Funded Projects Query Form
124 matches

The prototyping and testing of a web platform for sharing digitized medieval manuscripts that allows users to identify and transcribe the annotations and marginalia. 

"Gallery of Glosses" constitutes a project aimed at producing an open digital platform with an accessible and flexible workflow and a community of users centered on "glosses" (annotations, marginalia) preserved in medieval manuscripts. It focuses on glosses composed on texts of various genres that were authoritative in medieval education and society.

The creation of geospatial enhancements to an existing digital infrastructure that will allow users to link to other scholarship, generate new research, and publish findings.

Metapolis aims to develop a digital research infrastructure to support scholarship in the humanities that seeks to geospatially reconstruct places throughout time. As an interactive map-based publication platform, it enables users to cross-pollinate archival, bibliographic and multimedia sources with interpretive research, allowing for their interlinking and visualization on a map. Built on top of ResearchSpace, an open-source Semantic Web research environment, it facilitates the reuse and publishing of Linked Open Data. A rich set of features support data enrichment with external knowledge bases such as VIAF, WikiData, OCLC, and the Getty vocabularies. Designed both as a research and publication tool, the software allows groups of scholars from a wide range of humanistic disciplines to connect their research and augment each other's findings through the layering of historical maps, interlinking them to sources to allow users to build knowledge about the world and its history.

The development and testing with humanities scholars of an open source mobile recording app for collecting “audio diaries” for use in research and public engagement. 

This project builds on the success of an existing prototype for a remote recording mobile app used to collect "audio diaries" in 2020-2021. We aim to redevelop the code for the front end of the app and refactor the code for the back end, resulting in a shareable app infrastructure that may be adopted by researchers at any number of institutions. We will bring together a user community of beta testing researchers across the humanities who may benefit from a remote recording app, which we hope to expand during the second year of funding into a broad user community and support system. The code and user manual will be published on a public GitLab repository, enabling future improvements by the user community.

The creation of machine learning methods to identify microartifacts from archaeological sites. 

Mortars are ubiquitous and essential parts of construction. Ancient builders prepared them as members of changing communities of practice. We ask to what degree interactions among contemporaries led to standardized mortars and whether builders learnt from culturally different predecessors. These issues require studying a large data set objectively. Our Level 1 project proposes to analyze 1000 mortar samples and ~1 billion particles with a dynamic image particle analyzer. We train machine learning algorithms to identify experimentally reproduced mortar constituents in archaeological samples. The latter come from the ancient port city of Caesarea Maritima that Roman, Jewish, Byzantine, Abassid-Fatimid Muslim, and Crusader builders constructed between 22 B.C.E. and 1265 C.E. Our approach – dynamic image analysis, experimental archaeology, and machine learning – can be extended to other parts of the ancient Mediterranean as well as to other microartifacts.

The development and release of new features for the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer platform used by librarians and archivists to annotate and share oral history collections online.

This project, a collaboration between Dartmouth College and the University of Kentucky, undertakes a major enhancement of the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS), the pre-eminent digital platform for managing and indexing oral history archives. Drawing on the prior work of the Dartmouth Digital History Initiative (DDHI), the project team will add advanced data annotation and Named Entity Recognition functionality to the OHMS application. The project team will also draw on the DDHI’s prior experience with data visualization to add mapping and timeline features to the OHMS viewer. The project will benefit archivists and curators who implement OHMS on digital oral history collections. It will also benefit the end users of oral history archives, who will have new digital tools for exploring and learning from these collections. All deliverables for this project will be available on a free and open-source basis.

The development of a prototype application that will allow users to view and manipulate digitized archival materials in augmented reality as well as an evaluation of its potential as a teaching tool for the humanities.

Interacting with digitized archival materials in a Web browser fails to replicate the close engagement possible during in-person research. We are building Booksnake, a mobile app that transforms existing IIIF-compliant digitized archival materials for interaction in augmented reality. Booksnake dynamically inserts a digitized item into the live camera view on a mobile device, making it feel like the item is physically present and permitting embodied exploration. Level II funding will support development of a beta-stage prototype and evaluation of Booksnake as a humanities teaching tool in university and K-12 education. We will use the NEH-supported Chronicling America collection of digitized historic newspapers to build support for compound objects, which have multiple images linked to a single catalog record. By the end of the grant period, we will publicly release a working prototype, open-source code, technical documentation, and project results, supporting extensibility and reuse.

Scaling up development and dissemination of the iSpraak application as a free and open source language pronunciation instruction and learning tool. 

This NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant proposal outlines the plan to enhance, scale, and provide free access to the web application iSpraak. This digital platform equips educators and scholars with an innovative tool for second language pronunciation instruction, assessment, and research. Originally developed for internal use at Saint Louis University in 2014, iSpraak has now been used by tens of thousands of students and instructors across the globe. NEH funding is currently sought in order to continue development, remove cost barriers to access, and to make the platform fully open and accessible to all interested parties.

The creation of software to easily allow non-programmers to develop interactive public humanities digital projects.

The Photogrammar Visualization Software (PGVis) is an open-source tool for the visualization and exploration of image collections. PGVis will allow anyone with a collection of digital images and associated metadata to create, with no prior programming experience, their own digital public humanities projects in the form of public websites. In addition to the software, the project will produce six case studies that will model and highlight how the software can be used in a variety of different domains, data sizes, and types of institutions.

An evaluative study on the impact of teaching world languages using Open Educational Resources (OERs) in K-12 classrooms across Idaho.

This Level II proposal addresses the third program priority to implement an evaluative study on the practices and impact of digital scholarship on pedagogy to enhance teaching and learning in the humanities. Our project, Pathways, is an Open Educational Resource (OER) that is a repository of more than 700 high-quality, editable digital materials (activities) that supports standards-based pedagogy centered on human inquiry for ten world languages and cultures. This project is innovative because we evaluate K-12 urban and rural pedagogy impacted over time as we explicitly train teachers to use Pathways and other digital humanities materials aligned to world languages and cultures. The findings from this evaluative study will provide new opportunities to communicate the impact of digital scholarship on pedagogy by characterizing the beliefs, perceptions, interests, and teacher practices of urban and rural K-12 humanities teachers, a profoundly under investigated population.

The scaling up of tools and methods to allow scholars to identify and decipher illicit printing in documents predating and associated with the First Amendment. 

In response to the NEH's “More Perfect Union" initiative, this application contends that some of the most fascinating stories of the First Amendment’s prehistory are yet to be told – and that they can only be discovered with tools, data, and methods developed in digital humanities. Evidence for clandestine printing often lies below the threshold of human attention – in minute typographical details, recurring pieces of damaged type, similar or divergent paper stocks, or tiny variations in print shop practices, observable only at scale. At the same time, it takes sophisticated information architecture for researchers to move effectively from minute physical details to broader, more consequential patterns. Freedom and the Press before Freedom of the Press will ameliorate persistent challenges in studying clandestine printing by scaling up an established suite of tools, data, and machine learning methods developed to help researchers discover hidden information in letterpress print.

The design and development of a prototype of a digital library repository of archival materials on the history of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.

Turath is a collaborative, community-centric, and open-source digital archive project that aims to curate a repository on the Arabian Peninsula’s history while building tools for the readability and searchability of Arabic texts. Focusing primarily on local sources from the last two centuries, Turath will collect, digitize, and visualize the records, periodicals, photographs, and audio/video recordings related to the history of the Arabian Peninsula. Turath will also further historical knowledge of the Indian Ocean, East Africa, South Asia, and the United States, and enhance our understanding of such global phenomena as modern capitalism, religion, urbanization, and global warming. Committed to the values of the humanities, Turath prioritizes universal accessibility for researchers while foregrounding and providing a platform for local communities in the peninsula to highlight their roles in history-writing and facilitate their own legacy-making through community archival collections.

The migration of an existing database and the development of an updated public interface and search engine for the Stolen Relations project, along with outreach activities with local New England tribal communities.

Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas (www.indigenousslavery.org) is a community-centered, collaborative project that seeks to broaden our understanding of Indigenous experiences of settler colonialism and its legacies through the lens of slavery and servitude. We are applying for a Level III NEH DHAG in order to design and program a front end public interface, initiate new partnerships (especially with the Tomaquag Museum), and build and expand the technical aspects of the database (including linked open data and migrating to Mukurtu). We are gathering and documenting as many instances as possible of Indigenous enslavement in the Americas between 1492 and 1900 (and beyond, where relevant), focused primarily on New England for now, in close partnership with thirteen regional tribes, nations, and communities. Our project seeks to recover the stories of individuals and make these stories and documents available for use by a broad range of people.

A series of meetings to develop a prototype for a federated digital resource on North American weather and climate data collected during the 18th- and 19th-centuries.

The proposed project is a collaborative effort between the Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton University, the Center for Digital Editing at the University of Virginia, and the Center for Digital Scholarship at the American Philosophical Society. The project is seeking level one funding to support planning meetings, a workshop, drafting of technical specifications, and the development of a prototype for federated weather and climate records digital resource. Planning and experimentation work during this grant period will lay the groundwork for the future development of a federated weather and climate records platform. This platform will support both the editorial preparation (broadly conceived) and publication of weather and climate records. Planning and development work will ultimately result in the publication of the Federated Early North American Weather Records Digital Resource.

A series of workshops in Arizona, New Mexico, and California and the development of a digital curriculum on the creation of culturally-appropriate descriptive metadata and narration for Native American films based on the Tribesourcing Southwest Film website.

Tribesourcing Southwest Film digitally repurposes a collection of midcentury educational and sponsored films about Native peoples of the Southwestern U.S., reclaiming visual content through recording culturally-informed alternate audio tracks voiced by Native narrators from within the cultures represented. This process, which we have termed “tribesourcing,” has the double benefit of repatriating historic images and decolonizing these archival films, visible at Tribesourcingfilm.com. In this proposal, we seek to extend the project by: recording additional narrations in Southern California, Arizona and New Mexico; developing a digital curriculum for workshops; and to begin decentralizing the project through a series of workshops to help communities who wish to do their own tribesourcing with their own archived audio-visual materials.

The development of new features and expansion of the user base for the free and open-source HistoryForge, a digital public humanities project that brings census records together with historical maps into one interface that fosters research and teaching of local histories.

HistoryForge is a digital application that combines historic maps with census records of the people who live in a community. The initial prototype visualizes the demographic data on searchable maps that allows users and institutions to more fully connect with primary source historical records. The proposed project expands the functionality of the HistoryForge prototype, and supports the further adoption by additional testing partners.

The creation of a virtual immersive environment to provide training to students in medieval languages and cultures.

Brendan's Voyage: An Immersive Environment for Medieval Language and Culture emphasizes the link between the spoken and written elements of medieval French in a virtual, interactive, immersive learning environment based on a foundational literary text. Informed by empirical research, modern language pedagogy offers immersive learning experiences through study abroad programs or exclusive target-language use in the classroom. These techniques are not readily available for the teaching of medieval languages. Our project addresses this problem through the creation of a virtual immersive environment that allows the user to learn medieval languages as if they were inhabiting an authentic context. Informed by professional game design and modern language pedagogy, Brendan’s Voyage will offer a revolutionary way to teach and learn a historically influential medieval language in a culturally informed narrative and visual context.

Research into the best practices for designing and preserving volumetric recordings of individuals for the purpose of teaching and learning history and culture in cultural heritage organizations.

We are applying for an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant at the level I planning stage in order to identify and begin culling important stories of expatriation by BIPOC during and beyond the war. The NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant in particular can help us explore whether volumetric video capture is an effective digital tool for preserving these unforgettable personal narratives and cultural memories in multi-sensory ways that make them accessible long into the future. We will rethink the nature of storytelling, considering, in particular, how immersive, interactive volumetric video capture and display are likely to dramatically alter what and how stories may be told, understood, archived, preserved, and accessed. A volumetric capture system uses a number of cameras to capture humans , turning them into lifelike, 3-dimensional renderings, producing a nearly identical, photorealistic representation of them.

Technical improvements to the Mukurtu Content Management System and the addition of two additional community hubs for Native American and Native Alaskan communities located in southern California and Alaska.

This project seeks to expand the digital and human infrastructure necessary for the ongoing development, deployment, support, and training related to Mukurtu CMS—a free and open source content management system and community digital access platform built with and for Indigenous communities globally. Now in its second decade of development, Mukurtu CMS is an established digital platform used to empower and sustain the ethical circulation, curation, management and preservation of cultural heritage materials and traditional knowledge, including endangered languages and digitally repatriated cultural materials. The proposed project will expand the current Mukurtu Hubs program from four to six regional hubs, and extend the Mukurtu CMS software to provide increased capacity, infrastructure and support to Native American and Native Alaskan communities as they seek to manage, share, and provide access to their valuable cultural, linguistic and historic materials.

Research into the application of natural language processing techniques to study the evolution of language in Buddhist Sanskrit texts.

This application is for a Level II DHAG. The project has two objectives: 1) to advance research in Indian Buddhism by developing semi-automated methods to study the vocabulary of Buddhist Sanskrit texts; and 2) to contribute to the Digital Humanities by refining computational methods that leverage representations of words as numerical vectors. These vector representations of language, called "word embedding models," have found wide application in industry and are gaining traction in Humanities research. Due to their technical complexity, however, the full potential of cutting-edge word embedding techniques is rarely deployed in the Humanities, and best practices for reliably applying them to the study of historical texts are yet to be drafted. This project brings together Natural Language Processing experts and Buddhist Sanskrit scholars to devise and test new methods for harnessing the power of latest-generation word embedding techniques for historical textual scholarship.

The creation of an online resource to increase accessibility to recordings of works by Black choreographers along with tools to make it easier to study dance by providing the ability to search and create connections across collections.

In keeping with the values of “experimentation, reuse, and extensibility,” this Level II proposal, titled “Dancing Digital,” leverages artist/scholar Gesel Mason’s existing collection No Boundaries: Dancing the Visions of Contemporary Black Choreographers and the open-source software CollectiveAccess to create a working prototype for an online resource that 1) provides online access to important full-length recordings of works by historically-underrepresented Black choreographers, 2) models how to imaginatively combine these full length recordings of dance with innovative features and supporting materials that enrich dance study across humanities disciplines, 3) creates a scalable, open-source, digital framework that broadens the focus from one choreographer’s work to the possibility of an interconnected field-wide archive, and 4) documents and shares the process, constructing a road map for other artists and organizations seeking to provide access to their collections.

Refinement of machine learning methods to improve automatic handwritten text recognition of Persian and Arabic manuscripts and make these sources more accessible for humanities research and teaching.

The Automatic Collation for Diversifying Corpora (ACDC) project will significantly improve the accuracy of handwritten text recognition (HTR) for Arabic-script manuscripts by developing a collation tool to automatically create large amounts of training data from existing digital texts and manuscript images without time-consuming human annotation of individual manuscripts. The ACDC project will accomplish this task by extending the capabilities of the text alignment tool passim and the HTR engine Kraken to align very poor initial HTR transcriptions of diverse manuscript exemplars with existing digital texts in order to automatically produce training data in a “distantly supervised” manner. The ACDC tool’s acceleration of the training data production process will enable, for the first time, the creation of generalizable Arabic and Persian HTR models required for the digital transcription of large-scale Persian and Arabic manuscript collections.

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.

Development of augmented reality software for rapidly documenting cultural heritage artifacts from archaeology and related disciplines while doing fieldwork.

The Documenting and Triaging Cultural Heritage (DATCH) project will, building on the successful prototype created using funding provided by an NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Level II grant, further develop DATCH open-source software for field assessment and documentation of built and movable cultural heritage using augmented reality hardware. It will permit real-time overlay comparisons of cultural heritage against earlier documentation and enable creation of to scale drawings, even in the field without a network connection. An internet connection will allow additional features, such as video calls with subject experts, to facilitate rapid needs assessments of heritage sites and enable on-site multi-disciplinary collaborations. With our goal of creating a cross platform system for head-mounted augmented reality devices, DATCH will continue to be developed in Unity and field-tested with different versions of Microsoft’s HoloLens and Magic Leap One.

Prototyping of an autonomous robot that will utilize Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) to search for historically and archaeologically significant artifacts and sites.

Finding, identifying, and mapping buried archaeological sites and features is a critical component of archaeological research. The most powerful tools to do this are non-destructive geophysical prospection technologies such as Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR). These tools have been used to identify buried architecture, artifacts, fields, roads, ditches, and stratigraphic sequences. However, the established field techniques for collecting this data are slow and limiting, requiring initial surveys and the manual recording of small individual grids. This proposal seeks a level-II grant to support continued development and deployment of a novel autonomous robot, the Archaeorover, that dramatically increases the efficiency and scale of geophysical survey by combining recent advances in robotics, autonomous navigation technology, and Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) with geophysical instruments

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.