Reporting From the Digital Humanities Start-up Grant Project Directors Meeting

On Tuesday I had the privilege of attending the 2010 “Digital Humanities Start-up Grant Project Directors Meeting” hosted by the Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) at the National Endowment for the Humanities. The meeting, which was open to the public, featured two rounds of presentations by those who received Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants for projects starting in the 2010-2011 academic year.

The NEH-ODH awards start-up grants to digital humanities projects that are still in the relatively early stages of planning and development. And there are several other grant opportunities offered by the NEH that have been used to support such projects in their later stages.

“It isn’t a matter of getting things done more quickly; rather it is about getting things done that couldn’t be done before. That’s the game-changing aspect of technology.”

Brett Bobley
Director, Office of Digital Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities
“Why The Digital Humanities?” (PDF)

All told, there were 46 projects presented, and each project director was allowed only two minutes (and three slides) for their presentation. And you thought a pecha kucha presentation was fast! There’s a reason these were called “lightning rounds.”

There’s not enough space in this post for me to go into detail about each and every project, but the NEH-ODH Web site hosts a PDF list of projects from “Lightning Round 1” and “Lightning Round 2.” Additionally, you can consult the searchable library of searchable library of funded projects covering the last few years.

If I were pressed to come up with a list of emerging themes of note, based on my own subjective experience of the presentations, that list would look like this:

Mapping

These projects make use of geographical information to analyze, represent, or link data:

• The GeoHistorian Project involves “the creation of local history content linked to community locations by QR codes (2-dimensional bar codes).”
• Mapping Historical Texts uses “text-mining and visualization tools to study movement of information through time and space by analyzing digitized texts of historical newspapers.”
• Landscapes of the American Past will produce a “digital atlas seeking to demonstrate how the spread of emancipation of enslaved people  occurred during the US Civil War.”

Publishing

Several grants support projects that address the evolving world of creating, editing, distributing, and reading scholarly materials:

• Sustaining Digital History will bring together “editors of several print journals in history to explore various models of digital scholarship and publishing.”
• A Journal-Driven Bibliography of Digital Humanities, undertaken by Digital Humanities Quarterly is a project to “create, manage, export, and publish high quality bibliographical data across the digital humanities research domain.”
• Building a Better Back-End, an initiative of the journal Kairos, will develop “an open source editorial management system and reader tools for online publication of scholarly multimedia and related forms of digital scholarship for use with Open Journal Systems (OJS), a widely used editorial management system.”
• Scholar Press is building “three tools that will aid in the dissemination of research and teaching materials for humanities scholars.”

Crowdsourcing

In addition to the GeoHistorian project mentioned above, these projects also encourage the participation of (or contributions from) communities:

• Project Citizen is creating “a free online multimedia ‘dashboard’ and database to enable sharing community activities and civic engagement programs that promote education in democracy for young people in more than 65 countries.”
• The Lower Eastside Girls Club Girl/Hood Project will “[d]evelop and test software to create 3D virtual reality performance based on local history of the Lower Eastside neighborhood.”
• Leveraging “The Wisdom of the Crowds” is “[a] study of user-generated subject tagging to improve search capabilities for large-scale digital archives of humanities materials, using the historic newspaper collections of the New York Public Library.”
• Crowdsourcing Documentary Transcription, is developing Scripto, an “open source tool that would allow scholars to contribute document transcriptions and research notes to digital archival projects, using the Papers of the War Department as a test case.”

3D Modeling

These projects, like the Lower Eastside Girls Club project in the previous section, concern the creation, analysis, and exploration of data presented in three dimensions.

• Software Interface for Real-time Exploration of Three-Dimensional Computer Models of Historic Urban Environments is developing a prototype “for a generalized, extensible platform that will allow for real-time exploration, annotation, and tours in 3D computer models, using the NEH-funded Digital Karnak as the test case.”
• Drama in the Delta is building a role-playing game, “[a] scholarly, historic simulation meant for public audiences exploring the racial dynamics of a wartime internment camp in the Arkansas Delta.”
• Supercomputing for Digitized 3D Models of Cultural Heritage is creating “new algorithms and software to process large-scale, data-intensive 3D models of cultural heritage materials on supercomputers.”
• Egyptian Ceremony in the Virtual Temple: Avatars for Virtual Heritage is working on “virtual reality technology for an exhibition on ancient Egypt at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.”
• New Digital Tools for Restoring Polychromy to 3D Digital Models of Sculpture “set of tools that would allow for the accurate inclusion and display of color for Classical sculpture, using the ‘Augustus of Prima Porta’ in the Vatican Museums as a case study.”

Other activities on the day’s agenda

In addition to the lightning rounds, we heard a fantastic keynote address from Bryan Alexander of the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, watched a roundtable discussion of outreach strategies called “Getting the Word Out” (my rough notes can be found here), and we were given the opportunity to meet with program officers from other divisions of the NEH.

How about you?

Did you attend the meeting? What was your experience? Have you been involved with (or benefited from) such digital humanities projects? Let’s hear from you! And others could probably argue for their own thematic groupings (and I’d be interested in hearing in the comments what those might be!).

[Creative Commons-licensed flickr photo by ghwpix]