Funded Projects Query Form
795 matches

An eighteen-month research project to develop models, tools, and a strategic plan for teaching sustainability in cultural heritage conservation programs.  Funding would support a research associate for the duration of the project who would coordinate activities between UCLA faculty, Getty Conservation Institute scientists, and an outside advisory board consisting of engineers, architects, and conservators with demonstrated expertise in sustainability.

The UCLA/Getty Interdepartmental Program in the Conservation of Archaeological and Ethnographic Materials respectfully requests $75,000 for a Tier I National Endowment for the Humanities Research and Development Grant. We are proposing an eighteen month research project working with a Research Associate and an Advisory Committee to create a strategic plan for teaching sustainability in cultural heritage conservation. The project is the first phase of a larger initiative to integrate sustainability theory and practice into course offerings, convene a workshop of interdisciplinary experts, and create models and scalable curricular materials for publication by eScholarship, an open access publishing platform subsidized by the University of California. We will develop materials through research at UCLA and the Getty, and distribute them widely to benefit educational programs in cultural heritage conservation, library and archives preservation, and conservation of the built environment.

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 plan for metadata standards, accessibility, user needs, and long-term strategic planning and sustainability for Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center’s collections, as well as the pilot implementation of a digital collections management system and online collections portal with approximately 1,000 digital items.

Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center requests $50,000 to develop a pilot project creating online access to a part of its permanent collection. This will be an invaluable resource for scholars studying Black Mountain College’s history and legacy as it includes the creative output of groundbreaking figures in American culture from 1933 to the present, across visual, performing, and literary arts. Outputs for this planning period will include development and population of the back-end and front-end of a new collections management system, and documents detailing strategies and standards for future implementation. An earlier related phase, funded by the Luce and Windgate Foundations, involved the digitization of BMCM+AC resources which will be used as pilot data and media for the online collections portal. The project will take place from June 2021-September 2022. Full implementation at a later date will entail digitizing and adding the rest of the collection.

A multi-institutional planning project to develop an online portal that would aggregate the personal papers of former members of the United States Congress.

The American Congress Digital Archives Portal Project proposes to digitize and aggregate congressional archives in an online portal that will expand access to collections and increase research value by providing context and linkages among them. Congressional archives are rich resources documenting the history of the legislative branch and illuminating multiple narratives about America’s social, cultural, and political development. The portal would provide scholars with significantly improved access to geographically dispersed collections and provide the general public and teachers access to civically important documents about Congress and public policy. With the expertise of congressional scholars, archivists, and technologists, this Foundations project will establish best practices for contributing materials and provide scope for a larger project by prioritizing materials to be digitized. A prototype digital portal will provide a model for future collaboration and digital practice.

The creation of architectural, storage, and design plans to complete the second phase of a multiyear project to protect collections and the historic building where they are housed. The work that the Livingston County Historical Society proposes in this application is part of its long-term strategic plan to provide optimal conditions for collections and to act as a responsible steward for the 1838 Cobblestone Schoolhouse, where the Livingston County Historical Society is housed.

The proposed project will support Phase 2 of a multiyear project to protect our collections and the historic building in which they are housed and to improve our ability to serve our community. Under the proposed project, an interdisciplinary team that includes a historic preservation architect, conservator, and museum space planner will collaborate to reorganize existing curatorial and gallery spaces to be more efficient and secure and to plan a new, dedicated storage room that conforms to best museum practices. Sustainable preservation specialists and HVAC engineers will evaluate passive or low-energy options for environmental controls and lighting systems.

The development of the China Historical Christian Database that seeks to map and visualize the relationships among Chinese Christians, missionaries, and the people with whom they interacted from 1550-1950.

The China Historical Christian Database quantifies and visualizes the place of Christianity in modern China (1550-1950). It provides users the tools to discover where every Christian church, school, hospital, orphanage, publishing house, and the like were located in China, and it documents who worked inside those buildings, both foreign and Chinese. Collectively, this information creates spatial maps and generates relational networks that reveal where, when, and how Western ideas, technologies, and practices entered China. Simultaneously, it uncovers how and through whom Chinese ideas, technologies, and practices were conveyed to the West. This project breaks new ground in providing quantifiable data about modern Sino-Western relations. Scholars can interact with the data through an intuitive website, while advanced users have open access to the CHCD’s data for elaboration. Boston University’s digital infrastructure guarantees the project’s long-term sustainability.

The development, testing, and release of PlacePress, a plugin for WordPress, for designing and launching digital public humanities projects. 

We seek a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant to develop PlacePress, a WordPress plugin that enables humanities scholars, content experts, or organizations to create and share interpretive location-based tours and stories easily, affordably, and sustainably using the world's most ubiquitous content management system. The project will generate three use cases in collaboration with institutional partners in support of ongoing public humanities initiatives, as well as usability testing with a focus group drawn from identified target users.

The development of methods to make it easier for scholars to research historical records, with a focus on 17th century notary records from Argentina. 

We propose to develop a software tool that will enable scholars to expeditiously read and analyze seventeenth century Spanish American notary records and quickly find relevant content in these document collections. Since these records were written in a type of script that was intentionally cryptic, it takes years of training in Spanish American paleography to become proficient in reading and analyzing them. Digital collections contain large amounts of information that can be modeled as a knowledge graph by applying deep learning and knowledge management techniques. The development of such a tool will make notarial scripts accessible to a larger community of researchers without requiring extensive paleography training. By modeling the content in the notary records as a knowledge graph, graph queries will facilitate the identification of legal formulae that characterize types of notarized documents and allow researchers to more efficiently mine the information relevant to their projects.

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.

Planning for storage spaces at all six of the center’s collecting units, resulting in recommended improvements that would maximize preservation environment, space efficiency, and access to collections by staff and the public. Center staff would work with a consulting conservator, architect, and engineer to develop the plan.

The Buffalo Bill Center of the West requests a planning grant to seek professional guidance for addressing collections preservation issues in the Center's existing storage and work areas. Recommendations from outside consultants will result in a Master Preservation Plan that will make efficient use of available storage spaces. A team of consultants will work with select Center staff to evaluate vault space, workstations, and storage areas that serve staff, professional researchers, and the public.

A planning project to assess and develop sustainable preventive conservation and storage strategies to protect a collection of 2,700 fine arts objects. The assessment would include an evaluation of the 1890’s-era, 6,540 square foot McPherson House to determine how it could be adapted to satisfy needs for collection storage, educational programming, and improved access for Gettysburg College students, faculty, and the general public, while also achieving energy efficiency.

Gettysburg College seeks a planning grant of $50,000 to assess and develop sustainable preventive conservation and storage strategies to protect its Fine Arts Collection. As an undergraduate college of liberal arts and sciences the Fine Arts Collection is central to teaching and learning in the humanities.

A planning project to explore sustainable preservation strategies that can address deteriorating environmental conditions in museum storage and exhibition areas. Improved environmental conditions would preserve the Autry’s collection of over 600,000 historical, archival, and library materials and works of art that represent the diverse cultures, perspectives, and ideas of the American West.

The Autry, located in historic Griffith Park in Los Angeles, requests a planning grant from NEH to assist the museum in preserving its extremely diverse collection of more than 600,000 significant and culturally unique assets, including the second largest assemblage of Native American objects in the United States. Items in the collection range in age from pre-contact to the present, documenting Native history and cultures throughout the Americas. The items provide rare opportunities for research, teaching and lifelong learning in the humanities for students, teachers, artists, researchers, scholars, historians and others. The project will assemble an experienced group of interdisciplinary experts, who will work collaboratively to address increasingly extreme fluctuations in temperature and humidity in the Autry Museum by recommending remedial "next steps" to respond to anticipated climate trends and support sustainable preventive conservation measures.

A planning project to develop recommendations for improving the storage environment at the Amistad Research Center (ARC), an independent archives and manuscripts repository located at Tulane University with extensive holdings on the history of African Americans from the 1780s to the present.

The Amistad Research Center (ARC) seeks to develop a master preservation and conservation plan for infrastructure and systems associated with collection storage at its main facility of Tilton Memorial Hall on the campus of its partner organization, Tulane University. This project will entail collaboration between Center staff and board with conservation experts and Tulane University planning and facilities personnel to document and prioritize conservation and preservation needs to 1) create a strategic plan outlining next steps for a comprehensive implementation plan based on best practices, and 2) develop a projected budget and identify funding sources to address action steps within the strategic plan. The project is guided by ARC’s Collection Development and Management Policies which outline ARC’s primary responsibility to provide a safe and secure environment for all collections and works in its custody.

Two one-week workshops for 72 K-12 educators on the interaction between Native Americans and European settlers in Santa Fe.

The University of New Mexico is seeking a grant award to provide teacher workshops during the summer of 2021. Santa Fe, a city boasting a 400+ year history as the recognized capital will be the site of this workshop. The extensive history of the continuously occupied historic sites offers a rich opportunity for teachers from around the U.S. to study the history and culture of the area by investigating the historic sites of Santa Fe and area Pueblos. The workshops will be structured around the concept of homelands and include the study of historic sites, artifacts and stories in Santa Fe, NM and surrounding communities. The Camino Real de Tierra Adentro and the Palace of the Governors will be interpreted, studied and contrasted with the Pueblo history of the region, including Taos Pueblo, to understand the complexity of historical homelands. Structures, museums, centers and libraries in Santa Fe housing artifact and document collections will be utilized to foster deeper understandings.

Two one-week workshops for 72 school teachers on the history of reform movements in Lowell, MA.

The Tsongas Industrial History Center, a partnership of UMass Lowell's College of Education and Lowell National Historical Park, proposes to engage educators in investigating Lowell’s textile industry as a case study of early 19th-century industrialization and reform. We use the resources of the Park and other cultural/historical sites to examine changes in work, society, and culture between 1820 and 1860, changes that led Lowellians, imbued with the ideals of the natural rights tradition, to engage in labor reform, women’s rights, and antislavery movements. We also look at nativism in this time period as a reactionary reform movement. An industrial city that formed the template for later industrial cities in the U.S., Lowell provides an ideal setting for historical inquiry. Through lectures, discussion, hands-on and field investigations, drama, and close study of primary, secondary, and literary sources, educators gain both useful content knowledge and new pedagogical approaches.

Two one-week workshops for 72 school teachers exploring the history of the slave ship Clotilda and the Africatown community in Mobile, Alabama, from the Civil War to today.

Spring Hill College (SHC) seeks funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) for “The Past is Present: From Africa to Africatown,” a new five-day Landmarks of American History and Culture workshop to immerse K-12 educators of all grades in the history of the slave ship Clotilda and the post-Civil War community of Mobile, Alabama’s Africatown.

A one-week institute for 35 K-12 teachers on the First Amendment to be held at the National Constitution Center.

One week intensive institute for k-12 teachers on the United States Constitution and the First Amendment, focusing on the delicate balance between the rights of individuals and the need to govern society and keep it safe. The institute will begin with an historical review and a conceptual discussion of the founding of the United States with an emphasis on important founding documents. The Institute will then move to a study of the issues raised by the incorporation of the First Amendment into the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause. And finally, it will examine specific issues that emerge out of the First Amendment as seen in major Supreme Court Decisions. The institute will not only explore substantive matters, but also promote the development of critical thinking and the disposition to question. Participants will then discuss how to apply the strong content in their own classrooms.

A two-week institute for 25 6-12 educators to study the history and literature of the borderlands.

The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and in collaboration with the Center for Inter-American and Border Studies (CIBS) and the Institute of Oral History (IOH), non-profit research and education centers at UTEP, propose a Summer Institute for School Teachers from July 18th to August 1st, 2021. Building on the successful participation of 25 Summer Scholars in the 2017 and 2019 Summer Institute for School Teachers titled Tales from the Chihuahuan Desert: Borderlands Narratives about Identity and Binationalism, the proposed Level II 2021 Summer Institute will provide 25 secondary school teachers (NEH Summer Scholars) in grades 6–12 with two weeks of intense, guided exploration of borderlands narratives from the Chihuahuan Desert—a culturally and politically significant region for instructional consideration and critical research encompassing 139,000 square miles across several Mexican states and parts of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.

A Tier I project to study errors and paratextual noise in optically transcribed digital library texts, and the consequences of these errors on historical and humanistic conclusions measuring trends across time.

The noise associated with digital transcription has become an important obstacle to humanistic research. While the errors in digital texts are easily observed, the downstream effects of error on scholarship are far from clear. Consequential problems for the humanities often spring less from the average level of error in a collection than from the uneven distribution of noise across different periods, genres, and social strata. Uncertainty about this problem undermines confidence in research and discourages some scholars from using digital libraries at all. To address these problems, we will 1) Create paired libraries of clean, manually transcribed volumes and optically-transcribed versions of the same volumes, with or without paratext. 2) Conduct parallel experiments in these corpora to empirically measure the distortions affecting scholarship. 3) Construct a map of error and share resources that help scholars estimate levels of uncertainty in their work.

A series of planning activities to create a network of scholars (or “hub”) to surface works by women writers through digital methods and also provide support, mentorship, and peer-review services for women in the digital humanities.

The project team is seeking a Level I Digital Humanities Advancement Grant to plan a digital recovery hub that will operate as a network of scholars grounded in diverse feminist methods under the umbrella of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW). The hub will provide a much-needed resource for project consultation and technical assistance for scholars engaged in the recovery of the works of American women writers from all periods. The hub's broader goals are to: 1) reinvigorate the value of digital scholarship as a recovery method by extending traditional editing projects with network mapping, spatial analysis, and the distant reading of massive datasets; 2) provide support for projects at a variety of levels; 3) act as a feminist peer reviewing body for in-process work; and 4) build a community of use to help recovery projects reach broader audiences by interfacing with SSAWW’s membership and journal Legacy.

Enabling multilingual citizen contributions to an existing open-source platform for transcribing and translating historical documents and adding these contributions to the archival record.

This project seeks $302,477 in support to enhance FromThePage (FtP), an open-source platform for the collaborative transcription, translation, and indexing of texts, with the intent to enable multilingual citizen contributions to DH activities (Part 1) and reuse these citizen contributions in the archival record (Part 2). The expected outcomes include platform restructuring to enable multilingual versions of FtP, a Spanish and Portuguese translation of the interface and user guides, enhanced support for object metadata and faceted browsing, additional export options to facilitate the use of machine-readable textual outputs in other digital scholarship tools, and workflows to incorporate citizen contributions into the archival and digital asset management system record.

A workshop for humanities scholars and librarians on the long-term storage and maintenance requirements for prosopographic data.

This Level I project will convene a 3-day meeting of experts in prosopographic data, repository infrastructure, and humanities data to determine the requirements for a prosopographies-specific data repository. This project will seek to answer questions about the metadata required, the techinical requirements, and potential user base for such a repository.

A multi-institutional planning project to develop an online portal for access to archival sources on Franco American history and culture.  The project team would also plan for digitizing Franco American sources at partner institutions and would explore linking other library and archival collections to the portal.

The Franco American Portal Project is a five-university collaboration to build a primary source discovery tool for Franco American collections. Sponsored by the University of Maine and in collaboration with the University of Southern Maine, University of Maine at Fort Kent, Assumption College, and St. Anselm College, this project seeks to create a single, bilingual, culturally conscientious, searchable portal to archival materials concerning the French Canadian diaspora in the United States. Funds will be used to create a portal that links to the five partners' in-scope archival collections; foster teamwork and partner collaboration; support outreach to solicit in-scope materials from other institutions in the United States and Canada; and develop a digitization plan for growing content for the portal.

Planning for the creation of online access to Native American language holdings at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, at the University of Oklahoma.  Planning would entail a series of workshops for tribal community members, linguists, archivists, and technology developers in order to share user needs and best practices in the design of language repositories.

The Native American Languages collection at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma is seeking funding for a collaborative project to plan the development of an online platform for the collection. The website will provide unprecedented access to the collection by allowing users to view and download materials directly, rather than the current system which requires people to visit the collection in person. This type of access fulfills our mission to make those materials that are meant to be shared as available as possible to Native peoples, researchers, and the greater public. We propose to hold a series of workshops designed to get input from NAL stakeholders (Native communities, linguists, educators), archiving professionals, and developers to create a user-oriented interface that will best serve the needs of our community of users. Information gathered from the workshops will be used to produce detailed mock-ups of the site.

A project to evaluate transcription tools and methods and develop a preservation plan for two sociolinguistic corpora documenting contemporary language practices of Spanish/English bilingual speakers in South Texas and southern Arizona.

Linguists at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV) and the University of Arizona (UA) have collected over 157 hours of audio-recorded interviews with Spanish/English bilinguals documenting language varieties along the U.S./Mexico border. However, due to the time-consuming nature of manual transcription, many of these interviews have not yet been transcribed, limiting access to this valuable collection. This project pilots technologically-enhanced transcription methodologies, such as speech recognition and time alignment, to speed and streamline the transcription process. It also pilots a sustainable, community-based approach to the transcription of interviews by undergraduate and graduate students in research internship courses. This assessment, outcomes and findings of this project will guide other scholars seeking to develop their own community-based sociolinguistic corpora.