Category: Digital Humanities

Interview Podcasts from the Coalition for Networked Information's Fall 2008 Task Force Meeting

Gerry Bayne has made available podcast interviews with selected participants at the Coalition for Networked Information's Fall 2008 Task Force Meeting.

Here are three of podcasts of special interest:

Winnemore Digital Humanities Dissertation Fellowships Available

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities has announced the availability of 2009 Winnemore Digital Humanities Dissertation Fellowships. The fellowship is:

Intended for students whose dissertations engage the intersections between new media and the traditional concerns of the Arts and Humanities, the Winnemore Fellowship will provide a stipend of $9,570, plus full benefits and tuition remission up to five credits.

Presentations from eResearch Australasia 2008

Presentations from the eResearch Australasia 2008 conference are available.

Here's a brief selection:

Scholarly Communication Institute 6: Humanities Research Centers, University of Virginia, July 13-15, 2008

The Scholarly Communication Institute has released Scholarly Communication Institute 6: Humanities Research Centers, University of Virginia, July 13-15, 2008.

Here's an excerpt:

In SCI 6, participants undertook an exploration of humanities research centers and their potential to advance technology-enabled scholarship. . . .

SCI 6 was designed to determine what collaborative actions a group of humanities centers might undertake that would promote technology-enabled scholarly communication. Though we are particularly interested in how new technologies can advance scholarship, the goal of this meeting was to engage centers organized in a variety of models and with differing orientations towards technology. . . .

A wide spectrum of research centers were represented at this institute: local, campus-based centers that serve all humanities and social science faculty; discipline-specific centers; a national center of excellence that formed around a rich collection of rare primary-source materials; a digital humanities center housed within an academic department; a digital humanities center that constitutes an academic department; a campus-based center that supports experimental work in digital humanities; and an international institute that relies on digital technologies to share multilingual resources and maintain an international network of collaborators. Also represented were several centers still in the development phase with explicit plans to focus on new technologies.

History 2.0: The History Engine Relaunches

Noted digital historian Edward L. Ayers, whose The Valley of the Shadow project has been very influential, became the President of the University of Richmond last July, and now the innovative History Engine project has moved with him from the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia to Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab.

Here's an excerpt from the "What is the History Engine?" page:

The History Engine project aims to enhance historical education and research for teachers, students, and scholars alike. The Engine allows undergraduate professors to introduce a more collaborative and creative approach to history into their classrooms, while maintaining rigorous academic standards. The core of the HE project is student-written episodes—individual snippets of daily life throughout American history from the broadest national event to the simplest local occurrence. Students construct these episodes from one or more primary sources found in university and local archives, using historical context gleaned from secondary sources to round out their analysis. Students then post their entries in our cumulative database, giving their classmates and fellow participants around the country the opportunity to read and engage with their work.

Read more about it at "The Little Engine That Can."

Dartmouth Appoints Its First Digital Humanities Chair

Dartmouth University has appointed Mary Flanagan as the first endowed chair holder of the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professorship in Digital Humanities.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Before joining Dartmouth's faculty, Flanagan was a professor of contemporary digital arts, culture and technology at Hunter College in New York City. . . .

Flanagan has published two co-edited books with MIT Press, Reload: rethinking women + cyberculture (2002) and Re:skin (2007) and is the author of the forthcoming book Critical Play. She is also the founder and director of the Tiltfactor Laboratory, which researches and develops computer games and software systems focused on science, math, applied computer programming, literacy and social values.

Flanagan received an MFA in Film and Video Production from the University of Iowa in 1994 and a PhD in Computational Media and Game Design from the University of the Arts, London in 2006. She was named a MacDowell Colony Fellow in 2007, a Fulbright Scholar in 2000 and twice received the City University of New York's Outstanding Scholar award in 2004 and 2007.

NEH Office of Digital Humanities Announces Grant Awards and New Grant Opportunities

The National Endowment for the Humanities' Office of Digital Humanities has announced 22 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants awards and 3 Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities awards.

Applications are being accepted for a new round of Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants with a 10/8/08 deadline.

Presentations/Reports from the JISC/CNI Meeting on Transforming the User Experience

Presentations are available from the JISC/CNI meeting on Transforming the User Experience.

Here's a selection:

Helen Aguera, Senior Program Officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities, has also reported on the conference in a series of Weblog postings:

The Impact of Digitizing Special Collections on Teaching and Scholarship: Reflections on a Symposium about Digitization and the Humanities

OCLC Programs & Research has released The Impact of Digitizing Special Collections on Teaching and Scholarship: Reflections on a Symposium about Digitization and the Humanities.

Here's an excerpt:

University faculty and scholars demonstrated their uses of rare books and archives—in both digital and physical forms—to an audience of RLG Programs partners at a symposium in Philadelphia on June 4, 2008. Tony Grafton's recent article in The New Yorker provoked the theme of the symposium: we'll be travelling both the wide smooth road through the screen and the narrow difficult road of books and archives for a long time to come.

The audience of librarians, archivists, museum professionals and senior managers discussed administrative issues and opportunities for the use of digitized special collections. The academic speakers, however, spoke to us directly about their expectations of special collections and proposals for collaboration with scholars. These scholars emphasized the critical roles rare books, archives and other materials play in both teaching and research, and called for specific directions for libraries and archives to take in the near future. The primary users of primary resources presented clear imperatives for collections and custodians: work with faculty to understand current research methods and materials; go outside the library or archive to build collections and work with faculty; and continue to build digital and material collections for both teaching and research.

Text Analysis: TAPoR Version 1.1 Released

The TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) text analysis tool has been upgraded to version 1.1.

Here's a description of TAPoR from the project's home page:

TAPoR will build a unique human and computing infrastructure for text analysis across the country by establishing six regional centers to form one national text analysis research portal. This portal will be a gateway to tools for sophisticated analysis and retrieval, along with representative texts for experimentation. The local centers will include text research laboratories with best-of-breed software and full-text servers that are coordinated into a vertical portal for the study of electronic texts. Each center will be integrated into its local research culture and, thus, some variation will exist from center to center.

NEH/DFG Bilateral US/German Humanities Digitization Grants

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) have issued a call for bilateral US/German humanities digitization grant proposals.

Here's an excerpt from the call:

These grants provide funding for up to three years of development in any of the following areas:

  • new digitization projects and pilot projects;
  • the addition of important materials to existing digitization projects; and
  • the development of related infrastructure to support international digitization work and the use of those digitized resources.

Collaboration between U.S. and German partners is a key requirement for this grant category.

A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States Released

A report prepared for the Council on Library and Information Resources titled A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States has been released.

Here's an excerpt from the "Executive Summary":

The immediate goals of the survey were to identify the extent of these [digital humanities] centers, and explore their financing, organizational structure, products, services and sustainability. The longer-term goal is to provide participants of SCI 6 [Scholarly Communication Institute 6] with a greater understanding of existing centers to inform their discussions about regional and national centers. The year-long study took place in two phases: an initial planning phase to develop selection criteria, identify candidates, and plan methodology, and an implementation phase to conduct the survey and analysis of the centers. . . .

The findings of this survey suggest that new models are needed for large-scale cyberinfrastructure projects, for cross-disciplinary research that cuts a wide swathe across the humanities, and for integrating the huge amounts of digital production already available. Current DHCs will continue to have an important role to play, but that role needs to be clarified in the context of the broader models that emerge.

Digital Research Tools (DiRT) Wiki Established

A team of librarians has established the Digital Research Tools (DiRT) Wiki.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

DiRT lists dozens of useful tools for discovering, organizing, analyzing, visualizing, sharing and disseminating information, such as tools for compiling bibliographies, taking notes, analyzing texts, and visualizing data. We also offer software reviews that not only describe the tool’s features, strengths, and weaknesses, but also provide usage tips, links to training resources, and suggestions for how it might be implemented by researchers. So that DiRT is accessible to non-techies and techies alike, we try to avoid jargon and categorize tools by their functions. Although the acronym DiRT might suggest that it’s a gossip site for academic software, dishing on bugs and dirty secrets about the software development process, we prefer a gardening metaphor, as we hope to help cultivate research projects by providing clear, concise information about tools that can help researchers do their more work more effectively or creatively.

DiRT is brand new, so we’re still in the process of creating content and figuring how best to present it; consider it to be in alpha release and expect to see it evolve. (We plan to announce DiRT more broadly in a few months, but we’re giving sneak previews right now in the hope that comments from members of the digital humanities community can help us to improve it.) Currently the DiRT editorial team includes me, my ever-innovative and enthusiastic colleague Debra Kolah, and three whip-smart librarians from Sam Houston State University with expertise in Web 2.0 technologies (as well as English, history, business, and ranching!): Tyler Manolovitz, Erin Dorris Cassidy, and Abe Korah. We’ve committed to provide at least 5 new tool reviews per month, but we can do even more if more people join us (hint, hint). We invite folks to recommend research tools or software categories, write reviews, sign on to be co-editors, and/or offer feedback on the wiki.

National Endowment for the Humanities High Performance Computing Initiative Launched

The National Endowment for the Humanities' Office of Digital Humanities has announced the Humanities High Performance Computing Initiative.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

As you may have seen in today's Chronicle of Higher Education, the NEH has just announced our new Humanities High Performance Computing initiative—HHPC for short. Our goal is to start a conversation about how high performance computers—supercomputers—can be used for humanities research. We are working with colleagues at the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to provide you with information on how high performance/grid computing and data storage might be used for work in the humanities. We are also announcing a new grant competition with DOE to award time and training on their machines. I urge you to check out our HHPC Resources page for more information.

Here's an excerpt from the Humanities High Performance Computing Resource page:

So what do we mean by "HHPC?" Humanities High-Performance Computing (HHPC) refers to the use of high-performance machines for humanities and social science projects. Currently, only a small number of humanities scholars are taking advantage of high-performance computing. But just as the sciences have, over time, begun to tap the enormous potential of HPC, the humanities are beginning to as well. Humanities scholars often deal with large sets of unstructured data. This might take the form of historical newspapers, books, election data, archaeological fragments, audio or video contents, or a host of others. HHPC offers the humanist opportunities to sort through, mine, and better understand and visualize this data.

Recipients of the JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants Announced

The new Office of Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities announced the first five recipients of the of the JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants yesterday.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The announcement was made by NEH Chairman Bruce Cole during an event at the Folger Shakespeare Library. . . . A total of five projects received over $600,000 in funding. . . .

Inaugurated last year as part of the Endowment’s Digital Humanities Initiative, the JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grant program is supported by both the NEH and the Higher Education Funding Council for England acting through the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). These grants provide combined funding of up to $240,000 for one year of development in the following areas: new digitization projects and pilot projects, the addition of important materials to existing digitization projects, or the development of infrastructure (either technical "middleware," tools, or knowledge-sharing) to support U.S.-England digitization work. Each project is sponsored by both an American and an English institution, whose activities will be funded by NEH and JISC respectively.

The formation of the Endowment’s Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) also was announced during the event. In 2006, the NEH launched the Digital Humanities Initiative, a program encouraging and supporting projects that utilize or study the impact of digital technology on research, education, preservation, and public programming in the humanities. With the creation of ODH, the initiative is being made permanent as an office within the NEH. ODH will continue the work of the initiative and will help to coordinate the Endowment’s efforts in the area of digital scholarship.

A complete list of the projects announced can be found below:

The Folger Shakespeare Library and the University of Oxford, with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland and the Shakespeare Institute at the University of Birmingham, plan to create the Shakespeare Quartos Archive, a freely-accessible, high-resolution digital collection of the seventy-five quarto editions of William Shakespeare's plays. The project will also develop an interactive interface and toolset for the detailed study of the quartos, with full-functionality applied to all thirty-two copies of one play, Hamlet, held at participating institutions, including the British Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, the Huntington Library, and the National Library of Scotland. ($119,598)

The Internet Archive in the United States and the Oxford Internet Institute and Hanzo in the United Kingdom plan to develop procedures and tools to improve the effectiveness of humanities research on the Web. This research and development effort promises to yield superior methods for indexing and analyzing the textual parts of larger digital collections, more focused browsing ("crawling") of the Web, and unified access to data resources, i.e., the ability to search for information across multiple digital databases. ($106,395)

The Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College, London, plan to launch Concordia, a set of tools and procedures to enable seamless textual searches and the dynamic mapping of a variety of humanities collections. The pilot project would concentrate on large holdings of papyrological and epigraphic texts from North Africa during the Greek and Roman periods. ($129,828)

A team of scholars from the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in Virginia, the University of Southampton's Nevis Heritage Project, and the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool is working together on the St. Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative. Together, they plan to develop an integrated digital archive of diverse archaeological and historical data related to the experiences of slaves on sugar plantations in the Caribbean by digitizing and delivering on the Web information from two 18th-century plantations. ($132,832)

The Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University and the Internet Centre at Imperial College London plan to develop Philogrid, a Web resource for scholars of Classical Antiquity. The project will generate a digital collection of fragmentary writings of Greek historians that is designed to interact with multiple source editions; a repository of philological data about the Greco-Roman world; and set of procedures that draws on the recipient’s experience in processing textual materials from Perseus but that can also be extended to other digital collections. ($119,992)

Supporting Digital Scholarly Editions: A Report on the Conference of January 14, 2008

The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities have published Supporting Digital Scholarly Editions: A Report on the Conference of January 14, 2008, which was written by Ithaka staff.

Here'a an excerpt from the "Introduction":

On January 14, 2008, a group of editors, representatives from university presses, and other stakeholders met to discuss the future of scholarly editions and how they might best be supported in the digital age. . . . .

The objectives of the meeting were:

  • To identify services and tools that are critical for supporting digital documentary editions;
  • To assess the need for a service provider to facilitate the production of these editions; and
  • To articulate the key uncertainties involved in creating such a service provider, so that those can be further investigated.

This report documents the workshop, with the goal of providing a reference not only for participants, but also for others in the community who are concerned with the future of scholarly editions. It is divided into three sections that follow the course of the day itself:

  1. Developing a vision for the next generation scholarly edition
  2. How do we get there? Identifying needs and gaps
  3. Creating a service provider for scholarly editions

Digital Humanities Grant: Mellon Foundation Funds Bamboo Planning Project

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has funded the Bamboo Planning Project, a digital humanities project which is headed by Janet Broughton, Dean of Arts and Humanities, University of California, Berkeley and Gregory A. Jackson, Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer, University of Chicago.

Here's an excerpt from the project home page:

Bamboo is a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, and inter-organizational effort that brings together researchers in arts and humanities, computer scientists, information scientists, librarians, and campus information technologists to tackle the question:

How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services? . . . .

Bamboo is meant to include liberal arts colleges, community colleges, research universities, national consortia, disciplinary societies, and other organizations internationally who are concerned with advancing the humanities through the development of shared digital technologies. If we move toward a shared services model, any faculty member, scholar, or researcher can use and reuse content, resources, and applications no matter where they reside, what their particular field of interest is, or what support may be available to them. Our goal is to better enable and foster academic innovation through sharing and collaboration.

Read more about it at "Project Bamboo Launches" and the project proposal.

Vertov Plug-in Brings Digital Audio/Video Annotation to Zotero

Concordia University’s Digital History Lab has released Vertov, an open-source Zotero plug-in that allows users to create clips from digital audio or video files, annotate them, and include the annotations in Zotero.

Read more about it at "Vertov: A Media Annotating Plugin for Zotero" and "Vertov Brings Video Annotation to Zotero."

NEH Awards $474,474 in Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded $474,474 to Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants recipients.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Note: The We the People program encourages and strengthens the teaching, study, and understanding of American history and culture. Grants bearing this designation have been recognized for advancing the goals of this program.

ALASKA

Fairbanks

University of Alaska, Fairbanks $50,000
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Siri Tuttle
We the People Project Title: Minto Songs Project Description: The collection, digitization, organization, and archival storage, as well as dissemination among the Minto Athabascan community, of recorded performances of Alaskan Athabascan songs.

ARIZONA

Tucson

University of Arizona $25,000
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Douglas Gann
Project Title: Virtual Vault
Project Description: Electronic access to the world's largest collection of whole pottery vessels from the American Southwest through digital renderings of Arizona State University's Pottery Vault and relevant prehistoric archaeological sites as well as interviews with anthropologists, conservators, and Native American potters.

ILLINOIS

Lake Forest

Lake Forest College $25,000
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Davis Schneiderman
We the People Project Title: Virtual Burnham Initiative
Project Description: The development of the Virtual Burnham Initiative (VBI), a multimedia project that would examine the history and legacy of Daniel H. Burnham's and Edward H. Bennett's Plan of Chicago (1909).

MARYLAND

College Park

University of Maryland, College Park $11,708
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Matthew Kirschenbaum
Project Title: Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use
Project Description: A series of planning meetings and site visits aimed at developing archival tools and best practices for preserving born-digital documents produced by contemporary authors.

MASSACHUSETTS

Boston

University of Massachusetts, Boston $24,748
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Joanne Riley
We the People Project Title: Online Social Networking for the Humanities: the Massachusetts Studies Network Prototype
Project Description: The development and evaluation of a social networking platform for the members of the statewide Massachusetts Studies Project.

Norton

Wheaton College $41,950
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Mark LeBlanc
Project Title: Pattern Recognition through Computational Stylistics: Old English and Beyond
Project Description: Development of a prototypical suite of computational tools and statistical analyses to explore the corpus of Old English literature using the genomic approach of tracing information-rich patterns of letters as well as that of literary analysis and interpretation.

MISSISSIPPI

Mississippi State

Mississippi State University $50,000
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Paul Jacobs
Project Title: Distributed Archives Transaction System
Project Description: Development of open source web tools for accessing online digitized collections in the humanities via a system that communicates with multiple database types while protecting the integrity of the original data sets.

NEW YORK

Brooklyn

Unaffiliated Independent Scholar $23,750
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Daniel Visel
Project Title: Sophie Search Gateway
Project Description: The development of an interoperable portal within the Web authoring program, "Sophie," for locating and incorporating multi-media sources from the Internet Archive.

Hempstead

Hofstra University $23,591
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: John Bryant
We the People Project Title: Melville, Revision, and Collaborative Editing: Toward a Critical Archive
Project Description: The development of the TextLab scholarly editing tool to allow for analysis of texts that exist in multiple versions or editions, beginning with the Melville Electronic Library.

New York City

New York University $49,657
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Brian Hoffman
Project Title: MediaCommons: Social Networking Tools for Digital Scholarly Communication
Project Description: Development of a set of networking software tools to support a "peer-to-peer" review structure for MediaCommons, a scholarly publishing network in the digital humanities.

RHODE ISLAND

Providence

Brown University $49,992
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Julia Flanders
Project Title: Encoding Names for Contextual Exploration in Digital Thematic Research Collections
Project Description: The advancement of humanities text encoding and research by refining and expanding the automated representation of personal names and their contexts.

TEXAS

Austin

University of Texas, Austin $49,251
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Samuel Baker
Project Title: The eCommentary Machine Project
Project Description: Development of a web-based collaborative commentary and annotation tool.

VIRGINIA

Charlottesville

University of Virginia $49,827
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
Project Director: Scot French
We the People Project Title: Jefferson's Travels: A Digital Journey Using the HistoryBrowser
Project Description: Development of an interactive web-based tool to integrate primary documents, dynamic maps, and related information in the study of history, with the prototype to be focused on Thomas Jefferson's trip to England in 1786.

Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use Grant Awarded

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, the Emory University Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, and the Harry Ransom Center have been awarded a NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant for studying "Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The project, directed by Matthew Kirschenbaum, Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, will involve a series of site visits and planning meetings among personnel working with the born-digital components of three significant collections of literary material: the Salman Rushdie Papers at Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (which includes Rushdie’s laptops), the Michael Joyce Papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Deena Larsen Collection at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. The meetings and site visits will facilitate the preparation of a larger collaborative grant proposal among the three institutions aimed at developing archival tools and best practices for preserving and curating the born-digital documents and records of contemporary literary authorship.

According to Kirschenbaum, "Today nearly all literature is born-digital in the sense that before it is ever printed as a book the text is composed with a word processor, saved on a hard drive or other electronic storage media, and accessed as part of a computer operating system. This new technological fact about writing means that an author working today will not and cannot be studied in the future in the same way as writers of the past, since the basic material evidence of their creative activity—manuscripts and drafts, working notes, correspondence, journals—is, like all textual production, increasingly migrating to the electronic realm. We look forward to the process of examining how to best meet these challenges, balancing the needs of both scholarship and archives in the new textual environment."

Stephen Enniss, Director of the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory, notes "The born-digital archive not only contains enormous data, it also contains enormous potential for literary scholars to pose new questions of the archive not even contemplated in the past." Thomas F. Staley, Director of the Ransom Center, comments "The Ransom Center is very pleased to be part of this vitally important project to explore how we can best preserve and make accessible the map of an author’s creative process in the digital age. This collaborative effort between the Ransom Center, MITH, and Emory will help lead the way in the preservation of born-digital materials and ensure that these materials are available to students and scholars for generations to come." Neil Fraistat, Director of MITH, adds "This project will deepen MITH’s focus on the preservation and analysis of born digital literary artifacts, which is already well established in its work with the Electronic Literature Organization and on an NDIIPP funded project on the preservation of virtual worlds."