Funded Projects Query Form
30 matches

A website and mobile application with walking tours exploring the history of affordable housing in San Francisco.

WALKING CINEMA: MUSEUM OF THE HIDDEN CITY (MHC) is a mobile application and walking tour exploring San Francisco’s history of affordable housing. Due to its unique mix of preservationist and progressive policies, San Francisco’s affordable housing stock spans a range of eras: from Depression Era minimalist housing blocks, to inclusionary housing in expensive new glass towers, to the largest concentration of Single Room Occupancy hotels left in the United States. The project will use this architecture and its surrounding neighborhoods as stages to show how the history of affordable housing informs present and future efforts to create shelter for all the city’s residents. Amidst numerous cranes, ubiquitous upscaling, and notorious evictions, MHC will reveal a saga of unintended consequences for a project that may just be getting its footing in one of the most expensive cities in the country.

Production of an online game using the history of the Apalachee as a case study to interrogate Indigenous experiences in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Florida. 

Mission US: Spirit of a Nation is an online learning game about the Apalachees, an Indigenous people from northwestern Florida, spanning the 1500s to the mid-1600s. The eighth installment of Mission US, WNET’s award-winning series of free classroom games on American history, it will enrich the teaching and learning of Early American history in middle schools. As players progress through the game narrative, they will take on the roles of Apalachee youths of different periods and interact with contemporary experts studying Apalachee history. The story of the Apalachees offers a compelling perspective on Indigenous, as well as Spanish, experiences in North America. Spirit of a Nation will develop young people’s knowledge of how American Indigenous communities persisted and adapted during early encounters with Europeans, and of how this past is researched, interpreted, and remembered.

Production of two digital tours and mobile apps, onsite kiosks, and online resources augmenting a new permanent exhibition on Jewish founders of the film industry and highlighting the history of Los Angeles neighborhood movie houses.

The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures respectfully submits a Production grant application to pilot two new digital user tours for its free digital interactive Hollywood Past & Present. The interactive takes the diverse array of lives, histories, and media found in the Academy Museum’s exhibitions and uses location-based storytelling techniques to create self-guided visitor tours of American film history, both on-site at the museum and on the streets of Los Angeles.

Production of a digital platform exploring the Supreme Court for middle and high school students.

iCivics proposes a new civics and history education gaming experience, earmarked for young people ages 12-18. This project is a unique in its approach to teaching critical humanities skills. iCivics will partner with Gigantic Mechanic to design, create, and disseminate Supreme Justice – an interactive classroom experience meant to promote civil dialogue, civic and historical knowledge ... and engage students. Supreme Justice is a multi-media experience. It builds on best practices in critical humanities education. Students will engage in a multi-player live simulation; the technology combines video, individualized student profiles, and real-time voting. Players will explore different aspects of government and civic life as well as concepts of student controversies, like First Amendment rights. Our gaming experience will equip players with facts and primary sources, guiding them towards face-to-face discussions where they can work together to craft arguments and debate key issues.

Production of a website and interactive timeline on the history of African American music.

Carnegie Hall requests Digital Projects for the Public Production support to produce a fully-functional interactive digital timeline of the history of African American music for broad distribution to a general audience. The primary goal of the project is to create an engaging and innovative digital resource that makes humanities content on African American music, culture, and history accessible to a broad public audience. Continued funding will allow Carnegie Hall to build upon NEH support for the discovery and prototyping phases of the project, completing production and launching the new digital timeline in 2021.

Production of a digital media project exploring non-traditional places of religious worship in the Boston area.

“Boston’s Hidden Sacred Spaces” is an immersive media project that provides an entry point for exploring how religious life in the United States is changing. Specifically, it provides close readings of hidden chapels, meditation spaces, and prayer rooms that people in Boston pass daily but few stop to closely consider. This project uses innovative, digital-based story-telling to show how religious life is being diffused and reshaped as people see and experience the sacred in new ways through these hidden sacred spaces. In partnership with NPR, the project team will expand its prototype to 10 diverse spaces in greater Boston - including a port, a correctional facility, a campus, a shopping mall, and an island military chapel. They will tell the story of each of these spaces, illustrating through detailed audio and 3D models the effects of immigration, responses to religious diversity, and the architecture of the sacred that underlie American religious change between 1950 and the presen

Production of an immersive website and mobile application exploring the impact and legacy of Reconstruction.

Reconstruction 360 is a web and mobile application that, for the first time, brings Reconstruction history to a 360° video platform. Created for the general public, students and educators, Reconstruction 360 is designed to increase understanding of the Reconstruction era for users of digital devices including computers, tablets and phones. It will contain six modules, each interpreting a different theme of Reconstruction history. To date, the first module, Land and Labor: Forty Acres and a Mule, has been completed and can be accessed at www.reconstruction360.org. For each module, the 360° video platform consists of a reenactment of a different aspect of Reconstruction history. The purpose of the immersive reenactment is to place the user inside the scene, creating a first-person experience. This emerging form of storytelling provides a sense of presence and place, inducing feelings of empathy, fear, conflict, and other responses that help people internalize difficult content.

Production of a website and on-site augmented reality tour of the Kent State University campus addressing the shootings on May 4, 1970.

This production grant builds upon the NEH-funded prototype project titled, “Layers of History: Experiencing May 4, 1970, and Its Legacy.” The prototype successfully used augmented reality (AR) to help campus visitors reflect on the Kent State shootings and their impact on American history. This proposal will build on the prototype to full production and dissemination with five key outcomes. First, events and themes related to May 4, 1970, will be broadened and enriched with additional stories and places of interest (e.g., downtown Kent). Second, the application will be visually enhanced to target multiple users and various mobile devices. Third, the 50th anniversary will be the impetus to provide AR application features accessible to off-campus users, reaching a wider audience across the country. Fourth, full evaluation will study the use of AR for humanities. Finally, the AR editor will be further developed to allow other humanities scholars to develop similar digital projects.

Production of a mobile-optimized website, a walking tour, and a museum exhibition exploring the history of underground and submerged sites in downtown San Francisco and the Bay.

The Exploratorium seeks support for the production and distribution of San Francisco's Buried History, a project that uses digital technology to engage the public in a physical and virtual exploration of the urban history of Downtown San Francisco. Specifically, Buried History uses a mobile-optimized web site, a walking tour, and accompanying museum exhibit to explore seventeen underground sites that provide fascinating clues as to how the landscape was used and altered over time, as well as to how past inhabitants of the area lived, worked and died. The project will prompt the public to become curious about the rich historical and cultural information right beneath their feet, and the story that information tells of how and why human activity transformed the landscape of San Francisco. In doing so, Buried History will engage users in adopting a more nuanced sense of place—encouraging its audience to learn from historical insights while developing perspectives on contemporary issues.

Production of a permanent and traveling multimedia exhibition and enhancements to a website exploring a little known but historically significant speech by Martin Luther King Jr.

Support is requested for the production of six components of the Virtual Martin Luther King (vMLK) Project. The production of these six components will enable on-going public exhibitions of the vMLK project both online, via the project website, and in physical spaces such as museums and libraries. The public exhibitions in physical spaces will be produced so that they can be experienced individually (via self-guided tours) and collectively (staged and guided exhibitions). The online exhibitions will include both curricular-guided pedagogical experiences and humanities for the public-guided experiences. Additionally, the production process, particularly as articulated and evaluated through a workshop with humanities advisers and library and museum partners, will provide a template for other humanities scholars working to produce digital programs for the public whether they are tied to physical spaces/locations or fully articulated online for public audiences.

Production of a website on the history and legacy of banjo music.

“Music is like the front porch of a culture,” said Harry Belafonte. “It is often where people first look and see each other.” Brought to the New World by enslaved Africans, the banjo is the product of three centuries of cultural exchanges and appropriations. If the banjo is America’s front porch instrument, then The Banjo Project: Stories of America’s Instrument is our 21st century front porch. Built on a searchable archive of over 300 hours of original media, The Banjo Project is a digital museum devoted to the instrument’s rich history, combining interactive documentary, research and curated content. It will also serve as the hub for a consortium of partner institutions, with portals to showcase related content and digital collections. When the diverse styles and purveyors of banjo music are placed in their historical context, users can create a community of storytellers who will build narratives around the banjo that overcome boundaries of race, culture, class, region and gender.

Production of an online game that allows players to explore the history of the ratification of the United States Constitution.

iCivics, in collaboration with Filament Games and select scholars in the humanities, proposes to develop its 20th online educational video-game: "Ratification: The Great Debate.” The game will offer middle and high school students a new immersive experience on a pivotal topic: the ratification of the United States Constitution. Our goal is to impart students with core knowledge surrounding this eventful period, to develop their argumentative writing, and to give our thousands of teacher-users a unique resource to engage their students in our nation’s history.

Production of a website exploring slavery in the colonial North with a focus on the individual stories of enslaved people at Philipsburg Manor, an eighteenth-century historic plantation site.

Historic Hudson Valley (HHV) requests NEH support for the production of a website titled People as Property: Stories of Northern Colonial Enslavement. The site will shed light on the often overlooked history of slavery in the colonial North with a special focus on individual stories as a means to personalize the past. This project is an outgrowth of the NEH-funded reinterpretation of Philipsburg Manor, HHV’s National Historic Landmark in Sleepy Hollow, NY. Probate inventories, runaway slave ads, legal and court documents, slave narratives, and other primary sources related to northern slaveholdings serve as entry points for exploring the human dimensions of slavery. Philipsburg Manor stands as the primary case study augmented by content from several noteworthy historic sites, libraries, academic institutions, and historical societies in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.

Production of two large-scale immersive, digital experiences to complement an exhibition exploring the history of Brooklyn’s waterfront.

Brooklyn Historical Society (BHS) seeks a production grant in the amount of $400,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Digital Projects for the Public program for Water Log and Visitor Vistas—two critical digital components of Waterfront, a long-term transmedia exhibition, and visitor experience that will bring the dynamic story of Brooklyn’s changing waterfront to visitors, both on-site and through the Internet. Waterfront immerses visitors in the engaging and deeply relevant history of Brooklyn’s waterfront and casts them as influential players in shaping its future. Crucial to this goal, the two proposed digital features have been developed to serve the needs of both local residents and national and international visitors—groups with different backgrounds, interests, knowledge bases, languages, and motivations for visiting.

Tides of Revolution: The Hermione Game is a web-based exploration of the background of the events leading to the climax of the American Revolution, the surrender of the British army under Cornwallis at Yorktown. The game is designed to help players develop a contextual understanding of these historic events, including the political climate in late 18th century Europe and America. Players will also acquire knowledge of 18th century sciences, technologies, engineering, humanities, arts, and mathematics. The central action of the game will follow Marquis de Lafayette, a Major General in the Continental Army and confidant of George Washington, as he secures support for the American cause from King Louis XVI of France and witnesses the building of L'Hermione which transports him back from France to Boston.
Tides of Revolution: The Hermione Game will combine badge or insignia-based accomplishment, and a Digital Object Library (DOL), and include an e-portfolio in support of formative assessments. As a Web-based learning resource the game, with all of its content assets for game play and reference, will be accessible anytime/anywhere.