Category: Digital Humanities

Scholarship in the Age of Abundance: Enhancing Historical Research with Text-Mining and Analysis Tools Project

The Center for History and New Media's Scholarship in the Age of Abundance: Enhancing Historical Research with Text-Mining and Analysis Tools project has been awarded a two-year grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Here's an excerpt from "Enhancing Historical Research with Text-Mining and Analysis Tools":

We will first conduct a survey of historians to examine closely their use of digital resources and prospect for particularly helpful uses of digital technology. We will then explore three main areas where text mining might help in the research process: locating documents of interest in the sea of texts online; extracting and synthesizing information from these texts; and analyzing large-scale patterns across these texts. A focus group of historians will be used to assess the efficacy of different methods of text mining and analysis in real-world research situations in order to offer recommendations, and even some tools, for the most promising approaches.

Presentations from eResearch Australasia 2007

Presentations from eResearch Australasia 2007 are now available.

Here are selected presentations:

Humanities Cyberinfrastructure: The TextGrid Project

The Humanities-oriented TextGrid Project is part of the larger German D-Grid initiative.

Here's an excerpt from the About TextGrid page:

TextGrid aims to create a community grid for the collaborative editing, annotation, analysis and publication of specialist texts. It thus forms a cornerstone in the emerging e-Humanities. . . .

Despite modern information technology and a clear thrust towards collaboration, text scientists still mostly work in local systems and project-oriented applications. Current initiatives lack integration with already existing text corpora, and they remain unconnected to resources such as dictionaries, lexica, secondary literature and tools. . . .

Integrated tools that satisfy the specific requirements of text sciences could transform the way scholars process, analyse, annotate, edit and publish text data. Working towards this vision, TextGrid aims at building a virtual workbench based on e-Science methods.

The installation of a grid-enabled architecture is obvious for two reasons. On the one hand, past and current initiatives for digitising and accessioning texts already accrued a considerable data volume, which exceeds multiple terabytes. Grids are capable of handling these data volumes. Also the dispersal of the community as well as the scattering of resources and tools call for establishing a Community Grid. This establishes a platform for connecting the experts and integrating the initiatives worldwide. The TextGrid community is equipped with a set of powerful software tools based on existing solutions and embracing the grid paradigm.

Advancing Knowledge: The IMLS/NEH Digital Partnership Grant Applications Due in March

Applications for Advancing Knowledge: The IMLS/NEH Digital Partnership grant program are due on March 18, 2008.

Here's an excerpt from the guidelines:

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) invite proposals for innovative, collaborative humanities projects using the latest digital technologies for the benefit of the American public, humanities scholarship, and the nation's cultural institutions. These grants require substantive collaborations among libraries, museums, archives, universities, and other cultural organizations. Grants support projects that explore new ways to share, examine, and interpret humanities collections in a digital environment; that develop new uses and audiences for existing digital resources; or that result in extensible and transferable methodologies or tools.

Eligible projects might:

  • advance the role of cultural repositories in online teaching, learning, and research for public audiences, teachers, students, and scholars;
  • develop collaborative approaches involving the scholarly community and cultural repositories for the creation, preservation, use, and presentation of reusable digital collections and products;
  • use innovative approaches in digital technology to provide new perspectives on humanities resources or offer new interpretive contexts for scholars, students, and public audiences; or
  • examine and coordinate community-based approaches and standards for making resources available online and allowing them to be widely shared.

NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants Guidelines

The National Endowment for the Humanities has issued guidelines for its 2008 digital humanities start-up grants.

Here's an excerpt:

Two levels of awards will be made in this program. Level I awards are small grants designed to fund brainstorming sessions, workshops, early alpha-level prototypes, and initial planning. Level II awards are larger grants that can be used for more fully-formed projects that are ready to start the first stage of implementation or the creation of working prototypes. Applicants must state in their narrative which funding level they seek. The Endowment will be setting aside funds for each of the two levels and more awards will be made in the Level I category. Applicants should carefully choose the funding level appropriate to the needs of the proposed project. See the section on Awards for more details.

Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants support full-time or part-time activities for periods up to eighteen months. Support is available for various combinations of scholars, consultants, and research assistants; project-related travel; and technical support and services. Up to 20% of the total grant may also be used for the acquisition of computing hardware and software. All grantees are expected to communicate the results of their work to appropriate scholarly and public audiences. In order to facilitate dissemination and the maximum usage of the projects that are ultimately developed through the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants, applicants are strongly encouraged to base their projects on open source and fully accessible software.

Spiro Reviews Last Year's Key Digital Humanities Developments

In a series of three interesting posts, Lisa Spiro, Director of the Digital Media Center and the Educational Technology Research and Assessment Cooperative at Rice University's Fondren Library, has reviewed 2007's major digital humanities developments: "Digital Humanities in 2007 [Part 1 of 3]," "Digital Humanities in 2007 [Part 2 of 3]," and "Digital Humanities in 2007 [Part 3 of 3]."

New Digital Scholarship in the Humanities Weblog

Lisa Spiro, Director of the Digital Media Center and the Educational Technology Research and Assessment Cooperative at Rice University's Fondren Library, has established the Digital Scholarship in the Humanities weblog.

Here's a selection of recent posts:

Perseus Digital Library Code and Content Now Freely Available

The Perseus Digital Library Project has released both the source code for Perseus 4.0 and a significant amount of the project's digital content. The Perseus Java Hopper code is open source; the content is under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States license.

Here's a description of the Perseus Digital Library from the About page:

Since planning began in 1985, the Perseus Digital Library Project has explored what happens when libraries move online. . . .

Our flagship collection, under development since 1987, covers the history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman world. We are applying what we have learned from Classics to other subjects within the humanities and beyond. We have studied many problems over the past two decades, but our current research centers on personalization: organizing what you see to meet your needs.

We collect texts, images, datasets and other primary materials. We assemble and carefully structure encyclopedias, maps, grammars, dictionaries and other reference works. At present, 1.1 million manually created and 30 million automatically generated links connect the 100 million words and 75,000 images in the core Perseus collections. 850,000 reference articles provide background on 450,000 people, places, organizations, dictionary definitions, grammatical functions and other topics.

The Lowdown on the MITH/Rice University Our Americas Archive Project

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities has posted a description of its IMLS-funded Our Americas Archive Project.

Here's an excerpt:

Rice University, in partnership with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland has received a three-year National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) in the amount of $979,578 for the Our Americas Archive Project (OAAP), with an additional $980,613 provided in cost share by the institutions. The project will develop an innovative approach to helping users search, browse, analyze, and share content from distributed online collections. OAAP will incorporate recent Web 2.0 technologies to help users discover and use relevant source materials in languages other than English and will improve users’ ability to find relevant materials using domain-specific vocabulary searches. Two online collections of materials in English and Spanish, The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA), and a new digital archive of materials to be developed at Rice, will provide an initial corpus for testing the tools. Rice principle investigators, Geneva Henry (Executive Director, Digital Library Initiative) and Caroline Levander (HRC Director), along with MITH co-PI Neil Fraistat are undertaking this innovative digital humanities project with a view to supporting scholarly inquiry into the Americas from a hemispheric perspective. As Geneva Henry says, “our goal is to develop new ways of doing research as well as new objects of study—to create a new, interactive community of scholarly inquiry.”

Two significant online collections of materials in English and Spanish supporting the interdisciplinary field of hemispheric American Studies—Maryland’s Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) [http://www.mith2.umd.edu/eada/] and a new digital archive of multilingual materials being developed at Rice [http://rudr.rice.edu/handle/1911/9219]—provide an initial corpus for developing and testing these new digital tools. The two multilingual archives illustrate the complex politics and histories that characterize the American hemisphere, but they also provide unique opportunities to further digital research in the humanities. Geographic visualization as well as new social tagging and tag cloud cluster models are just some of the new interface techniques that the Our Americas Archive Partnership will develop with the goal of creating innovative research pathways. As Caroline Levander comments, “we see this as a first step in furthering scholarly dialogue and research across borders by making hemispheric material available open access worldwide. Our goal is to further develop innovative research tools that will help generate a collaborative, transnational research community.” Ralph Bauer, MITH Fellow, general editor of the Early Americas Digital Archive, and collaborator on the project adds, “the added digital materials and tools to navigate seamlessly through these two collections is enabling new forms of scholarship. Because the OAAP makes available materials that are dispersed in different geographic locations, it facilitates collaboration and intellectual exchange among an international audience. The digital medium offers rich opportunities for multicultural exchanges and is therefore uniquely suited for a hemispheric approach to history.”

Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive Repository Launched

The University College Dublin has launched the Irish Virtual Research Library and Archive Repository.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

VRLA is a digital archive containing a number of digitised collections from UCD’s holdings, of use and interest to Irish humanities researchers. The IVRLA has developed a sophisticated interface enabling users to browse, search, tag and cite digital objects and view or download them in a variety of file formats. This interface sits on top of an open source repository architecture that functions as the IVRLA’s base content store. An elaborate collection model has been developed ensuring all content is viewed within context and structure. This model is particularly suited for organic primary source collections and enables hierarchy and sub-division in how objects are arranged and held within collections.

Rome Reborn 1.0

A cross-institutional team has built a a simulation of Rome as it was in 320 A.D. called Rome Reborn 1.0.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

Rome’s Mayor Walter Veltroni will officiate at the first public viewing of "Rome Reborn 1.0," a 10-year project based at the University of Virginia and begun at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to use advanced technology to digitally rebuild ancient Rome. The event will take place at 2 p.m. in the Palazzo Senatorio on the Campidoglio. An international team of archaeologists, architects and computer specialists from Italy, the United States, Britain and Germany employed the same high-tech tools used for simulating contemporary cities such as laser scanners and virtual reality to build the biggest, most complete simulation of an historic city ever created. "Rome Reborn 1.0" shows almost the entire city within the 13-mile-long Aurelian Walls as it appeared in A.D. 320. At that time Rome was the multicultural capital of the western world and had reached the peak of its development with an estimated population of one million.

"Rome Reborn 1.0" is a true 3D model that runs in real time. Users can navigate through the model with complete freedom, moving up, down, left and right at will. They can enter important public buildings such as the Roman Senate House, the Colosseum, or the Temple of Venus and Rome, the ancient city’s largest place of worship.

As new discoveries are made, "Rome Reborn 1.0" can be easily updated to reflect the latest knowledge about the ancient city. In future releases, the "Rome Reborn" project will include other phases in the evolution of the city from the late Bronze Age in the 10th century B.C. to the Gothic Wars in the 6th century A.D. Video clips and still images of "Rome Reborn 1.0" can be viewed at www.romereborn.virginia.edu. . . .

The "Rome Reborn" project was begun at UCLA in 1996 by professors Favro and Frischer. They collaborated with UCLA students from classics, architecture and urban design who fashioned the digital models with continuous advice from expert archaeologists. As the project evolved, it became collaborative at an international scale. In 2004, the project moved its administrative home to the University of Virginia, while work in progress continued at UCLA. In the same year, a cooperative research agreement was signed with the Politecnico di Milano. . . .

Many individuals and institutions contributed to "Rome Reborn" including the Politecnico di Milano (http://www.polimi.it), UCLA (http://www.etc.ucla.edu/), and the University of Virginia (www.iath.virginia.edu). The advisors of the project included scholars from the Italian Ministry of Culture, the Museum of Roman Civilization (Rome), Bath University, Bryn Mawr College, the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, the German Archaeological Institute, Ohio University, UCLA, the University of Florence, the University of Lecce, the University of Rome ("La Sapienza"), the University of Virginia and the Vatican Museums.

Digital Humanities Centers Network Being Formed

Several individuals, including John Unsworth, have issued a call for the formation of a network of digital humanities centers.

Here’s an excerpt from the call:

If you represent something that you would consider a digital humanities center, anywhere in the world, we are interested in including you in a developing network of such centers. The purpose of this network is cooperative and collaborative action that will benefit digital humanities and allied fields in general, and centers as humanities cyberinfrastructure in particular. It comes out of a meeting hosted by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Maryland, College Park, April 12-13, 2007 in Washington, D.C., responding in part to the report of the American Council of Learned Societies report on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, published in 2006.

We leave the definition of "digital humanities" up to you, but we intend to be inclusive, and we know that there will be cross-over into the social sciences, media studies, digital arts, and other related areas. If you think your center is a digital humanities center, in whole or in part, then we’d be glad to have you as part of the network. This might include humanities centers with a strong interest in or focus on digital platforms. The definition of "center" is only slightly more prescriptive: a center should be larger than a single project, and it should have some history or promise of persistence.

Some early initiatives are likely to include

  • workshops and training opportunities for faculty, staff, and students
  • developing collaborative teams that are, in effect, pre-positioned to apply for predictable multi-investigator, multi-disciplinary, multi-national funding opportunities, beginning with an upcoming RFP that invites applications for supercomputing in the humanities
  • exchanging information about tools development, best practices, organizational strategies, standards efforts, and new digital collections, through a digital humanities portal

For further information (including how to respond), see the call.

Position Papers from the NSF/JISC Repositories Workshop

Position papers from the NSF/JISC Repositories Workshop are now available.

Here’s an excerpt from the Workshop’s Welcome and Themes page:

Here is some background information. A series of recent studies and reports have highlighted the ever-growing importance for all academic fields of data and information in digital formats. Studies have looked at digital information in science and in the humanities; at the role of data in Cyberinfrastructure; at repositories for large-scale digital libraries; and at the challenges of archiving and preservation of digital information. The goal of this workshop is to unite these separate studies. The NSF and JISC share two principal objectives: to develop a road map for research over the next ten years and what to support in the near term.

Here are the position papers:

Landmark Digital Humanities Book Is Now Freely Available

A Companion to Digital Humanities is now freely available in digital form.

This important 2004 book was edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. It includes chapters by such notable experts as Howard Besser, Greg Crane, Susan Hockey, Willard McCarty, Allen H. Renear, Abby Smith, C. M. Sperberg-McQueen, John Unsworth, and Perry Willett (to name just a few).

Collex: Remixable Metadata for Humanists to Create Collections and Exhibits

What is Collex? The project’s About page describes it in part as follows:

Collex is a set of tools designed to aid students and scholars working in networked archives and federated repositories of humanities materials: a sophisticated COLLections and EXhibits mechanism for the semantic web.

Collex allows users to collect, annotate, and tag online objects and to repurpose them in illustrated, interlinked essays or exhibits. It functions within any modern web browser without recourse to plugins or downloads and is fully networked as a server-side application. By saving information about user activity (the construction of annotated collections and exhibits) as ‘remixable’ metadata, the Collex system writes current practice into the scholarly record and permits knowledge discovery based not only on the characteristics or ‘facets’ of digital objects, but also on the contexts in which they are placed by a community of scholars.

A detailed description of the project is available in "COLLEX: Semantic Collections & Exhibits for the Remixable Web."

You can see Collex in action at the NINES (a Networked Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) project, which also uses IVANHOE ("a shared, online playspace for readers interested in exploring how acts of interpretation get made and reflecting on what those acts mean or might mean") and Juxta ("a cross-platform tool for collating and analyzing any kind or number of textual objects").

The About 9s page identifies key objectives of the NINES project as follows:

  • It will create a robust framework to support the authority of digital scholarship and its relevance in tenure and other scholarly assessment procedures.
  • It will help to establish a real, practical publishing alternative to the paper-based academic publishing system, which is in an accelerating state of crisis.
  • It will address in a coordinated and practical way the question of how to sustain scholarly and educational projects that have been built in digital forms.
  • It will establish a base for promoting new modes of criticism and scholarship promised by digital tools.