DigitalKoans

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.

The National Endowment for the Humanities has announced 149 awards and offers, totaling $11.9 million (Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants are included in this announcement).

The awards are contained in three files: Alaska-Indiana, Kansas-Ohio, and Oklahoma-Wisconsin and American scholars abroad.

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."

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded SEASR (Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research) project is building digital humanities cyberinfrastructure.

Here's an excerpt about the project from its home page:

What can SEASR do for scholars?

• help scholars to access existing large data stores more readily
• provide scholars with enhanced data synthesis and query analysis: from focused data retrieval and data integration, to intelligent human-computer interactions for knowledge access, to semantic data enrichment, to entity and relationship discovery, to knowledge discovery and hypothesis generation
• empower collaboration among scholars by enhancing and innovating virtual research environments

What kind of innovations does SEASR provide for the humanities?

• a complete, fully integrated, state-of-the-art software environment for managing structured and unstructured data and analyzing digital libraries, repositories and archives, as well as educational platforms
• an open source, end-to-end software system that enables researchers to develop, evolve, and maintain data interoperability, evaluation, analysis, and visualization

Read more about it at "Placing SEASR within the Digital Library Movement."

Indiana University at Bloomington has establishes an Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IDAH) will enable and expand digitally based arts and humanities projects at IU by bringing together scholars, artists, librarians and IT experts. The institute draws on established strengths at the IU Bloomington campus in combining arts and humanities disciplines and information technology, such as the Variations digital music library, the EVIA digital video archive of ethnographic music and dance, 3-D virtual reality work by IU artists and the IU Digital Library Program. . . .

IDAH will make use of the extensive cyberinfrastructure on the Bloomington campus, including massive data storage capacity and advanced visualization systems. The institute will be housed in the new Research Commons, an initiative being implemented by the IU Bloomington Libraries that offers a suite of services in support of faculty research and creative activity. The Research Commons space will be located on three floors in the East Tower of the Wells Library.

IDAH unites faculty from eight IU Bloomington schools with the disciplinary and technical expertise of staff from the Wells Library and University Information Technology Services. UITS will provide information storage and access, hardware, software support and the delivery of various technologies.

IDAH joins the ranks of similar national and international institutes at institutions such as the University of Glasgow, University of Virginia and the University of California Los Angeles. The institute is administered through IU's Office of the Vice Provost for Research and led by Ruth Stone, associate vice provost for arts research and Laura Boulton, professor of ethnomusicology. . . .

Two-year fellowships will be offered for faculty to develop digital projects. IDAH fellows will work in an interdisciplinary environment to enhance their understanding of digital tools, prepare prototypes for major projects, and develop and submit grant proposals for external funding. . . .

During their fellowships, faculty will participate in an ongoing workshop with a team of specialists and other faculty fellows. Following the fellowship period, fellows will be invited to work with the institute, which will assist in hiring and supervising staff for the faculty research projects. IDAH will also serve as a center for collaboration among faculty already pursuing existing projects in expressive culture.

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 are now available.

Here are selected presentations:

• "Andrew Treloar: Supporting the e-Research Lifecycle from Acquisition through to Annotation: the DART/ARCHER Experience"
• "Brian Fitzgerald and Scott Kiel-Chisholm: The Legal Framework for e-Research Project"
• "Ian Johnson: Beyond Bibliographies: Integrating Research Data in a Unified Collaborative Framework"
• "Jane Hunter: Harvesting Community Tags and Annotations to Augment Institutional Repository Metadata"
• "Keith Webster: eResearch and the Future of Research Libraries"
• "Kerry Kilner: The Resource for Australian Literature"
• "Paul Arthur: Going Digital: Humanities and the eResearch Revolution"
• "Richard Levy and Austin McLean, ProQuest: Institutional Repositories: A Gateway to e-Research"
• "Ross Coleman: A Maturing Partnership: eHumanities and the Digital Library"
• "Sarah Howard and John Byron: Humanities Technologies: Research Methods and ICT Use by Humanities Researchers"
• "Toby Burrows and Elzbieta Majocha: Building Infrastructures for Web-based Collaboration in Humanities Research Networks"

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.