In order to build this digital environment that will serve a wide range of learning communities, a one year in depth feasibility initiative is needed which will test technology in the field, recruit a talented long-term staff, and design a electronic platform for a planned multi-year project.

Development of a tool to present the progressions of interrelated items held in an electronic thematic humanities repository.

The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) has collaborated with University of Virginia faculty and others on scholar-driven projects to create electronic thematic repositories for quite a few years. The importance of presenting information out of such a thematic repository as a progression, that is, organized along a particular axis, such as a timeline, has become clear through these collaborations. In two of the scholar-driven projects a custom-designed display process was implemented. The proposed project will design and implement a generalized version of the display process that will allow user interaction with presentations of progressions derived from other thematic repositories much more feasible. The proposed project will also extend the display functionality to allow more than one progression to be presented and thus compared.

The testing and implementation of a prototype for digitizing artists' books by a group of curators, artists, critics, and scholars who will expand the use and population of this virtual resource through a distributed content model.

Artists' books are original works of art produced in traditional and experimental formats. An increasing number of scholars are taking an interest in this field. But critical scholarship depends on having access to these works - many of which are rare, out-of-print, and difficult to locate. Artists' Books Online is a networked digital resource designed to provide access to these books in virtual facsimile as page images accompanied by extensive metadata in a form that creates substantial commentary. The infrastructure of the ABsOnline prototype has been designed to aggregate materials that are geographically dispersed into a single "collection" of online objects. NEH funded activity would test a model of "distributed content development" for the repository. By working with a handful of selected collaborators, I will test the viability of building a community of contributors and scaling this prototype of collaborative, online scholarship.

Creation of a proof-of-concept system that employs Natural Language Processing techniques and utilizes information contained in tables of contents and back-of-the-book indexes for more precise searching of the content of electronic books.

Research shows that monographs are a key source of information for researchers in the humanities. Unfortunately, modern day search technology is not well suited to monograph access because most full-text retrieval systems have been developed for the search and retrieval of web pages or journal articles which tend to have many fewer words than the average book. We propose to apply Natural Language Processing techniques to utilize the rich, intellectually-viable information contained in tables of contents and back-of-the-book indexes in traditional information retrieval and browsing systems, thus making monographs accessible by capitalizing on the internal structure of the book. We believe this automation effort will ease the task of making the content of electronic books more precisely accessible, ultimately allowing humanities scholars to carry out their research even as the preferred resources become digitized.

A study of the impact of podcasting technology in the teaching of foreign language courses.

The goal of this project is to build upon previous work by the principal investigator to determine if the use of podcasting technology in foreign language courses results in increased pedagogical effectiveness and greater student learning outcomes. The proposed study will examine the academic use of podcasting in beginning to advanced language, literature, and culture courses for the 2007-2008 academic year, including Arabic, German, Italian, Spanish, and Foreign Literatures in English Translation. The evaluation will provide evidence of the benefits of podcasting for foreign language instruction for publication in professional journals to promote the widespread adoption of strategies and materials developed by the project. It will provide evidence that podcasting has measurable instructional benefits. This will be used in subsequent studies that will scale up the use of new instructional practices to other courses that proved to be most successful for academic podcasting.

The development of a programming tool for automatically identifying, categorizing, and describing newspaper articles from digital files produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).

In the next few years, images of several hundred thousand pages will be digitized and available online through the National Digital Newspaper Program. While the digitization process typically includes identification of the words in the text using basic optical character recognition (OCR), the identification and indexing of articles is not required of the project awardees. Articles are the natural unit for interacting with the news. Knowing the articles can improve search accuracy and support user-friendly interaction and it should increase the value of the material for historians, teachers of history, and members of the public who are interested in history. We will develop automated methods for such article-level processing. Specifically we will build a set of Java programs that will use the image files and the OCR files as input and will identify, categorize, and extract descriptions from articles.

The digital reconstruction of classical Greek monuments in a second stage pilot project focused on the three dimensional digital recording of the early fourth century BCE tholos at Delphi in Greece.

Ashes2Art combines cutting-edge digital technologies, art history, archaeology, graphic and web design, animation and digital photography to recreate monuments of the ancient past. The project provides an extraordinary opportunity for faculty and students from various universities to combine skills from disparate disciplines in a web-based project available worldwide using open-source software. Faculty and students conduct focused research on specific monuments, visit the locations (when possible), shoot digital panoramas, write essays that summarize various opinions, document those sources with an extended bibliography and construct immersive 3D models based on published archaeological reports.That research is then published online utilizing technologies including Adobe Photoshop, Google Earth, SketchUp, Panoweaver, Tourweaver, Studio Max 3D, Cinema 4D, RealViz 5.0 Stitcher, Dreamweaver, Adobe Director and Macromedia Flash animation.

Development of an electronic publishing framework and supporting tools for Records of Early English Drama (REED), focusing on a pilot publication of documents on drama and secular entertainment performed between 1401 and 1642 in London's Inns of Court.

Volumes in the Records of Early English Drama (REED) series contain complex texts which qualify technically as data-sets. In the world of electronic publication, new means become available to access such data-sets. The proposed project will develop the framework, textual processing techniques, and editorial tools to enable single-source digital and print publication of future volumes in the REED series, beginning with the pilot collection of dramatic records for London: Inns of Court, edited by Alan H. Nelson. The code and documentation developed in this project will be made freely available for scholarly use under a standard open-source license such as the GPL.

The development of tools and practices for describing and accessing digital film and video materials.

Using selected moving images from Northeast Historic Film, this project will take a team approach to achieve open access with a metadata system incorporating emerging standards for discovery. We will emphasize contextualization, building tools to provide access to articles, scene-by-scene notes, both item-level and collection-level descriptive records, and we will integrate this information with new curriculum materials through easy-to-use interfaces. Partners are Primary Source and China Source, Maine Historical Society's Maine Memory Network, MIC, and the University of Maine's Windows on Maine. Three China scholars associated with Primary Source are committed to the project. We will digitize and put online unique footage of China,1928-1936, with rights to reuse, and we will ensure that researchers can easily find, identify, understand, and use the moving images. Teachers will participate in evaluation, informing decisions regarding follow-up initiatives.

Research regarding best practices for producing discussion forums that would mix live and off-site participants.

Scholarly presentations now extend beyond the lecture hall. Participants can contribute by their live presence, by joining chat sites or blogs, or by using "avatars" in interactive environments like Second Life. Digital technologies can enrich these events by fostering greater interaction among all participants, and preserving the exchanges for further research and discussion. From 10/2007 through 3/2009, this project aims to create a framework that will: (1) identify best practices for producing humanities forums that mix live and off-site participants (seating, displays, recording, bandwidth, etc.); (2) determine how best to foster and coordinate interaction among presenters, on-site audience, and off-site participants across various media platforms, and to record and store all their interactions; (3) outline the prototype for an open source database scheme and application that would archive and retrieve the variety of records generated from such "mixed reality" events.

The development of a recreation of the 1964-1965 World's Fair as a three-dimensional archive.

Come Back to the Fair recreates the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair as a fully interactive 3-D environment. This 3-D environment serves as a navigational tool for mixed media Internet based archival holdings. Images, documents and video footage are accessed through the 3-D environment permitting researchers to place the materials within the special context of the actual Fair environment.

A 3-day invitational workshop for 10 experts in historical Geographical Information Systems, religion in the Atlantic world, and cultural mapping, which will result in a book on the workshop topic.

This proposal for an expert planning conference on Humanities GIS imagines a future for the humanities arising from the cultivation of interfaces between the humanities and social sciences. A research project and book will stem from the workshop. The audience for this project includes both specialists and non-specialists, including teachers who must help their students understand the local and global context of events.

A project to create standards/practices and software for marking up and representing "static multimedia documents," especially marginalia and annotations in printed texts.

We propose to create a set of software technologies and encoding practices that will allow for the encoding, displaying, and searching of static documents that mix print, manuscript, and visual images--documents such as printed texts or images bearing handwritten annotations. The technologies we plan to build include standards for encoding coordinates in XML transcriptions so that search engines can visually display results of user searches for manuscript words and phrases; software for linking XML editing programs to an image display to allow encoders to relate bitmap images to XML text; and model stylesheets capable of displaying transcriptions of annotated documents together with digital images of those documents. The goal will be to create a software suite that is simple enough to be used by transcribers with little familiarity with information encoding and portable enough to work in multiple computing environments for widely different kinds of archival projects.

Development of a series of audio and video podcasts and additional online elements on the history and aesthetics of music.

uTunes: Music 1.01 is an initiative to develop an unprecedented multi-media approach to teaching Americans basic musical literacy, in the context of the new-media environment inhabited by today's "Net Gen" students. Program elements would be a mixture of "expert testimony" by leading academicians and scholars from both inside and outside of UT's College of Fine Arts, combined with classroom instruction, live in-studio and in-concert performances by leading resident ensembles, guest appearances by key musical celebrities, and graphic, text, audio and video interstitial elements. These programs will be designed for publication and distribution across a broad range of media platforms, aimed at the broader American public. At five to fifteen minutes in length, the program segments would be available as podcasts (both video and audio), on-demand "streaming" audio segments on traditional public-service media (e.g., public radio and television sites), as well emergent social media sites.