Endowment for staff and other costs of managing the digital Walt Whitman Archive.

The year 2005 marks the 150th anniversary of the first publication of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855), a declaration of American literary independence and the founding book of American literary democracy. Whitman gave epic voice to our country, memorable articulation to American ideals, and expressed through his art the crisis of Civil War and the cultural possibilities of democracy. Founding principles of our country--freedom and equality--shaped his free verse style, his vernacular usage, and his subject matter. The 150th anniversary of Leaves of Grass is also the 10th anniversary of the Walt Whitman Archive < http://www.whitmanarchive.org > (1995-present). The Archive is providing a complete record of the "American bard," thus giving the general public and scholars at all levels the opportunity to read and study the work of this central spokesman for America. The Archive has begun the unprecedented process of providing free access, via the world-wide web, to the entire corpus of a writer who deepens and enriches our sense of who we are and of what we can become as Americans. We have accomplished a great deal in our initial ten years of long-term undertaking (a projected thirty years of major editorial work along with concurrent and indefinitely ongoing work to foster the scholarship, teaching, and learning the Whitman Archive makes possible). We have produced a large amount of high quality content, garnered grant support from three different federal agencies and a private foundation; established the infrastructure for our work; and built a talented and cohesive team of scholars, technical experts, and library staff. We need, however, to establish secure financial footing. With the support provided by an NEH Challenge Grant, we will create the first fully realized "born digital" edition of a major American writer.

To Come to a Better Understanding analyzes the cultural encounters of the medicine men and clergy meetings held on Rosebud Reservation in St. Francis, South Dakota, from 1973 through 1978. Though the groups ended their formal discussions after eighty-four meetings, Sandra L. Garner shows how this cultural exchange reflects a rich Native intellectual tradition and articulates the multiple meanings of “understanding” that necessarily characterize intercultural encounters. Garner examines the exchanges of these two very different cultures, which share a history of inequitable power relationships, to explore questions of cultural ownership and activism. These meetings were another form of activism, a “quiet side” without the militancy of the American Indian Movement. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and archival analysis, this volume focuses on the medicine men participants—who served as translators, interpreters, and cultural mediators—to explore how modern political, social, and religious

Preparation of a digital publication on the architectural history and development of the Doric style at the Temple of Hera at Olympia (ca. 600 BCE).

I have recently completed a high-resolution 3D recording of the oldest well-preserved Greek temple in the Doric style, the Heraion at Olympia. The project has revealed significant new insights into the architectural history of the monument. I am now facing a common challenge for researchers working with 3D scans of cultural heritage: how to publish the wealth of digital data. I plan to develop a project website to disseminate the models, reconstructions, and linked texts and images. A lightweight environment built on existing mapping technologies will enable users to navigate visualizations of the remains interactively. The dissemination of the complex 3D models from Olympia through pre-rendered orthographic views will represent a model that might be adapted for many other ancient monuments. The site will allow flexible exploration, but it will also guide visitors through a new argument concerning the architectural history of the temple’s peristyle.

Race and Children's Literature of the Gilded Age is a digital archive that will present texts that show how constructions of racial identity and childhood intersected during the late nineteenth century. It will provide page scans, rigorously edited transcriptions, searchable images, and commentary on books and other popular culture materials that 1) were first published in the US between 1865 and 1911, 2) were intended to be read by children, and 3) feature characters of different races. It will include works by several principal Northern and Southern American authors, such as Mark Twain, Joel Chandler Harris, Annie Fellows Johnston, Thomas Nelson Page, and L. Frank Baum. Popular culture materials will include selections from Uncle Remus Magazine, St. Nicholas, and Windsor McKay's Little Nemo stories.

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.

Refinement, expansion, and documentation of digital methods and tools to assist researchers in identifying authorship in unattributed content printed in newspapers and other periodicals.

This project seeks to create two interconnected innovations with clear utility for researchers and scholars of print culture who work with periodicals, including those without intensive DH training. First, we propose to extend and refine our successful method for the attribution of anonymous periodical writings that has the potential for broad applicability in the study of literary and historical texts. The uncertainty and fluidity of newspaper authorship that lies at the root of this attribution problem will in turn be reflected and clarified in our second innovation: an open-source web interface for the display of periodical materials that makes visible this fluidity and uncertainty of authorship, places attributed texts in the context of their larger periodical publication, and allows for user exploration of the surrounding periodical content.

The development of data-mining and visualization tools to detail and map relationships in communities of writers and artists within specific geographic and temporal locations.

The Crowded Page is an Internet-based humanities computing project whose goal is to create data-mining and visualization tools that will allow researchers to map out the intricate connections between the members of artistic and literary communities. In most accounts of literary and art history, a work of art or literature is said to be the product of a single creative mind. In an effort to make visible what is often obscured in traditional histories of art and literature, The Crowded Page seeks to take advantage of the unique capabilities of the digital medium to foreground the ways in which a complex network of friends, editors, neighbors, lovers, and fellow artists and writers informs the creative process.

A series of planning meetings with the editors of several print journals in history to explore various models of digital scholarship and publishing.

This project seeks to build a scholarly community for the practice of the emerging field of digital history by 1.) enhancing communication and collaboration among scholars and journal editors, 2.) creating model forms of scholarship and peer review, and 3.) establishing a clearinghouse for all peer-reviewed digital history scholarship. Digital History has grown up in the last fifteen years through and around the explosion of the World Wide Web, but historians have only just begun to explore what history looks like in the digital medium. Increasingly, university departments seek scholars to translate history into this fast-paced environment and to work in digital history; however, they have found that without well-defined examples of digital scholarship, established best practices, and, especially, clear standards of peer review for tenure, few scholars have fully engaged with the digital medium. Our challenge now is to create a wider scholarly community around Digital History.

Using three case studies -- the Walt Whitman Archive; an edition of James Joyce's Ulysses; and an edition of J.W. Goethe's Faust -- the proposed project will experiment with methods of advanced TEI markup, create methods for detailed scholarly queries currently unavailable, and develop user interfaces to best display the variants exposed through diachronic markup. The German partner, the University of Frankfurt, is requesting 139,634€ from DFG.

The project is situated in the Digital Humanities area of literary criticism and textual scholarship, in particular the analysis of literary works in diachronic depth, that is: under perspectives of the genesis of their texts. Here, only the digital medium allows substantial future research and education in literary studies. In this context, the project addresses three major desiderata: 1. testing, improving, and making usable diachronic markup, that is the digital representation of document sources (based on TEI), 2. tools to operate on this data under the light of research requirements, and 3. means to publish and visualize the results of these operations. The project promises to develop and publish such tools and to provide best practices for a wide range of use cases. It does so by bringing together three leading projects in digital literary studies, covering different eras of German, US, and British literature: J.W. Goethe, Walt Whitman, and James Joyce.

The preparation of an online dictionary of Omaha and Ponca, mutually intelligible Siouan languages spoken in Nebraska and Oklahoma.

The project would create a comprehensive dictionary of Omaha and Ponca at a time when there are only a few dozen elderly fluent speakers. Data would be drawn from archival and published documents from nearly a dozen sources. The largest source is an unpublished word list compiled by ethnologist James Owen Dorsey in the late nineteenth century, which includes approximately 20,000 entries written in a complicated orthography. All materials would be digitized and transcribed into the contemporary orthographies used by tribal members and educators. The dictionary would be in a Structured Queried Language database that conforms to standards promulgated under the Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data. Omaha has a complex verbal morphology with the possibility of multiple affixes. All words, especially verbs, would be analyzed to determine their roots, their appropriate placement in the dictionary, and which affixed forms should be included. The dictionary would contain a brief grammatical sketch, including a description of the phonemes of the language, its major phonological and morphological patterns, and an outline of sentence structure. This project would make freely available to native communities, students, and researchers a vast collection of Omaha and Ponca language.

Digitizing 100,000 pages of Nebraska newspaper titles, 1880 to 1910, scanned from 150 reels of microfilm created by the United States Newspaper Project that document the history and culture of Nebraska.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln and its partner, the Nebraska State Historical Society, propose to digitize an estimated 100,000 pages of Nebraska newspapers dating from 1880 to 1910 as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program at the Library of Congress. The project will be completed over a two year period. Newspapers selected for digitization will be of significant research value, represent a range of geographic areas and genres, and cover the time period as fully as possible. Digitization will include imaging, text conversion, metadata creation, and XML mark-up following guidelines provided by the Library of Congress. Digitization will be done by iArchives. Management of the project and quality control steps will be conducted by he University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries; copies of the newspaper microfilm will be provided by the Nebraska State Historical Society; and selection will be conducted and monitored by an advisory board of scholars, teachers, librarians, and editors.

The digitization of archaeological field records, original drawings, and photographs, and integration into an existing research archive, along with electronic databases of data pertaining to the Salmon Pueblo site in northern New Mexico, which documents a prehistoric Puebloan cultural center dating to the 11th century CE and which was excavated in the 1970s.

The goal of the proposed Salmon Pueblo Archaeological Research Collection (SPARC) project is to preserve and make accessible incomparable legacy data from the important excavations of Salmon Pueblo. Built around 1090 CE, this ancestral Pueblo site was the first major colony outside of Chaco Canyon and was a cultural center on the north bank of the San Juan River 45 miles north of Chaco. The site of Salmon Pueblo is important both for its place in the larger Chacoan world of the twelfth century and its unique archaeological history. A collaboration exists between four institutions--the Salmon Ruins Museum, Archaeology Southwest, the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. Support for SPARC will go toward three phases: (1) digital acquisition, (2) data integration and management, and (3) online preservation of and access to materials.

The digitization, cataloging, and transcription of approximately 410 pages of historical records, 10,000 pages of government documents, 200 photographs, and 50 oral histories documenting the history of Indian boarding schools and the experience of Native Americans who attended the Genoa Indian Boarding School in Genoa, Nebraska.

The Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project seeks a three-year, $350,000 Humanities Collections & Reference Resources Implementation Grant to digitize, contextualize, and make available materials related to the Genoa U.S. Industrial Indian School. The project is a collaboration between the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the Genoa U.S. Indian School Foundation, working with a Community Advisors Council of tribal representatives. An HCRR grant from the NEH would enable the Project to complete the second phase of the project: the preservation and transcription of approximately 50 hours of oral histories of Genoa school attendees and the digitization and description of approximately 410 pages of records for Cheyenne and Arapaho children located at the Oklahoma State Historical Society, about 6,300 pages of U.S. government documents located in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and 200 photographic images at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland.

Development of the Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education (COVE) with three areas of focus: implementation of more robust data standards for long-term use; expansion of content with over 80 titles concentrating especially on non-canonical and global literatures; and enhancements of the COVE website to facilitate pedagogically-focused digital humanities work with literary texts.

The PIs on this grant request NEH funds to preserve and expand a large body of critically-encoded nineteenth-century literary texts and recent, related critical literature. This corpus comprises seven million words of primary texts already encoded, one and a quarter million words of existing critical literature, and an additional one million words of primary texts to be encoded through the proposed project. All of this material has been or will be integrated into COVE (Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education), an open access publishing platform, while that integrated to date (the primary texts already encoded and the critical literature) is already being used by scholars and students from around the world for both teaching and research. Support from the NEH would ensure both technological and programmatic sustainability for the project and its content in the long term, especially the adoption of more robust data standards for the entire collection.

Creation of finding guides to Walt Whitman's prose manuscripts held at more than 70 repositories together with images of the documents. The project would also develop an integrated guide that relates each manuscript to the work to which it contributed.

The Walt Whitman Archive (whitmanarchive.org) seeks a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create item-level finding guides to Walt Whitman's prose manuscripts, which are held at more than seventy individual repositories. The finding guides will be written in Encoded Archival Description (EAD) format, and we will associate with each description high-quality digital images of the manuscript material. These individual guides, linked to digital images, will then be dynamically joined in an integrated guide, using a system of identification that relates each prose manuscript to the conceptual "work" to which it contributed. When joined with the Archive's similarly implemented, award-winning guides to Whitman's poetry manuscripts, the EAD records created for Whitman's prose manuscripts in this project will provide unprecedented documentation of and access to the literary manuscripts of a major literary figure.

A Foundations project to plan the cataloging and digitization of a collection of ca. 12,000 maps and ancillary materials on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Metadata Construction and Digitizing Maps of Afghanistan and Pakistan project will enable collation, digitization, cataloguing, library indexing, analysis, storage, and eventual selective publication of all relevant and unique mapped and written materials on Afghanistan and Pakistan to make them available to the public worldwide and to preserve them for posterity. The original maps and digital surrogates will be housed and maintained in the Arthur Paul Collection in the University of Nebraska at Omaha Criss Library and financially sustained by the Center for Afghanistan Studies after the grant period is over. The long-term benefits to research, education, and public programming in the humanities provided by this project is a valuable and one-of-a-kind source of unique data on a country that hosted America's longest war.

Work on the final stage of an online, open access edition of the complete correspondence of American novelist Willa Cather (1873-1947). (36 months)

We propose to edit American author Willa Cather’s complete correspondence for digital publication on the free and open-access Willa Cather Archive (cather.unl.edu). Thanks to previous NEH support, we are well on our way to completing the first stage of this edition. We are now asking for support to complete the edition so the remaining 1,500 letters--dispersed in over 70 repositories and full of tremendous detail about Cather's life, work, and relationships--can be included. This digital edition will feature texts transcribed and marked up in TEI P5 conformant XML, high-quality digital images of original documents, full multimedia annotations, and innovative search and browsing features including automatically-generated indices of names, titles, and geographic locations. The whole edition will be strengthened by its integration into the Willa Cather Archive, indisputably the central online resource for scholarly study of the author.

The preparation for online publication of a selection of 19th-century American author Walt Whitman's early published and unpublished writings as part of an existing digital archive devoted to Whitman. (36 months)

The Walt Whitman Archive, a digital archive that makes Whitman's vast work easily and conveniently accessible to scholars, students, and general readers alike, seeks to expand its content to include Whitman-authored materials written before the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. This "foreground" period consists of Whitman's novel, Franklin Evans (1842); his roughly two dozen short stories and vignettes initially published between 1841 and 1848 in news and literary papers; his unpublished pre-1855 prose manuscripts; his pre-Leaves of Grass notebooks; and a significant selection of Whitman's journalism in which he develops a persona across multiple articles. The Whitman Archive proposes to gather, edit, and annotate Whitman's early materials for digital publication and will offer, for the first time, a seamlessly integrated presentation of Whitman's literary contributions in the lead-up to his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass.

Work on the first stage of an online, open access edition of the complete correspondence of American novelist Willa Cather (1873-1947). (36 months)

We propose to edit Cather’s complete correspondence for digital publication on the completely free and open-access Willa Cather Archive (cather.unl.edu). We are asking for NEH support for the first stage of this edition: 1,500 letters, or half the complete currently-known corpus. This digital edition will feature texts transcribed and marked up in TEI P5 conformant XML, high-quality digital images of original documents, full multimedia annotations, and innovative search and browsing features including automatically-generated indices of names, titles, and geographic locations. The whole edition will be strengthened by its integration into the Willa Cather Archive, indisputably the central online resource for scholarly study of the author.

Creation of a digital archive and website, presentation of virtual seminars, and research and writing of a scholarly monograph and journal articles related to a series of legal cases and family networks in early Washington, D.C. (24 months)

This project explores multigenerational black and white family networks in early Washington, D.C., by collecting, digitizing, making accessible, and analyzing over 4,000 case files from the D.C. court from 1808 to 1815, records of Maryland courts, and related documents about these families. Scholars from the University of Maryland and the University of Nebraska will collaborate by uncovering the web of litigants, jurists, legal actors, and participants in this community, and by placing these family networks in the foreground of our interpretive framework of slavery and national formation. We focus first on the landmark 1813 case Queen v. Hepburn, the only petition for freedom from slavery heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, and a foundational case establishing the hearsay rule. We propose to document the relationships within and among black and white families in early D.C. at the center of these cases, host virtual seminars to refine our methods, and produce a series of studies in monograph and article form.