Funded Projects Query Form
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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.

The development and release of a beta-level app to improve accessibility of graphic and visual narratives for blind and low-visioned readers, together with a searchable database of encoded visual narratives that will enable analysis by humanities scholars and students.

The Graphic Narrative Accessibility App (GNAA) project will provide an equitable, robust reading experience to help all readers hear, interact and experience comics and graphic novels in a number of fully accessible ways. Drawing on psycholinguistic theory and utilizing haptic (vibratory) computer responses, the app will help blind and visually impaired readers understand page layout and other artistic and spatial design elements previously unavailable. As comics and graphic novels continue to gain in popularity in K-12 and college classrooms, schools must comply with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 1990 by having an equitable, accessible version of each work taught. All users will enjoy the ability to have parts or whole sections read aloud at one touch, plus each work will come fully translated into several languages. Finally, this novel approach will also use TEI coding to help make comics and graphic novels searchable for research and archival purposes.

Convening a three-day meeting bringing together Chinese language scholars, instructors, and digital technologists to design a free online curriculum for teaching Chinese language in a cultural context. 

Our proposed curriculum intends to advance a pedagogical shift in language teaching by taking up opportunities afforded by Web 2.0 to explore ways to improve communicative competence and develop critical cultural awareness. Three characteristics are: creating an immersive learning environment by pulling in rich resources from the online world; engaging learners by utilizing online engagement tools/platforms and social media; developing critical cultural awareness by taking advantage of the immersion and engagement created. It will serve as a model for curriculum design not only for other less commonly taught languages, but also for language and culture teaching as a whole. A Level 1 grant will enable Allegheny College to convene a conference to collect comments and feedback on experiments and innovations made in classrooms and revise them accordingly. The project will culminate with a white paper and a website delineating if, why, and how the digital curriculum will achieve its goals.

The creation of an interactive online platform to present 3D models of Maya artworks that document the spread of cultural and scholarly knowledge across the region.

This project will develop a web-based platform that will interactively present and publicly curate two in situ artworks of global significance from Maya archaeological sites. The two significant finds are the San Bartolo murals and the Los Árboles temple friezes at Xultun, Guatemala. These artworks are tangible evidence of the hallmarks of Maya civilization that include the invention of writing, complex calendrical knowledge, and governance by divine kingship. However, located in extremely remote jungles and buried by the ancient Maya, these important artifacts of Indigenous Maya cultural heritage are nearly impossible to access and visitors to the sealed tunnels threaten their very preservation. Our innovative digital models will expand virtual tours beyond well-known, highly-traveled sites and bring spectacular buried Maya architectural masterpieces to scholars, students, and the public through an open access, bilingual 3D interface—usable in digital research, teaching, and learning.

A series of planning meetings to consider how to approach the technical challenges of developing a digital resource on klezmer music that will incorporate multilingual oral histories of klezmer musicians along with written scores.

The Klezmer Archive project aims to create a universally accessible, useful resource for interaction, discovery, and research on all available information about klezmer music. The project will adapt and apply methodology from computational musicology and library sciences to create a tool to facilitate study of the klezmer corpus in a deeper, more systematic manner and on a more comprehensive scale than previously possible.

The development and testing of virtual reality-based philosophical thought experiments for both classroom teaching and research.

Philosophers present hypothetical scenarios called “thought experiments” to analyze philosophical concepts. This project modifies, extends, and disseminates ongoing work to develop VR scenarios based on the popular “trolley problem” thought experiment, a hypothetical dilemma involving a choice between five deaths and one death. By presenting thought experiments in VR (instead of written presentations), we can address previous concerns that thought experiments are too abstract to be of much use in theorizing, research, and education, and that they do not accurately reflect widespread philosophical beliefs. The scenarios will be disseminated, along with a pilot study data set, via an online and modifiable repository for VR thought experiments. The project will conclude with a symposium to discuss challenges, opportunities, and recommendations for humanities-based research using VR and to promote the use of and ongoing additions to the repository.

A two-day workshop and support network to build capacity in digital mapping methods for scholars in Latinx Studies.

We request a Level 1 grant for a two-day workshop at UCLA on August 12-13, 2021. Latinx Studies is built on understanding how spatial struggles shape racial, ethnic, and national identity. As Latinx Studies scholars increasingly use digital mapping in their research and teaching, we will bring scholars, GIS experts, and public and academic research librarians together to: 1) provide technical training to help participants build skills and advance their individual projects; and 2) plan a support network to facilitate the creation of shared data repositories, partnerships with libraries, training and mentoring opportunities, and an online hub of best practices and teaching materials. The workshop will draw on UCLA’s extensive resources and expertise in GIS research. In line with the “A More Perfect Union” initiative, this project will advance digital mapping as a method of increasing understanding of the enduring presence of people of Latin American descent in the history of our nation.

The planning stages to develop a digital catalogue raisonné for Georgia O'Keeffe, which will allow scholars and the public to engage with O'Keeffe's works.  

The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum seeks a Level I Digital Humanities Advancement Grant to envision a new type of digital publication to enhance scholarly discourse around the life, art and contexts of Georgia O’Keeffe. In the field of art history, catalogues raisonnés are critical in researching and understanding the full arc of an artist’s output, exhibitions, provenance, and publication histories. A 1999 print edition of the "Georgia O’Keeffe Catalogue Raisonné" is out of date and has limited access. Working with a cross-disciplinary group of scholars, this project proposes research and processes investigating the possibilities for updating the Georgia O’Keeffe Catalogue Raisonné in a digital format as a generative and collaborative form of humanities-based scholarship. The Museum will publish its findings in a white paper as well as develop a project plan for implementing this new digital research tool.

The development of methods to study communities of potters in Ancient Greece to better understand the role that individuals played and how artistic ideas were transmitted over space and time.  

With a NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Level I Grant, our team will produce a network-based model for studying communities of potters in ancient Greece. Our project, Social Networks of Athenian Potters (SNAP), employs Social Network Analysis (SNA) to map for the first time in a relational database the ties among potters in Archaic and Classical Athens (600-400 BCE). The social network graphs (sociograms) and their digital platform offer an innovative approach to explore artists’ roles based on their position and how communities of potters are structured in periods of traditional practice versus experimentation. Our goals for the 12-month grant period are to: 1) complete all data collection to populate existing database and data formatting for Social Network Analysis for the Athenian potters; 2) disseminate our preliminary results through a project website, a workshop, and an open-access publication; and 3) plan its digital platform for our relational database.

A series of workshops, to be hosted at the University of Virginia and the University of Arizona, on approaches for teaching computational text analysis.

These summer institutes will support access to community support, technical infrastructure, and educational resources for teaching and learning text analysis based on open content and infrastructure. This two-year Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grant will result in teacher development and the creation of a series of open educational resources that are intended to support the larger educational community of practice.

The design and testing of teaching modules built in virtual reality for an existing 3-D digital model of Kilcolman Castle, Ireland, home of English poet, Edmund Spencer.

This Level II "Prototype" grant will adapt into Virtual Reality a digital 3-D model of an Irish castle for teaching purposes. Kilcolman Castle, now in ruins, was the adopted home of the early modern English poet and administrator Edmond Spenser (1552-1559). Spencer's career and famous writings, which often focus in controversial ways on his life as a plantation settler in Ireland, make the castle a fascinating subject of study. This grant will focus on Spenser's castle and writings through innovative undergraduate and high school teaching modules in history, architecture, archaeology, Irish studies and English literature. These modules with VR applications will highlight the artistic accomplishments of Spenser as well as the cultural diversity of the castle and its surroundings. Spenser's activity in Ireland is a crucial element in our understanding of the historic impact of colonial imperialism. The project will educate and appeal to both students and the general public alike.

The development of an open-access, online collaborative platform and repository of Maya hieroglyphic texts for use by scholars and descendent communities. This project contributes to the longer-term endeavor to expand the international Unicode Standard repertoire to include the Maya script.

Our Level II project seeks to annotate Classic period (ca. 250-900 CE) Maya hieroglyphic texts from the Northern lowlands, Central Peten, and Western regions and make them accessible for study online. Using an open-access online platform for annotating ancient documents (READ), texts from the Postclassic Maya codices (ca. 1250 – 1519 CE) that were digitally rendered during the project’s previous phase will be published in digital form for public use. Concurrently, select Classic period inscriptions will be encoded and annotated using READ, resulting in a repository of digitally encoded Maya hieroglyphic texts. These texts form an important part of the dataset of Maya literature extending from the second century BCE through the colonial, republican, and more recent periods—an almost unbroken record spanning two millennia. Through these tools, online users have the ability to examine, query, manage, edit, annotate, and render Maya texts in ways not previously imaginable.

The development of a pilot database and visualization tools that will allow users to search a large collection of paintings by pigment and to determine the time and location where particular works of art were painted based on the availability of pigments.

Mapping Color in History [MCH] brings together the scientific data drawn from existing and on-going material analyses of pigments in Asian painting in a historical perspective. As a digital portal with a searchable online database, MCH will not only document pigments and their material properties, but also enable an in-depth historical analysis of pigment data through a search tool that will identify specific examples and their locations in both time and space. It takes an object-based method for data collection instead of a pigment-based organization scheme. By developing a database model that can normalize fragmentary and uneven data, MCH will help scholars to bring together disparate data that is difficult to find or compare. A Level II NEH grant will support the completion of a pilot database of historical pigments linked to paintings, locations, times and a visualization tool that will allow users to search the database for entries that match a particular pigment.

A collaboration between Marshall University and the American Foundation for the Blind to develop enhanced accessibility features and related user documentation for the Clio project, a platform that allows educators and cultural institutions to design mobile tours for exploring local history and culture.

Our team of humanities scholars and developers will work with the American Foundation for the Blind to make Clio accessible. The team will share lessons learned and hopes to become a model for other public-facing digital humanities projects.

The development and testing of a prototype of an interactive three-dimensional simulation of the Newark Earthworks, one of Ohio’s Hopewell ceremonial centers.

People the world over build monuments to connect land and sky, structuring human experience of the cosmic through their creations. When built of earth, these monuments degrade in ways that obscure the intended earth-sky connection and meaning ascribed to it. We overcome some of these challenges by employing recent digital technologies to virtually reconstruct one of the most significant earthworks built by the American Indian people of the Hopewell Culture. With a Level II grant, Virtual World Heritage Ohio develops a full digital model and virtual exploration prototype of the Octagon Earthworks--a Hopewell culture site on the U.S. Tentative List for World Heritage. The publicly accessible prototype builds upon the existing CERHAS reconstructions, expanding avenues for humanities scholarship while broadening public understanding of and appreciation for these significant American Indian monuments.

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.

The redesign of the Lakeland Digital Archive using minimal computing approaches and the creation of tutorials to teach other community organizations how to build and maintain digital public humanities projects.

Residents of Lakeland, a 130-year-old African American community adjacent to the University of Maryland (UMD) have worked for more than 10 years to document, preserve, and share their cultural heritage. Their ambition has been to capture a history that covers African American life in the long 20th century in their own voices as community members. This project will develop a working prototype of the Lakeland Digital Archive to demonstrate how digital humanities methods such as minimal computing can enhance community-led projects by empowering them to build digital publications that are resilient, shareable online and off, and amenable to models of shared governance. Continuing an existing community-university partnership, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) will collaborate on this Level II grant with the Lakeland Community Heritage Project (LCHP) and other local partners.

A five-day institute for twenty-five participants organized by and hosted at the University of Central Florida for using digital methods to research digital culture.

There has been growing awareness of the need for humanist inquiry into the internet platforms and communities driving contemporary culture. From fan communities and discourse about works of literature to meme-makers skewering cultural objects, online spaces enable readership, creation, circulation, and transformation of humanist texts—and the active making and remaking of public history. However, much internet research is driven by computational approaches without also being rigorously grounded in theories of culture and textual production. Navigating this space can be particularly daunting to early-career humanities scholars. This is where we seek to intervene. Understanding Digital Culture: Humanist Lenses for Internet Research will foster a transdisciplinary humanities institute to provide resources, training, and a community of collaborators to engage both computational network and data analysis tools and the ethics and best practices of using the web as a site of research.

A two-week summer institute on the theory and development of digital scholarly editions for twenty-five participants to be hosted at the University of Pittsburgh.

The proposed NEH Institute, “Advanced digital editing: modeling the text and making the edition”, will train 25 participants who already know how to edit their texts in TEI XML to participate directly in the modeling, conceptualization, and implementation of their editions, empowering them to express innovative philological scholarship in a way that is informed by a deep understanding of what is possible technically, and of how to achieve it.

The creation of an improved, open source method for visualizing patterns and themes in music and the development of course modules for undergraduate students at HBCUs.

Innovations in music visualization render new possibilities for understanding music. One example is Wattenberg’s Shape of Song, a defunct web app. The arc diagram visualization technique for Shape of Song is brilliant, but ultimately the project did not live up to its potential because of a poor understanding of how composers develop musical themes, a central object of inquiry for music theorists. Algorithmic Thinking, Analysis and Visualization in Music (ATAVizM), identifies and implements major improvements over Shape of Song: (1) pattern recognition based on heuristics from music theory, (2) theme identification by users integrated into the application, and (3) visualization enhancements that make arc diagrams utilitarian for research and teaching. The team will also design and implement a course module at Emory, Georgia State University, Morehouse College, Spelman College and the University of Georgia.

Further research in enhanced optical character recognition techniques for historical print books and automatic discoverability of handwritten marginalia drawing upon the collections of the Internet Archive.

Most past digitization projects have focused on transcribing documents individually. With the availability of library-scale digital collections, we propose a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (Level II) to develop computational image and language models to discover multiple copies and editions of similar texts and to correct each text using these comparable witnesses. We provide evidence that this collational transcription system can significantly improve optical character recognition on historical books. We also propose to use these collated editions to discover annotated passages in large digitized book collections. This approach will therefore not only mitigate the errors that reader annotations introduce into the OCR process but will also produce the first automatically generated database of handwritten annotations, Ichneumon. Methods and software developed by this project will thus benefit future research on automatic collation, book history, and historical reading practices.

The further development of the Bodies and Structures series on East Asian history and geospatial studies. As part of the project, the Scalar publishing platform would be improved to allow for the incorporation of additional spatial visualizations.

Cartographic maps visualize only a small part of the historical relationships and experiences that constitute spatial history. Yet they remain the mainstay of digital spatial history projects. Bodies and Structures captures the multivocality of spatial history. Built in the open-source platform Scalar, the site enables scholars and students to analyze the historical, multivocal nature of space and place in East Asia and beyond. We are applying for a Level II grant for September 2019-August 2021 to greatly enhance the site’s utility for teaching and research in modern East Asian history and the spatial humanities. During this period, we will enhance Scalar’s capacity for analytical visualizations and user-directed engagement; add twelve modules to expand the project’s geo-historical scope and provide new disciplinary perspectives; and use the new Scalar tools to design new maps and visualizations that locate the modules in the site’s new spatial historical environment.

A two-day workshop and follow up activities on approaches to developing ethical data visualization techniques and interactive cartographic interfaces with a particular focus on text mining colonial-era French newspapers.

This project advances work toward generating ethical visualizations of historical corpora comprising the European cultural imagination prior to the twentieth century without reproducing ethnocentrism. Visually representing the historical place of misrepresented peoples and locales throughout the world requires interdisciplinary collaboration focused equally on critical theory, data visualization, ethics, machine learning, and text analysis. We seek $49,851 of level-1 funding for a workshop that unites top experts in the fields of information design, computational linguistics, and history to address the conceptual and logistical challenges in realizing this goal. This project will address two key issues: 1) how to create ethical data visualizations--and their underlying forms of training and analysis--that grapple with inherent source biases; and 2) how to computationally process non-modern, non-English languages for humanities research in a critically engaged way.

The further development and refinement of a system to carry out photogrammetric 3D reconstruction quickly, inexpensively, and without the need for specialized equipment.

This project will document, validate and improve upon a high-throughput multi-camera, Computer-Operated Photogrammetric Imaging System (COPIS) for capturing large numbers of overlapping images from multiple viewpoints around an object for photogrammetric 3D reconstruction. This will be accomplished through a demonstration project to image and reconstruct 3D models of approximately 1,000 cultural heritage objects selected from a broad sampling of the Yale Peabody Museum’s Anthropological and Babylonian collections. This project will further evolve the COPIS design specification for photogrammetry, improve usability and performance of the software components, add a preliminary design element to facilitate structured-light scanning and deploy an installation at the Museum to produce high-resolution 3D reconstructions of diverse sets of objects from its Anthropology and Babylonian collections.

The development of a prototype platform that will allow scholars to combine distant and close reading methods to discover relationships between texts and identify texts in collections for further study.

We seek Level II funding for a pilot project to develop a model that will allow scholars to bridge the gap between distant and close reading when conducting research on large, heterogeneous digital text collections. We propose to create a language agnostic environment—called the Intertextual Hub—in which the conceptual relationships among texts discovered by text-mining algorithms can fruitfully guide close reading in dialectical interaction with distant reading. Fundamentally, we are contending that the core of scholarly reading in the digital age should be the discovery and navigation of intertextual relationships. The Intertextual Hub will be a powerful hermeneutical device allowing users to navigate between individual texts and larger corpora that are related through shared themes, ideas, and passages. Focusing on the French Revolutionary period, we will test this model by applying it to the extensive and diverse 18th-century French collections of UChicago’s ARTFL Project.