Funded Projects Query Form
193 matches

The creation of a resource to transcribe early polyphonic music into standard notation and develop a corpus to allow scholars and students to search, compare, and analyze early music.

During the grant period we would: 1. create a free, open-access website on which to store what will eventually be approximately 110 organa, 460 clausulae, and 680 motets along with their rhythmic and melodic variants; 2. transcribe approximately a quarter of this music into modern notation (25 organa, 100 clausulae, 150 motets) presenting multiple plausible transcriptions of each work each of which will then be entered into the website as .xml files and then analyzed using MEI; 3. create an interface using Edirom and GET requests which will allow users to compare as many versions of a given work as desired, and allow them to create and print a hybrid edition which could combine several of the versions together according to the user''s specifications.

Further work on a platform that enables users to transcribe, archive, and study non-Western music.

This proposal is to support the continued development of an “interactive digital transcription platform” (IDTP). The IDTP is a web-based application that allows for the digital transcription, archiving, sharing, and analysis of audio recordings of oral melodic and improvisational traditions, with a first focus on Hindustani music.

Expansion, development, and outreach of the World Historical Gazetteer, a comprehensive digital resource linking significant global place names over time used for researching and teaching world history.

This proposal is to develop infrastructure, content and sustainable governance for Version 3 of World Historical Gazetteer (WHG), a platform for linking knowledge about the past via place. WHG is a powerful tool for scholarly collaboration and crucial backend architecture for named entity recognition, digital mapping and library search. This grant will allow WHG to more than double in size and expand its multivalent and multilingual records; to perform enhancements to support teaching and dataset submission; to foster communities of board members, scholars, learners and developers; and to become financially sustainable. We aim to ensure widespread use, institute scholarly peer review and promote open-source development. WHG is the only digital humanities project developing tools, platforms, content, and community for the history of place at the global scale. It enhances and integrates other spatial history projects and fosters a humanistic approach to place beyond historical GIS.

The development of a virtual reality model of a Viking Age longship with a team of undergraduate researchers. The project team will document the workflow and learning outcomes to share with other undergraduate institutions.

This project explores and tests strategies for integrating undergraduate student learning and labor in the development of long-term Digital Humanities (DH) research projects. Combining the strengths of two leading liberal arts colleges with the multidisciplinary affordances of virtual reality (VR) technologies, the project aims to create an immersive VR experience for visualizing the social and cultural roles of a Viking Age longship by forming a DH community of inquiry and practice that cultivates deep competencies in spatial computing within the context of a liberal arts education. Student co-authored outcomes will include: (1) an open-source minimum viable product (MVP) VR experience made in consultation with museum partners in the US and Europe; (2) experience design document outlining future development; (3) presentations on our findings at major DH and History conferences; and (4) open-access article detailing the project's strategies and recommended best practices.

The planning and development of a digital archive of oral histories of community members, built by faculty and students at the University of the Virgin Islands.

This project will engage University of the Virgin Islands students in Service Learning by training them in best practices of oral history research, collection, preservation, public engagement and linguistic practices, awareness, and recording. Oral history collection develops students’ critical communication capacities and analytical skills, while also helping to preserve the rich history, languages, and cultures of the Virgin Islands community. This funding will enable a team of UVI faculty members to continue to train and engage a young generation to contribute meaningfully to humanities projects on St. Croix, St. John, St. Thomas, and Water Island. This grant will allow students to further contribute to the preservation of these stories by transcribing and editing the videos to be uploaded into an online public access website, so that other researchers around the world gain appreciation for the history and cultures of the US Virgin Islands.

The continued development of the Digital Humanities Resource Infrastructure for Teaching Technology (DHRIFT) platform to provide technical training in digital humanities methodologies with a particular focus on faculty and staff for historically under-resourced institutions. 

Access to technical training in the digital humanities is inequitably distributed, especially among historically underserved institutions. Since 2018, and with funding provided by two NEH-funded IATDH grants, the Graduate Center, CUNY has supported development of over 30 local DH institutes and intensives by training 48 DH practitioners as part of the Digital Humanities Research Institute (DHRI). Building on the demonstrated success of these approaches, GCDI proposes a social and infrastructural intervention, Digital Humanities Resource Infrastructure for Teaching Technology (DHRIFT), to provide pedagogical support to a wider DH community. DHRIFT is conceived around flexible infrastructure for deployable sites—DHRIFT Core—that can be readily set up at local institutions and which provide ready-to-teach OERs and additional functionality to support DH pedagogy. By building community, curriculum, and infrastructure, DHRIFT aims to facilitate the more equitable development of DH skills.

A series of virtual planning meetings for the development of a prototype platform for builders of digital lexical resources and dictionaries for under resourced languages.

The project supports the creation and dissemination of digital dictionaries for low-resource languages. With many world languages at risk of extinction, online dictionaries & glossaries are increasingly crucial. Unfortunately, the languages most in need of such resources have the biggest challenges. The availability of digital infrastructure for a language is proportional to its representation - the more data that is available in digital format, the easier it becomes to automatically process it. Conversely, the less a language/culture is represented online, the higher the costs of retrieving and processing data about it. We propose to prototype a digital infrastructure that can help redress this inequality by drastically reducing the costs/technical expertise required to create, publish and maintain online dictionaries. A series of iterative development cycles will bring together user-testers, identify their needs, and prepare an alpha-prototype application to address these needs.

The further development of user interfaces for collective translation of the collections in the Digital Archive for American Indian Languages Preservation and Perseverance (DAILP), a digital archive of Cherokee-language manuscripts and lexical resources.

Cherokee language documents are a ready source of valuable insight into the cultural, linguistic, and historical legacy of the Cherokee people. With an online environment to facilitate translation, Cherokee language experts and scholars could translate these documents collectively with Cherokee language learners of all ages who are found in online classes, immersion schools, university classrooms, and communities. And their translation work could be supported with ready access to the lexical datasets found in dictionaries, wordlists, and grammars. The Digital Archive for American Indian Languages Preservation and Perseverance (DAILP) seeks to address these needs by creating a digital archive of Cherokee-language manuscripts and lexical resources to support the collective translation of American Indian language manuscripts, and to advance indigenous language learning, translation, and documentation.

Developing a workshop and building a network for supporting and disseminating methods in digital humanities pedagogy for secondary and post-secondary institutions in the St. Louis, Missouri region.

“Expanding Access to the Digital Humanities in St. Louis” will build a digital humanities network for the greater St. Louis metropolitan area, linking faculty, students, and community members across the region’s educational and cultural institutions in a community of pedagogy and practice. This network will bridge the K-12-college divide and emphasize active advancement of digital humanities pedagogy and access for underserved populations. Rather than focusing on faculty research, this network will center student learning, particularly at the often neglected secondary and undergraduate levels. At a workshop held in September 2022, network members will establish processes that will allow secondary and post-secondary students throughout the region to participate remotely in digital humanities projects headquartered at participating institutions. They will also identify other collaborative goals for the network to pursue toward improving digital humanities pedagogy in St. Louis.

The development of web-based tools and documentation to allow both novice and expert users to interact with data from the HathiTrust Digital Library.

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) seeks $325,000 in funding for a period of 2 years, through the Digital Humanities Advancement Grants program, Level III, for the development of next-generation web-based, interactive visualization and analytical tool dashboard that consume existing data from our one-of-a-kind, fully open Extracted Features dataset, along with a well-documented API to allow our user community to develop its own tools for interacting with data from the 17.5-million-volume HathiTrust Digital Library. We will develop and promote these tools and API through a robust community outreach program that includes a public event and hack-a-thon focused on tool building.

A survey of scholarly presses and the preparation of a report on revenue models for open access publishing.

The project seeks to understand empirically whether the availability of Open Access (OA) editions of scholarly books has a quantifiable effect on the sales performance of print editions. University presses publish an estimated 4000 monographs annually. While many university presses have pursued experiments with OA publishing, sustainable financing of all publishing operations is a significant concern. This study will gather sales data on a significant number of both OA and traditionally published titles across multiple disciplines from a wide array of non-profit scholarly publishers in order to answer one of the biggest questions in humanities book publishing: does an OA option decrease sales, increase sales via greater discovery, or have no discernible effect? The research will be essential to inform future OA book programs and models, pointing the way to expanding sustainable open publishing operations.

Convening of a series of participatory design workshops to enhance discovery and use of the Mitten Collection of moss for humanities research.  

This submission to the NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant requests support for a Level I project titled Inverting the Wunderkammer: Rethinking the Digital Humanities through Botanic Histories and Archives, to be hosted by New York University (NYU) in partnership with the New York Botanical Gardens (NYBG). Building and expanding on histories of botany and responding to the ongoing violences of colonial collecting, preservation, and display at work in western cultural institutions, our project tackles the digital representation of a perhaps surprising plant that travels the globe in unusual ways at multiple scales: moss. Moss, in all of its miniscule, microscopic mundanity, might initially seem an odd choice of subject for a humanities-based project, especially after an arduous year of existential, ecological, and political challenges.

Convening a group of religious studies scholars and technologists to research best practices and evaluate the appropriateness of recording and interpreting religious rituals in extended reality (XR) for teaching religion.

This project seeks to convene a meeting of religious studies scholars and experts in XR modalities to explore the creation of immersive videos analyzing and explaining religious rituals. The proposed two-day advisory meeting will evaluate the best practices for creating stereoscopic (360 degrees) videos combined with documentary style analysis and discussion into resources aimed at teaching about religion. The meeting will consist of presentations by scholars of various religious traditions and experts in educational immersive technologies, paired with brainstorming sessions considering appropriate representations of diverse religious traditions, suitable methods regarding the filming and dissemination of such videos, and concerns around maintaining connections between practices and the living communities that hold them sacred. Information generated by our collaboration will be made publicly available and serve as the backbone for a blueprint towards the creation phase of the project.

Prototype development of a new digital tool that will allow users to identify and study objects and landscapes appearing in moving image scenes.

We seek Level I funding for planning and early prototype development of the Latent Archive tool, conceived as an immersive media platform for studying moving image archives. The project has been developed in collaboration with MIT Transmedia Storytelling Initiative (TSI) and MIT Virtual Experience Design Lab (VxD).

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.

The development of additional features and extensions for the Scalar multimedia platform to better allow scholars and publishers to produce works by and about indigenous cultural and linguistic content.

This grant will fund enhancements to Scalar, an open-source publishing platform, that will improve accessibility of content and enable core features and functions to better serve the needs of future authors and audiences. We will test the enhancements with content from our Critical Edition of Franz Boas and George Hunt’s groundbreaking 1897 ethnography, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, currently under development with RavenSpace, an application of Scalar for digital publishing of cultural heritage in accordance with mainstream academic and Indigenous frameworks. In particular, the grant will support collaborative research, testing, and assessment of extensions to Scalar features (navigation templates, advanced search functionality, expanded alt text and AV captioning capacity, and customized Traditional Knowledge Labels) that will increase access to Indigenous cultural and linguistic content, and be extensible throughout the digital humanities.

The enhancement of the digital editing platform that undergirds the Tasso in Music Project by incorporating additional accessibility features and analytical tools.

The Tasso in Music Project (www.tassomusic.org) is the first complete digital edition of the early modern settings of the poetry of Torquato Tasso, the most prominent literary figure of late 16th-century Italy. With funding from NEH Scholarly Editions ($260,000, 2016-19), the project has made available a repertoire of over 750 settings, most of which were previously unavailable in modern edition, addressing an interdisciplinary audience of scholars and performers. We now seek to enhance the digital framework to make the project accessible to an even broader audience and to encourage analytical studies. Specifically, we will expand the range of the editions’ formats, providing among others an option for Braille notation, creating one of the largest musical repositories accessible to the visually impaired. Additionally, given the analytical potential of the repertoire, with settings of the same poetry by multiple composers, we will build computational tools to analyze the interaction between musical and poetic prosody/syntax.

The development of a new research and learning platform that brings together spatial and linguistic data extracted from historical records and oral histories to support and teach spatial studies of the Holocaust.

We propose to build a prototype, multi-part, interactive website that will generate new insights into the role of places in genocide and survival while providing a platform for teaching and spatial thinking about the Holocaust. The website will share 14 years of data developed during the team’s research on the geographies of the Holocaust. The site’s unprecedentedly rich content will include detailed data on 1,111 SS-administered concentration and labor camps and 1,142 Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Eastern Europe, with camps and ghettos dynamically linked to sites of experience described in 4,000 transcripts of survivor interviews. This project will demonstrate a new model for humanistic mapping that combines GIS with computational linguistics. The website will provide user-tested teaching materials, sample maps, and full documentation to support use in high school and college classes, as well as carefully checked data and a digital Holocaust gazetteer for scholarly research.

The continued development of computational methods to analyze and process handwritten scripts from 17th century documents.

We seek NEH funding to complete the development of a software that will enable twenty-first century scholars to expeditiously read and analyze seventeenth-century Spanish American notary records and efficiently find relevant content in these documentary collections. Using recent advances in deep learning and knowledge management, we will develop a tool to manage and analyze about 220,000 pages of digital images of seventeenth-century manuscripts available at the Archivo General de la República Argentina located in Buenos Aires. This collection combines a large variety of handwritten scripts. Based on this distinctive collection, our proposed tool will enable processing manuscripts available at other archival sites and create research and collaboration opportunities elsewhere in Latin America.

The development of 3D virtual reality methods to help elicit memory recall from current and former residents of a community in Florida to study how this technique can aid in collecting and documenting oral histories.

The MemoryScan: Humanizing Digital Twin Environments project (MemoryScan) seeks to develop a prototype community-scale Digital Twin platform to elicit memory recall from current and former citizens and visitors of a particular community. MemoryScan will examine the potential advantages of using Digital Twins (a complete virtual representation of a building(s)) as a tool to assist the capturing of participant reflections and supporting documentation. As an interactive 3D virtual environment, it is designed to be applied to large areas, which can enable users to move between structures without interrupting the experience evoking their reflections. This Digital Twin will permit, through a shared interview/exploration the collection of personal images and documents. Our research seeks to gather personal reflections and contextualize them with a broad spectrum of information related to a community.

The further development of an immersive VR experience that allows users to explore and study an illuminated manuscript from the 15th century.

This embodied, interactive experience enables global audiences to explore and learn to handle an ancient, fragile Renaissance book while being immersed in the aural and spatial environment in which the manuscript was originally used. A key innovation is the true interactivity and material physics technology that enable people to actually turn and “feel” like they are turning parchment pages. This supports enhanced awareness of the risk of use-damage for ancient artifacts of cultural and historical interest. The virtual reality experience promotes engagement without damaging the originals and facilitates education, public programming, and humanities research and teaching in libraries, archives, museums, and colleges. This virtual reality project is a means both to preserve and promote access to and reading of a 15th-century illuminated, parchment Book of Hours that was owned by a woman associated with a community of lay women, and is now at the University of Southern California.

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 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.