Independent research into the aesthetics, application, dissemination, and ontological status of deepfakes across media contexts, including digital artworks, social activism, museum exhibits, and film and television.  

The project explores the aesthetics, application, dissemination, and ontological status of deepfakes across media contexts, including digital artworks, amateur videos, social justice activism, museum initiatives, and film and TV.

This project will publish the book The Other/Argentina: Jews, Gender, and Sexuality in the Making of a Modern Nation, written by NEH Fellow Amy M. Kaminsky (NEH grant number FA-58217-15), in an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons license, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of at least $500 upon release of the open access ebook.

This project will publish the book Contracultura: Alternative Arts and Social Transformation in Authoritarian Brazil, written by NEH Fellow by Christopher Dunn (Federal Award Identification Number FA-57197-13), in an electronic open access format under a Creative Commons license, making it available for free download and distribution. The author will be paid a royalty of at least $500 upon release of the open access ebook.

During the early part of the Cold War, Japan emerged as a model ally and Japanese Americans were seen as a model minority. From Confinement to Containment examines the work of four Japanese and Japanese American artists and writers during this period: novelist Hanama Tasaki, actor Yamaguchi Yoshiko, painter Henry Sugimoto, and children's author Yoshiko Uchida. Their backgrounds reveal a mixing of nationalities, a borrowing of cultures, and a combination of domestic and overseas interests. Tang shows how the film, art, and literature made by these artists revealed to the American public the linked processes of U.S. actions at home and abroad. Their work played into but also challenged postwar rehabilitated images of Japan and Japanese Americans as it focused on the history of transpacific relations such as Japanese immigration to the U.S., the Asia-Pacific War, U.S. and Japanese imperialism, and the wartime confinement of Japanese Americans.

A multimedia research project, including a public crowdsourcing component, exploring the work of early 20th century artist and writer Mina Loy.

A pressing need in digital humanities is for multimodal, user-directed narratives that situate evidence, interpretation, and arguments in ways that allow readers to understand the scholarly project. Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde is a scholarly website that charts the career of the 20th century writer and artist Mina Loy. Using Loy as a case study, our goals are to: provide access to and interpretations of Loy’s work in diverse media, using new digital modes of textual and visual expression to invite closer, more informed and interactive engagement; develop a theory of the en dehors garde (literally, “coming from the outside”) that accounts for contributions of women and people of color who have been excluded from conventional formulations of the avant-garde; and, conduct an experiment in public humanities scholarship that involves students in transforming scholarly methods and products, tests new processes for peer review, and sets UX design standards for digital scholarship.

A three-day workshop for dance scholars, archivists, librarians, and media specialists on approaches to researching and teaching with digitized collections of dance resources.

Film and video technologies have revolutionized dance education and scholarship by serving as a text for what has historically been an oral tradition; allowing preservation and analysis of dance work. While digital video makes recording dance easier, archives of recorded dance have not been made available online for education and research, and dance scholars face significant geographical and financial barriers to access. Our project brings together dance scholars, archivists, and educators for a three-day symposium during which attendees will explore expansion and aggregation of existing online dance resources along with design of a new pilot resource. The symposium’s results will be disseminated and support for its blueprint actively sought through publication of a white paper, presentations at national conferences, and at open sharing events throughout the United States.

The expansion and extension of a set of machine learning-based tools designed to assist scholars with identifying and classifying artifacts from archaeological sites based on design motifs.

Two years of NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant Level III funding is sought to increase availability and strengthen usability of SnowVision. The grant will support 1) the integration of SnowVision with an interactive, online user interface, 2) the acquisition and integration feedback from scholars working in laboratories and curation facilities across the Southeast, 3) the enhancement of the technological infrastructure of SnowVision so that the newly integrated system meets the needs of the user community and has a framework built for long-term success, and 4) providing select institutions with start-up funds to begin digitizing collections, providing the USC team with rigorous, off-site testing of the system. Collaboration between the USC development team and an Advisory Committee will increase the utility of SnowVision, secure buy-in from stakeholders, and ensure extensibility of the software. NEH funding will support software enhancement of accuracy, reliability, and speed.

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.

Convening a group of religious studies scholars and technologists to research best practices and evaluate the appropriateness of recording and interpreting religious rituals in extended reality (XR) for teaching religion.

This project seeks to convene a meeting of religious studies scholars and experts in XR modalities to explore the creation of immersive videos analyzing and explaining religious rituals. The proposed two-day advisory meeting will evaluate the best practices for creating stereoscopic (360 degrees) videos combined with documentary style analysis and discussion into resources aimed at teaching about religion. The meeting will consist of presentations by scholars of various religious traditions and experts in educational immersive technologies, paired with brainstorming sessions considering appropriate representations of diverse religious traditions, suitable methods regarding the filming and dissemination of such videos, and concerns around maintaining connections between practices and the living communities that hold them sacred. Information generated by our collaboration will be made publicly available and serve as the backbone for a blueprint towards the creation phase of the project.

Retention of three full-time staff members and external contractors to digitize archival collections, complete the augmented reality experience of the site, and produce an orientation film.

Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill (SVPH) seeks relief funding from The National Endowment for the Humanities for a multi-faceted digital humanities project and the retention of three humanities staff members. This project proposes two activities critical to SVPH's mission and organizational strategy. First, this project will provide funding for continued digitization of the objects collection as well as digital publication of the collection for public access. Second, this project will provide funding for the creation of 40 audiovisual elements that will be used in an interactive augmented reality experience available to guests through an app on personal devices, and for the creation of an orientation film. The audiovisual elements and film fulfill a dual purpose with both on-site use as well as the ability to share them broadly through digital and social media channels. Both projects will engage our audience in a deeper examination of the Pleasant Hill Shakers.

Partial salary for ten museum and library staff positions to develop a virtual collection and exhibit on the seven-decade history of the university museum of clothing and textile design.

This project forms a collaborative team with the Avenir Museum of Design and Merchandising and Colorado State University (CSU) Libraries to leverage university resources to fund existing positions for humanities workers involved in the development and realization of the virtual exhibition, "Threads of our Community: A History of the Avenir." and to prevent disruption of this project because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The exhibition traces the growth of the Avenir Museum from its beginnings as a small teaching collection in the 1950s to its current form as a state-of-the-art museum facility with a collection of approximately 25,000 historic clothing and textile artifacts. This project engages the public in learning about the importance of university collections not only for students, but also for fostering meaningful connections between campus and community. [edited by staff]

Employing computational linguistics and natural language processing techniques to study how Holocaust survivors use spatial terms to describe their experiences. Testimonies from the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation Center collection would provide the sources for the preliminary study.

First-person accounts are central to understanding the Holocaust. Our project will be the first to examine survivors' testimony for the spatiality of individuals' experiences. Drawing on video interviews with survivors, we will analyze the language survivors use in speaking of places, events, movement, relationships, and their perceptions of space and time. We will focus on how their social networks were fragmented and reformed and the spatial characteristics of work places and work relationships experienced by forced laborers in ghettos and labor camps. We will do this through a hybrid methodology that combines close listening with spatial visualization and corpus and computational linguistics methods that we will apply to interview transcripts. The dictionary of spatial and relational terms this will produce, along with our visual conceptualizations of the topologies of experience, will enable us to link survivors to Nazi-controlled spaces represented in our existing GIS datasets.

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.

The development and testing of a tool and accompanying thesaurus to make film searchable for dance movements.

The ARTeFACT Movement Thesaurus is a continuation of the ARTeFACT project which was developed at the University of Virginia as a means of enabling research into movement-based arts, specifically dance. The Movement Thesaurus is a major step toward providing access to movement-derived data. By using motion capture technologies we plan to provide a sophisticated, open source tool that can help make film searchable for single movements and movement phrases. The ARTeFACT Movement Thesaurus will contain over 100 codified dance movements derived from Western concert dance genres and styles from which we can develop algorithms for automatic search capabilities in film. By bringing together engineers, movement specialists, and mathematicians we will forge ahead to break new ground in movement research and take one step closer to the creation of an automated means of mining danced texts and filmed movement.

An online collection of tools that would allow film researchers to collect, store, and process scholarly data about film editing.

This proposal requests an NEH Level II Start-Up grant support for the innovation of Cinemetrics (http://www.cinemetrics.lv/index.php), an open-access, interactive website designed to supplement the traditional toolkit of film studies with a number of digital tools that enable researchers to collect, store, and process scholarly data about film editing. Any student of film interested in the way films are edited can use Cinemetrics tools to time a movie, submit the obtained time data, calculate and visualize data statistics, and comment on or make use of the data generated and collected by others. As it stands, Cinemetrics offers its users a client tool to measure a film, a database to store the measurements, graphs that help users to visualize the statistics, and a lab space that can be used to compare films. The NEH grant will enable the project team to innovate, augment, and enhance these tools. This will put Cinemetrics at the forefront of humanities cyberinfrastructure.

Development of new virtual reality technology for an exhibition on ancient Egypt at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

With Virtual Reality, students can directly interact with distant times and places, giving them greater understanding and empathy for other cultures. Egyptian religious performance and ritual were central to the culture, and monumental temples were their dramatic performance spaces. The Earth Theater at Carnegie Museum of Natural History supports the Virtual Egyptian Temple, a three-dimensional, computer-graphic simulation of a Ptolemaic Era temple. We propose to stage an important religious event from that time, the Egyptian Oracle, virtually “in” the temple at the Earth Theater and two other large-screen theaters. An expert puppeteer will control the temple virtual High Priest and lesser constructs, a live educator, and even with the audience in the role of the Egyptian public. A live puppeteer can experiment and improvise in ways no artificial intelligence can and decades of educational research show the best way to learn about a social activity is to see it and do it.

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.

A scholarly workshop and follow-up activities that will bring together film studies scholars, moving image archivists, and library professionals to consider how digitization of early motion picture film might be improved to better capture the physical attributes of the film print. The workshop would focus on early twentieth-century films made for African-American audiences.

The study of "race movies," the early motion pictures produced for black audiences in the first decades of the 20th century, presents an ideal humanities context for framing important questions bearing on the digital representation of film artifacts as material evidence: How must we reevaluate and amend current best practices for digitization of motion picture film which by design omit or obscure physical attributes of the original artifact?; And how might this representation of film as a material object offer a conceptual bridge for integrating audiovisual media within a wider network of related visual and textual documentation? The Black Film Center/Archive (BFC/A) at Indiana University proposes in this Level I Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to explore these questions by convening an interdisciplinary group of scholars, moving image archivists, and technology specialists in digital humanities for a two-day conference and workshop to be held in November 2013.

A two-day workshop led by Games for Change that will result in the development of a proof-of-concept prototype for a game based on The Negro Motorist Green Book, first published in 1936 with advice for African Americans traveling in the Jim Crow South.

The history of African American travel is one of the great untold American stories. We seek a Level I Start-Up Grant to support the collaboration between humanities scholars and interactive designers to develop a choice-driven, exploratory game that places players directly in the shoes of African American travelers of the past. Through the game mechanics, players will explore the nature of prejudice, how it manifests, and the discrimination African Americans had to endure during the pre-civil rights era. The game will engage students and allow them to make strategic decisions, developing problem solving and systems thinking skills. Players will gain a rich and complex understanding of this important period in our nation’s history that continues to have contemporary resonance. The learning experience within the game will be augmented by the other platforms--documentary film, web series and digital cultural mapping--that make up the Traveling While Black (TWB) transmedia project.

The implementation of a software system that would use game play to allow users to contribute high-quality descriptive information about digital collections of humanities materials held by cultural heritage institutions.

Our team received Level II Start Up funding to create a pilot of Metadata Games (MG), a software system that uses computer games to collect information about artifacts in libraries and archives as they strive to go digital. Games are useful in that they can entice those who might not visit archives to explore humanities content while contributing to vital records, and they create much more metadata than typical staff can do alone in the same timeframe. The system is open-source and is easily customized to meet each institution’s needs. The full project employs new techniques to make the system smarter and more trustworthy. We will also create new game components. MG can be used to enhance knowledge about artifacts in particular disciplines and fields, or with interdisciplinary collections. MG has the potential to unearth new knowledge that could radically enhance scholarship in the humanities, expanding what records we can encounter in our quest to understand the human experience.

A two week workshop at Middlebury College for twelve participants on the topic of incorporating time-based media like video and audio in multimodal humanities scholarship.

This two-week workshop, scheduled for June 2015, will gather scholars interested in producing critical work in a multi-media format. The workshop is designed for 12 participants, ranging in rank from advanced graduate students to full professors, whose objects of study involve audio-visual media, especially film, television, and other new digital media forms. In a workshop setting, we will consider the theoretical foundation for undertaking such innovative work, and we will experiment extensively with producing multi-media scholarly work, resulting in at least one work of publishable quality per participant. The goals will be to explore a range of approaches by using moving images as a critical language and to expand the expressive possibilities available to innovative humanists. The curriculum and work produced by the participants in the workshop will be featured in a special issue of [in]Transition, the first peer reviewed journal devoted exclusively to videographic criticism.