| HAA-263803-19 | Digital Humanities: Digital Humanities Advancement Grants | Dartmouth College | Understanding Visual Culture through Silent Film Collections | 1/1/2019 - 9/30/2022 | $222,438.00 | Mark | J. | Williams | John | P. | Bell | Dartmouth College | Hanover | NH | 03755-1808 | USA | 2018 | Film History and Criticism | Digital Humanities Advancement Grants | Digital Humanities | 222438 | 0 | 222438 | 0 | 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. |
| HD-51394-11 | Digital Humanities: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants | Dartmouth College | ACTION (Audio-visual Cinematic Toolbox for Interaction, Organization, and Navigation): an open-source Python platform | 9/1/2011 - 12/31/2013 | $50,000.00 | Michael | A. | Casey | Mark | J. | Williams | Dartmouth College | Hanover | NH | 03755-1808 | USA | 2011 | Film History and Criticism | Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants | Digital Humanities | 50000 | 0 | 50000 | 0 | The development of a platform that would support the computational analysis of film and other audio-video materials. The platform would allow such features as the automatic detection of shots and scenes, the analysis of soundtracks, and overall content analysis.
Audio-visual media have become ubiquitous due to the central position that computing has taken. Yet, methodologies and tools for supporting humanities research based on computational techniques, such as automatic shot-boundary detection, are nascent. ACTION seeks to provide free and open-source computational tools, and best-practice documentation, for new media-analytic methodologies based upon machine-vision and machine-hearing algorithms and software. We anticipate that automatic shot-boundary detection, scene-boundary detection, sound-track analysis, structure segmentation, and other methods, will lead to new insights into the development of film editing styles, scene composition, lighting, sound, and narrative construction. Building upon previous open-source frameworks, such as OMRAS2, AudioDB, Sphinx, Bregman, and OpenCV, ACTION will be a platform consisting of worked use-case examples in computational cinematics for future humanities researchers to extend. |
| PR-234316-16 | Preservation and Access: Research and Development | Dartmouth College | Semantic Annotation Tool | 1/1/2016 - 12/31/2017 | $74,984.00 | Mark | J. | Williams | | | | Dartmouth College | Hanover | NH | 03755-1808 | USA | 2015 | Interdisciplinary Studies, Other | Research and Development | Preservation and Access | 74984 | 0 | 74984 | 0 | The development of the Semantic Annotation Tool (SAT), which would facilitate the creation and sharing of time-based media annotations on the Web by researchers, students, and educators.
The Semantic Annotation Tool (SAT) proposal seeks funds to develop and distribute a drop-in module that facilitates the creation and sharing of time-based media annotations on the web. The finished system will be composed of two parts: first, a jQuery plugin that wraps an existing media player to provide an intuitive authoring and presentation environment for time-based video annotations; and second, a linked data server that communicates with the plugin to collect and disseminate user-generated comments and tags using the W3C Open Annotation specification. The goal of building this system is to create an end-to-end open source video annotation workflow that can be used as either an off the shelf or customizable solution for a wide variety of applications. Potential uses include collaborative close reading of video for humanities research, simplified coding of time-based documentation in social science studies, enhancing accessibility for media clips on web sites, and many others |
| PR-263888-19 | Preservation and Access: Research and Development | Dartmouth College | Accessible Civil Rights Heritage Project | 1/1/2019 - 9/30/2022 | $299,863.00 | Mark | J. | Williams | | | | Dartmouth College | Hanover | NH | 03755-1808 | USA | 2018 | Film History and Criticism | Research and Development | Preservation and Access | 299863 | 0 | 277439 | 0 | The development of processes and guidelines to
facilitate the use of historical film and video from the civil rights era, with
a focus on enabling access for blind and visually impaired users.
The Accessible Civil Rights Heritage (ACRH) Tier II proposal seeks to develop processes and guidelines supporting the delivery of annotated archival video to the higher education community with a particular focus on blind and visually impaired (BVI) users. The ACRH project will research the creation, curation, and consumption of online humanities collections by developing a test corpus of culturally significant newsfilm on American civil rights, dating from the 1950s to the 1980s. ACRH will then combine the deep knowledge of experts on the era with the work of archivists and human-cognition researchers to develop new cataloging and access procedures that deliver high-quality, meaningful experiences to BVI users about culturally significant material. The team will produce evidence-based accessibility guidelines and software that will be published as open resources for use by educators and archivists. |
| RZ-286881-22 | Research Programs: Collaborative Research | Dartmouth College | Legacies of USIA Moving Images Through International Lenses | 11/1/2022 - 1/31/2024 | $50,000.00 | Mark | J. | Williams | | | | Dartmouth College | Hanover | NH | 03755-1808 | USA | 2022 | Media Studies | Collaborative Research | Research Programs | 50000 | 0 | 49938 | 0 | Ten planning workshops and a semi-public symposium on the filmic
production and international organizational infrastructure of the United States
Information Agency (USIA, known internationally as the United States
Information Service, USIS) between 1953 and 1999. (12 months)
The “Legacies of USIA Moving Images Through International Lenses” project will bring together (virtually) a team of renowned international scholars and archivists who are committed to developing international studies of the USIA and its corresponding USIS acronym in offices around the world. This team will schedule a series of ten workshops that develop an interrogative process toward the production of granular analyses of hundreds of USIA films, which will lay the groundwork to identify the opportunities, challenges, and inter-disciplinary potentials to realize new humanistic research about the history and impact of USIA moving images (motion pictures and television/video), especially regarding select areas of the world: Latin America, East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the U.S. itself. This grant will entail two years of research, workshops, and granular analysis culminated by a major public conference plus publication in a blind-peer-reviewed online journal. |