Funded Projects Query Form
502 matches

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The development of computational methods to analyze formal details in paintings, focusing on cloud studies by John Constable and his emulators, documentary photographs, and fine art photographs.  

“Seeing Constable’s Clouds” proposes to use computer vision and machine learning to better understand the visual cues of 19th-century pictorial realism. Realist landscapes by British artist John Constable (1776-1837) are often split into two phases depending on whether they were made before or after an intense period spent observing and painting clouds in 1821-1822. Contemporaries disagreed about the effect this interlude had on the realism of his work, and art historians continue to debate how his empirical approach influenced his style and technique. The project team will use computer vision to seek formal details that art historians may have overlooked or been unable to discern. We will also use machine learning to discover whether there are formal features that contribute to the verisimilitude of three different types of pictorial realism: Constable’s paintings of clouds, fine art photographs of clouds, and research photographs of clouds made for scientific study.

The creation of a virtual reality experience of a 15th-century illuminated manuscript to allow users to engage with the content of the manuscript and also gain an appreciation for handling rare materials.

In this Level I proposal, we will build a virtual experience of a 15th century illuminated manuscript that is held in USC's Special Collections and place the model in a virtual version of a convent room similar to that in which it was originally used. This unique experience will allow participants to not only explore the manuscript by holding it rather than viewing it in a glass case, but also have the opportunity to learn about the consequences physical use of an object may have for its preservation. Additionally, the virtual version provides an opportunity for the participant to see the details and textures of the manuscript, the parchment, the binding, the ink, the gilding, and the painting at an extraordinary level of detail that cannot be achieved except in the virtual realm.

A three-day workshop for dance scholars, archivists, librarians, and media specialists on approaches to researching and teaching with digitized collections of dance resources.

Film and video technologies have revolutionized dance education and scholarship by serving as a text for what has historically been an oral tradition; allowing preservation and analysis of dance work. While digital video makes recording dance easier, archives of recorded dance have not been made available online for education and research, and dance scholars face significant geographical and financial barriers to access. Our project brings together dance scholars, archivists, and educators for a three-day symposium during which attendees will explore expansion and aggregation of existing online dance resources along with design of a new pilot resource. The symposium’s results will be disseminated and support for its blueprint actively sought through publication of a white paper, presentations at national conferences, and at open sharing events throughout the United States.

The development of a prototype of an online music editor to help scholars and students analyze medieval music manuscripts. The project would also convene a workshop for medieval studies scholars, musicologists, and technical specialists to evaluate the prototype.

The development of an online music editor will allow a variety of modern readers (students and experts, musicologists, music theorists, those interested in the history of music notation, counterpoint, medieval palaeography and/or manuscript studies) to access and contribute transcriptions of music directly linked to digital images of the medieval manuscripts, and to learn about the original notation. A two-day workshop will bring together the leading experts in music encoding and medieval musicology to evaluate the prototype editor and to devise plans for its further development and rollout. This tool will offer new possibilities for the analysis and interpretation of late medieval music. In a broader humanities context, the project investigates how modeling the meanings of notational signs can lead to new understandings of the interaction between the sign and the signified, and of the relationship between notational style and changes in musical style across time and place.

The planning for future integration of three independent digital projects focused on African Americans during the Civil War and Reconstruction through convening a meeting of scholars, genealogists, and technical experts to create a blueprint for next stages of collaboration.

“Freedom’s Movements” brings together three extant projects--(1) Visualizing Emancipation, (2) African American Civil War Soldiers, and (3) Last Road to Freedom. Project Directors for this grant began collaborations in 2015, each project director providing feedback and their expertise in extending the work of the other projects, driven by the complementary nature of their work. By 2017, it became clear that a partnership between these projects could be beneficial. This Level I proposal is the first fruit of that more robust partnership.

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

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

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

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

A workshop on Library Circulation Histories to be hosted by Ball State University's Center for Middletown Studies. The workshop will bring together representatives from eleven library and reading history digital projects along with additional scholars and digital humanities developers to investigate making historical library circulation data more accessible for humanities research.

Ball State University's (BSU) Center for Middletown Studies, in conjunction with BSU's Digital Scholarship Lab, seeks a Level I Digital Humanities Advancement Grant to support the Library Circulation Histories Workshop, to be held March 6-7, 2020. The project period will run from September 1, 2019 to August 31, 2020. The aim of the Workshop is to make historical library circulation data more accessible and more analytically powerful. The Workshop assembles scholars and developers representing eleven (or more) library and reading history projects to share insights and develop new strategies or increasing the value for these already powerful research tools. Topics addressed will include the use of computational text analysis, network analysis, ethical issues, and data aggregation. The Workshop will result in published articles in a special issue/section of one or more journals, an online video recording of the conference, and a white paper on best practices.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The further development of a platform for middle and high school humanities teachers to incorporate content-based games into their classrooms.

Project Maestro empowers educators and students with limited computer access to make digital humanities games. Created from The Search for Harmony, a web game about the rich, forgotten historical legacy of classical musicians of African descent, this WordPress-based plugin transforms art and text on paper into digital assets for a prebuilt minigame, enabling new versions to be developed without requiring programming skill. This grant’s primary tasks are to build a set of minigames, design activity guides for instructors, and partner with education groups to refine the platform through workshops. The end product will be a website where instructors can publish work as playable games. The producers of this project seek $100,000 for platform development, adviser consultation, game design and documentation. This tool will allow educators and others in the humanities to use digital games as a means of creating engaging, informative experiences for students.

A four-day summer workshop at the University of California, Berkeley, and follow-up activities for thirty-two participants on the ethical and legal issues around data mining of large scale textual collections for humanities research.

Digital humanities (DH) scholars, and professionals who support them, often perceive a barrier to utilizing text data mining (TDM) techniques: the law. Uncertainty about the breadth of TDM rights can impede the scope of DH research questions, or unnecessarily expose scholars to risk. Building Legal Literacies for Text Data Mining (Building LLTDM), hosted by UC Berkeley from June 23-26, 2020, will equip DH TDM researchers, librarians, and professionals with foundational skills to: 1) confidently navigate law, policy, ethics, and risk within DH TDM projects; 2) integrate workflows for DH TDM research and professional support; 3) practice sharing these new tools through authentic consultation exercises; 4) prototype plans for broadly disseminating their knowledge; and 5) develop communities of practice to promote cross-institutional outreach about the DH TDM legal landscape. Instructional materials will be shared publicly as a CC0 (Creative Commons Zero waiver) open educational resource.

A two-week long institute that will teach participants how to create datasets, visualize data, and create maps, with the overarching goal of creating a cohort of military historians who are able to use digital tools and methods to examine issues at the intersection of war and society.

As historians have begun to accept and adopt digital methods for historical analysis, the field of military history has been slow to follow suit. For a field that is rich with data and unconventional sources for analysis, this lack of adoption is somewhat surprising. Both structural barriers and lack of training contribute to the relative paucity of compelling digital projects that focus on military history. To address these barriers and provide hands-on training in digital methods of particular interest to the military history community, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University requests funding for Digital Methods for Military History, an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities.

Frameworks for linking and analyzing documents dealing with slave conspiracies (defined as planned or actual insurrections against slave owners) to help resolve questions and uncertainties in historical accounts.

We are a multidisciplinary research project dedicated to preserving, digitizing, transcribing, translating, publishing, and analyzing manuscripts from three Louisiana slave conspiracies. We are presenting these manuscripts, with original transcription and translation, alongside interactive, data-driven maps in an effort to address essential but still unresolved questions about the organization of social relations and the circulation of ideas in these conspiracies.

The recovery and revitalization of a unique and important database, supported by NEH and other funders in the 1970s, containing information on theater and popular culture in London in the long eighteenth century (1660-1800).

Obsolescence is a serious issue facing the digital humanities today. Projects can take years to complete, by which time the data and software are out of step with current platforms and file formats. We propose to recover an NEH-funded humanities computing project completed in the 1970s: the London Stage Information Bank. In addition to revitalizing and making available a database of great interest to scholars of eighteenth-century British culture, this project will address three broader goals: (1) model best practices for recovering obsolete digital projects; (2) make visible the Information Bank’s underlying assumptions about the nature of the data itself, fostering awareness of the theoretical underpinnings of humanities databases used today that were begun in the early decades of humanities computing; and (3) create a platform that can interface with other digitization and data collection projects now underway, enabling the future growth of a network of related databases and tools.

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.