The development of a digital platform to assist small historical societies and other local humanities institutions, including public media organizations, in curating their federated collections on the web.

North Country Public Radio is developing Diviner, an innovative digital platform for organizing and sharing humanities materials with the public, and encouraging exploration and personal interaction with that content. Our proposal is to package Diviner, the digital platform, and make it available to other humanities and public media organizations. During the grant period we will evaluate our current platform, develop new elements, and finally package all elements of the platform into free WordPress elements to be shared publicly in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory. During the grant period we will develop Diviner into a configurable platform useful for other organizations, through staff development meetings, meetings with our advisory board on how best to package the platform for public use, meetings with our humanities collaborators to design new features, and periods of testing and quality assurance for all aspects of the platform.

Prototype development and adaptation of open-source software tools to facilitate large-scale search and analysis of podcasts.

Despite an explosion of interest in podcasts - claims of a “Golden Age” of podcasts abound - sound remains mystifyingly difficult to analyze and the history of this emerging media form is already at risk of being lost. PodcastRE Analytics: Investigating Podcasting through Metadata and Sound aims to put podcasting’s data traces to work, making digital audio more usable, visible and audible than current archives. PodcastRE Analytics leverages the 120,000+ podcasts of the PodcastRE database (http://podcastre.org), a preservation collaboration between UW-Madison’s Libraries and Dept. of Communication Arts, to pioneer new techniques for the analysis and visualization of audio and metadata. While tools for data mining text archives exist, PodcastRE Analytics will allow users to explore audio in ways that are as familiar as textual resources. Using digital humanities methods, we can better research contemporary culture and investigate a new media form that has captured significant attention.

The digital re-creation of the laboratory of pioneering digital humanities scholar Father Roberto Busa to study the methods used by his team in early computational work with scholarly texts.

In 1956, Roberto Busa, SJ, founded the first humanities computing center in Italy. After five years in other locations, the operation moved in 1961 into a former textile factory outside Milan, where IBM punched-card data processing machines were installed. There student operators worked on the Index Thomisticus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other projects, 1961-1967. We aim to digitize a key range of materials in the Busa Archive directly relevant to the establishment of the center, to augment these with oral histories of machine operators and link to punched-card machine software emulators and an immersive 3D model of the center. The goal is to begin to recover the infrastructure, workflow, and institutional contexts for this highly significant “site” (both literally and figuratively) in the history of technology and the humanities. The outcome will be increased historical understanding through the creation of models for research and learning.

The early-stage development of a virtual reality environment that re-creates an 18^th century theater at the Paris Fair. The environment is intended to provide users with an immersive experience that will allow them to learn about social and political issues, discourse, and status during the time of the Enlightenment.

The V-ESPACE project consists of devising and implementing an interactive and explorable virtual reality video game of an evening at the eighteenth-century Paris Fair theater. Players select avatars with distinct goals to complete, keyed to the play on stage and their social status, as they navigate the virtual theater space alongside other users and non-player characters. Game play accommodates a range of linguistic ability, making this an inclusive learning tool for undergraduates studying French, theater, or early modern history. During this grant period, we will establish (1) the floor plan and architectural features of an historically accurate virtual Fair theater space; (2) the text(s) that will comprise the theatrical entertainment, as well as modalities for digital capture of a live performance; (3) avatar profiles, story lines, and characteristics, integrating historical research with computerized behavioral modeling; and (4) detailed roadmaps for continued research and implementation.

Implementation of three studies and creation of software tools that computationally analyze visual information about printed books. Partners include the Folger Shakespeare Library and the HathiTrust Research Center.

While humanistic inquiry traditionally involves synthesizing a rich set of contextual information, computational approaches to text analysis introduce several forms of simplification, beginning from the initial act of digitization. In this work, we advocate for an alternative that seeks to reason about text within a rich material context: as ink on paper. We propose new computational approaches to three tasks: using visual information about the physical layout of pages to segment the document structure of books in the HathiTrust; reconstructing lacunae (physical gaps in the medium of writing), and attributing and identifying compositors from visual cues in typesetting (using Shakespeare’s First Folio). Our core unifying principle is reasoning about text holistically—awareness of a text’s rich material context can not only shape the historical questions we ask of large-scale book corpora, but can also be informative for traditional tasks that text alone has been used to answer.

The creation of a catalog of individuals and groups of individuals mentioned in ancient sources, in part to focus attention on the historical role played by those other than the “great actors” (the important individuals, states, or empires singled out in historic texts). To do so, they will use Named Entity Recognition, a computational linguistics method which identifies people and place names in texts and then sorts them into pre-defined categories, allowing further study and analysis.

The Herodotos Project is creating a catalog of all groups of peoples mentioned in ancient sources, ultimately to assemble informational material for a detailed ethnohistoric profile of each. Our sources at first are Latin and Greek texts. Given the labor-intensive and time-consuming nature of manually searching texts in the original language, and for greater accuracy, we are automating the group name extraction process, drawing on Named Entity Recognition (NER) technology from computational linguistics to identify significant entities in a given text, including our target group names. Most NER systems are English-based, so we have been creating a Latin system that is successful (c. 90% accuracy) but needs more development to achieve even better results. Also, we must adapt our Latin-based system for use with Greek. The NER-development phase of the Project is an essential step towards furthering the creation of the catalogue that will fuel the ethnohistoric side of the overall project.

Implementation of Freedom on the Move, a public history resource that will offer a unified access point to 100,000 runaway slave advertisements published in American newspapers through the end of the Civil War. In addition, the project will develop tools for students to engage with primary sources by transcribing the advertisements.

“Freedom on the Move” (FOTM) creates a digital resource from an estimated 100,000 runaway slave advertisements from pre-1865 U.S. newspapers. These ads, placed by enslavers when enslaved people attempted to escape, comprise one of the richest sources of information about enslaved individuals in United States history. The FOTM database, which will be freely available for browsing and research, is the first comprehensive collection of these ads. Using crowdsourcing to parse ad data into a database, FOTM enables new research analyses of the history of U.S. slavery. The prototype interface is already built. We seek funds to complete FOTM as a site for public engagement that supports lessons for K-12, university, and museum education. NEH implementation funding will enable us to build tools for analyzing and visualizing data, managing student interaction, engaging the public, and establishing a prototype for future digital resources.

Development of a prototype tool to enhance museum and art historical research into the printmaking practices of Rembrandt and other artists.

This project seeks to creatively merge digital, computational, and art historical methodologies to significantly broaden access to crucial watermark information elucidating Rembrandt’s printing practice and chronology. Its central innovation is the use of the decision tree model, which allows rapid, confident visual identification of Rembrandt watermarks by non-specialists. The project will build interrogatory decision tree branches for each of the 54 types of watermarks on Rembrandt’s papers, resulting in a complete tree that will be coded into purpose-developed software. The project will also develop procedure to add new watermarks to the tree as they arise, and will lay the foundation for a watermarks database for Rembrandt’s etchings in U.S. collections. The decision tree will provide proof of concept for application to other research questions requiring visual differentiation in datasets too large for the unaided researcher but too small to recommend a machine-learning approach.

The further development of a centralized bibliography, a revised editorial workflow, and pilot citation analysis study for the scholarly journal Digital Humanities Quarterly.

Digital Humanities Quarterly seeks funding to complete the development of a centralized bibliography of digital humanities that will support the journal's publication and provide data for citation research and analysis. Building on an NEH-funded prototype, the project will expand the existing bibliography, enhance it with local authority control, and develop a streamlined workflow for maintaining the bibliography as part of the journal's regular production. A pilot research analysis will explore the potential of the data for rhetorical and citation analysis focusing on discipline formation and discursive practices in digital humanities. An exploratory interface for the bibliography will be integrated into the DHQ publication, and the data will also be exposed through a public API.

An update and redesign of Scripto, which is a free, open-source tool used for collaborative online transcriptions of documents and multimedia files. This update will ensure it is compatible with Omeka S, a platform for publishing linked open data and integrating collections. In addition to this, the team will migrate the holdings in an important archive (The Papers of the War Department) to Omeka S and develop guidance to assist other cultural heritage organizations in managing their own community transcription projects.

RRCHNM seeks a Level III Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the NEH-ODH to 1) update and redesign the Scripto transcription tool to make it compatible with the new data architecture in Omeka S; 2) migrate the substantial holdings in the Papers of the War Department collections to Omeka S; 3) and use the project as the basis for producing a number of publications and guides that will support other cultural heritage organizations in their efforts to develop community transcription projects with Scripto and Omeka S.

The creation of a digital open educational resource for German language and culture. The applicants aim to produce an alternative to traditional textbooks by developing an interactive and immersive environment for language and culture that makes use of videos and interviews with native and near-native German speakers.

We seek a Level II grant to complete Grenzenlos Deutsch, an online, open-access curriculum for introductory German language and culture courses that creates an inclusive and interactive learning experience. The curriculum, started by Professors Brigetta (Britt) Abel and Amy Young during their sabbatical leaves in the fall of 2016, is intended as a no-cost alternative to current traditional textbooks in the field. Funding will be used primarily for the formation of a Collaborative Working Group of German faculty to assemble for further development and completion this full-year curriculum, which mixes materials from real-world, contemporary communication scenarios, multimedia content, and online learning activities. Firmly rooted in humanities, including language and culture, this curriculum will be openly available to German Studies teachers and learners worldwide, and our project will present a viable alternative to traditional textbooks across humanities fields.

The development of open source software that will allow archaeologists, historians, and archivists to conduct rapid needs assessment of cultural heritage in conflict and non-conflict situations. The software will, when used in conjunction with mixed reality hardware (which merges both real and virtual worlds), allow users to quickly identify and document damage to structures and sites by providing overlays that compare real-time conditions against previously collected images.

The Documenting and Triaging Cultural Heritage (DATCH) project will develop prototype open-source software for field assessment and documentation of built and movable cultural heritage using mixed reality hardware with or without network connections. It will permit real-time overlay comparisons of cultural heritage against earlier documentation while also enabling the creation of new scaled drawings using gestures, even in field situations with no network connections. When network connections are available additional features such as video calls with specialists and data sharing with management systems will be enabled. DATCH will aid rapid needs assessments of cultural heritage in conflict situations, ongoing assessments of cultural heritage in the field, and enable field work across multiple disciplines. The prototype software will be developed and field tested with Microsoft’s HoloLens, but with a goal of cross-platform compatibility across head mounted display mixed reality devices.

The development of a set of prototype image identification tools and techniques to allow enhanced access to large photography archives. The Carnegie Museum of Art’s Charles “Teenie” Harris Archive of African American life in Pittsburgh would serve as the test collection.

We address the challenges faced in the research and annotation of large digital image archives by creating prototype software tools that use machine learning and computer vision. Specifically, we are developing software tools to aid research into the Carnegie Museum of Art’s publicly available Teenie Harris Archive, a major photography collection documenting 20th century African American life in Pittsburgh. Our goal is to create open-source software that uses state-of-the-art techniques to help identify and annotate visually distinctive features across this large (80,000 item) set of digitized photographs, to improve and expedite the Museum's archiving and cataloging process. Through compatibility with International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) standards, our project will furthermore provide free tools and reproducible, computer-vision based workflows that other museums, libraries and archives can use to help organize their own digital collections.

The further development of a database and web portal that would aggregate indigenous linguistic information relevant to Mesoamerican flora and fauna.

This project will develop a web portal, Documenting the Ethnobiology of Mexico and Central America, designed to forge an innovative web-based environment for multidisciplinary and multiethnic collaboration among anthropologists and linguists studying traditional ecological knowledge; biologists interested in collections mostly from poorly explored areas; and Indigenous communities and scholars who want to document and preserve traditional knowledge of local flora and fauna. This project will expand Symbiota, a widely used open source content management system for curating specimen- and observation-based biodiversity data, for use by humanities scholars and professionals by developing standards for tagging ethnobiological data, data that crosses thresholds separating the humanities, social science and natural science. By making available research on native nomenclature, classification, and use of flora and fauna, it will disseminate material key to understanding the cultural history of Indigenous Mexican populations.

The further development of the Global Medieval Sourcebook, an open-source resource for transcriptions, translations, and contextual information about digitized medieval texts from Europe, North Africa, and Asia. This project adds new content, expands the available languages, integrates TEI markup, and develops new pedagogical features.

The Global Medieval Sourcebook, a teaching and research resource, will present transcriptions of original medieval texts and their translations in an accessible, user-friendly, downloadable, open-source format. It will include information about each text, including a scholarly and user-friendly commentary on the text and translation. Links to online manuscripts and other relevant materials will enable scholars to use the site as a research portal and will provide essential context to students and teachers. Texts will be searchable by genre, author, date, language, keywords, and themes. Additionally, with teachers and students in mind, we will create and upload audio files of specialists reading the texts in their original language. Currently we are able to cover the following languages: Middle High German, Old French, Old and Middle English, and Medieval Chinese, Arabic, and Persian. In the next two years, we will expand to include medieval Spanish and Italian, with Slavic languages anticipated for addition in the next phase.

The study of how four Indigenous communities, with whom this team collaborated on a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant to digitally repatriate archival materials, have used those materials in culture and language revitalization efforts.

This grant proposes to study how four Indigenous partners built digital archives based on Indigenous epistemologies and how they are using the materials for cultural and language revitalization. The grant will also support DH projects being constructed by the four communities using the digitally repatriated materials, which reflect how DH tools and theories take on very different forms when incorporated into Indigenous knowledge systems.

The continued development of a prototype of an analytical tool and database to allow humanities scholars and students to comparatively study architectural floor plans. The test case would be a collection of floor plans by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright from the Alexander Architectural Archives at the University of Texas, Austin.

Currently, those who design and study the built environment are hindered by an inability to examine large datasets of architectural drawings. Despite advancements in image recognition, no integrated system is capable of storing, reading, and analyzing floor plans. To solve this problem, this project is developing the Building Database & Analytics System (BuDAS) to partially automate the process of floor plan analysis. This project is seeking funding to expand the prototype into an integrated open source system with image recognition software for automatic floor plan detection, a database for the storage and management of data, and advanced query and graphing tools. BuDAS will allow users to compare thousands of plans to discover common design elements, examine spatial relationships over time, and mine for patterns across datasets. These findings will allow for a deeper understanding of the trends and patterns of space usage and the relationship between buildings and human experience.

Development of a working prototype for an open-access, curated, and classroom-sourced digital anthology of British and American literature in English (1650-1800).

Literature in Context is a TEI-encoded digital anthology of British and American literature in English (1650-1800) designed for use by students, teachers, and the general public. The project will innovate by taking full advantage of the affordances of digitization to create an Open Educational Resource that incorporates annotation, interactivity, digitized page images of original editions, and other contextual media materials. It also develops templates, assignments, and resources to help instructors at the college level engage students in the task of editing and annotating literary texts that can be added to the collection. Literature in Context provides a mechanism for the thoughtful, collaborative dissemination of our shared humanistic heritage. By including students in the production of the anthology, the project will foreground how the public construction of knowledge is essential to understanding the modern world.

The development of tools to allow humanistic researchers to analyze recorded literary and cultural materials ranging from poems, radio plays, and books to political speeches and sermons.

Audio archives provide tremendous resources for studying texts-in-performance, performance styles, and media history and formats. Such research requires tools that work well on low-quality, noisy audio common in humanities research, e.g., poetry readings, radio plays, and talking books, the datasets for this project. The proposed project will develop, provide access to, and support humanistic research using two state-of-the-art, open-source, user-friendly tools, Gentle and Drift. Drawing on advanced speech recognition and signal processing algorithms, Gentle and Drift visualize and quantify prosodic, expressive features of speech, including pitch range, intonation patterns, intensity, and rhythm. The project will also train a network of scholars in using these tools, and solicit and apply their feedback to develop new features to fit their needs. In so doing, the project will provide practical tools, broaden the community of users and develop new digital humanities research on sound.

Major infrastructure improvements to the multi-institutional Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery.

Over the past two decades, archaeologists have struggled to discover how the web can help them collaborate across institutional boundaries to generate accurate and commensurate data, share them publicly, and analyze them to advance our understanding of human history. This proposal from the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery, based at Monticello, offers linked social and digital strategies that can meet these challenges in the archaeological study of early-modern slave societies. The project seeks Level III funding to enhance proven open-source software (www.daaacrc.org) and training programs that provide our collaborators with flexibility in how they collect data and share it with diverse stakeholders. The project will optimize search and navigation on the DAACS website (www.daacs.org) to accommodate a 10-fold increase in the number of archaeological sites represented. The project would demonstrate how a core facility like DAACS can leverage collaboration among researchers working in diverse institutions.

Digital revitalization and content upgrades for World History Matters, a free-to-use educational web resource for teaching world history.

World History Commons, a Level III grant, will provide an essential digital resource for teaching and research in world and global history, reviving and expanding World History Matters, the award-winning, NEH-funded collection of world history websites now almost twenty years old. Using robust, modular, and extendable open-source software, this Open Educational Resource (OER) will preserve and enhance widely-used resources while introducing new humanities scholarship and pedagogy. World History Commons represents a ground-breaking collaboration between the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, the World History Association, and Monash University (Australia) which runs one of the largest world history programs in the southern hemisphere. World History Commons will provide a free, centralized, digital, world history platform with high quality, peer-reviewed resources for high school and higher education students, teachers, and scholars.

The expansion and improvement of an existing digital archive for indigenous languages, the development of software to identify and analyze archival materials, and two training workshops for tribal representatives and scholars engaged in language revitalization efforts.

The Miami-Illinois Digital Archive (MIDA) is critical to the educational development of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma’s language revitalization efforts: it is the only software for the organization, storage, retrieval and analysis of digital surrogates of archival language documentation. The proposed Breath of Life 2.0: Creating a ‘Second Breath’ for Indigenous Language Revitalization (BoL 2.0) project will enhance the proven functionality of MIDA by providing a stable and secure data platform to share this powerful tool with Native American communities engaged in archivally-based research and analysis for language revitalization. The resulting Indigenous Languages Digital Archive will be disseminated in two one-week training workshops for alumni from the National Breath of Life Archival Institute for Indigenous Languages who seek to engage in the type of advanced archivally-based research that has enabled languages such as Miami-Illinois to be spoken again after decades of silence.

The development of an open source software library that will allow scholars, teachers, and students to analyze time-based media including films, news broadcasts, and television programs.

This project allows scholars to work with large-scale collections by building an open source software library to facilitate the algorithmic production of metadata summarizing the content (e.g., shot angle, shot length, lighting, framing, sound) of time-based media. The software allows scholars to explore media in many forms, including films, new broadcasts, and television, revealing how moving images shape cultural norms.

The further development of the online Scholarly Text-Editing Platform for the production of print and digital critical and documentary editions.

Following a successful NEH start-up grant, we propose to implement a cloud-based Scholarly Text-Editing Platform (STEP). That platform is a complete workflow environment designed by scholarly editors, interface specialists, and web and application developers, for facilitating the production of print and online critical or documentary scholarly editions. STEP helps (1) facilitate rigorous TEI-XML transcriptions through timesaving encoding methods; (2) import digitized images of original documents; (3) compile textual apparatus lists; (4) enable the online scholarly editing, annotating, and formatting of texts in an interface that keeps track of and archives every iteration of a document through multiple stages of corrections and editorial interventions; (5) link edited texts and their components both to the digitized documents and to their critical editorial apparatus; and (6) streamline the conversion of edited texts to laid-out and hyperlinked texts for online or print publication.

The development of a model for aggregating information about dispersed collections of ancient Greek pottery based on the concepts of linked open data to provide greater access to the collections and to allow new ways of analyzing the materials. 

Linked Open Greek Pottery: Kerameikos.org is an international effort to define the intellectual concepts of Archaic and Classical Greek pottery following the methodologies of Linked Open Data (LOD). These concepts include categories such as shapes, artists, styles, and production places. When linked externally to other LOD thesauri, such as the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus, Kerameikos.org allows for the normalization and aggregation of disparate museum and archaeological datasets into an information system that facilitates broader public access (e.g., Pelagios Commons). Beyond the definition of pottery concepts, following open web standards, Kerameikos.org will standardize and document an ontology and model for exchanging pottery data, provide easy-to-use interfaces to visualize geographic and quantitative distributions of Greek pottery, and publish a series of data manipulation web services enabling archaeologists and museum professionals to contribute data to this ecosystem.