| HD-51897-14 | Digital Humanities: Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants | University of Nebraska, Lincoln | Image Analysis for Archival Discovery (Aida) | 6/1/2014 - 6/30/2016 | $60,000.00 | Elizabeth | | Lorang | Leen-Kiat | | Soh | University of Nebraska, Lincoln | Lincoln | NE | 68503-2427 | USA | 2014 | American Literature | Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants | Digital Humanities | 60000 | 0 | 59696.55 | 0 | The development of a prototype tool that would allow scholars and students to apply image processing and machine learning techniques to identify specific visual elements within digitized collections. The project would start with an attempt to identify poetry found in the Chronicling America collection of historic newspapers.
Images created in the digitization of primary materials contain a wealth of machine-processable information for data mining and large-scale analysis, and this information should be leveraged both to connect researchers with the resources they need and to augment interpretation of human culture, as a complement to and extension of text-based approaches. The proposed project, "Image Analysis for Archival Discovery" (Aida), applies image processing and machine learning techniques from computer science to digitized materials to facilitate and promote archival discovery. Beginning with the automatic detection of poetic content in historic newspapers, this project will develop image processing as a methodology for humanities research and analysis. In doing so, it will advance work on two fronts: 1) it will contribute to the reevaluation of newspaper verse in American literary history; 2) it will assess the application of image analysis as a method for discovery in archival collections. |