Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 352.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: NINCH-ANNOUNCE <david@ninch.org> (144)
Subject: Funding (NSF): Last Humanities DLI-2 projects
announced; new NSF program welcomes "computational
humanities"
[2] From: NINCH-ANNOUNCE <david@ninch.org> (71)
Subject: Funding (NEH/NEA): Budgets Increased (NHA Release)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2000 12:08:26 +0100
From: NINCH-ANNOUNCE <david@ninch.org>
Subject: Funding (NSF): Last Humanities DLI-2 projects announced;
new NSF program welcomes "computational humanities"
NINCH ANNOUNCEMENT
News on Networking Cultural Heritage Resources
from across the Community
October 13, 2000
NEH & NSF ANNOUNCE DLI-2 PHASE TWO RECIPIENTS
<http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/projects.html>http://www.dli2.nsf.gov/projects.html
NEW NSF PROGRAM (INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH)
WELCOMES HUMANITIES PROPOSALS
<http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2000/nsf00126/nsf00126.htm>http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2000/nsf00126/nsf00126.htm
http://www.itr.nsf.gov/
The last of the humanities-related DLI-2 funded projects have been
announced by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National
Science Foundation. More than $4.8-million in grants for five new
information-technology projects was awarded, providing technological
solutions to research problems in the humanities.
As the DLI-2 funding project has closed "computational humanities"
applications are being welcomed in the second year of the NSF's Information
Technology Research initiative: see
<http://www.itr.nsf.gov/>http://www.itr.nsf.gov/ for information on the
initiative. $192 million has been requested for ITR in FY01.
At the recent NINCH "Building Blocks" workshop, the NSF's Michael Lesk
encouraged humanities scholars and librarians to apply with projects that
demonstrate that humanities research poses challenges to computer science
in a way that both the humanities and the computer science/information
technology fields benefit. As examples of technical limits exposed by
humanities research projects, he cited multilingual searching and
presentation; OCR of pre-20th-century printing; the fusion of geographic,
numeric, image and text information; and inter-institutional cooperation on
sophisticated electronic projects.
David Green
===========
Here are the five projects recently funded by the DLI-2, with the abstracts
printed below.
Indiana University at Bloomington, Digital Music Library,
$3,056,913, Michael McRobbie.
<https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/servlet/showaward?award=9909068>https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/servlet/showaward?award=9909068
Stanford University, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Creating
Standards and Procedures for Online Encyclopedias), $528,896, John Perry
and Edward N.
Zalta.
<https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/servlet/showaward?award=9981549>https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/servlet/showaward?award=9981549
University of California at Los Angeles, Cuneiform Digital
Library Initiative, $650,000, Robert Englund.
<https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/servlet/showaward?award=0000629>https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/servlet/showaward?award=0000629
University of Hawaii-Manoa, Classical Chinese Digital
Database, $146,859, Roger Ames and Mary Tiles.
<https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/servlet/showaward?award=9910808>https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/servlet/showaward?award=9910808
University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Indexing Handwritten
Manuscripts, $450,000, Raghavan Manmatha.
<https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/servlet/showaward?award=9909073>https://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/servlet/showaward?award=9909073
Digital Music Library
This project is to establish a Digital Music Library (DML) testbed. The
testbed will focus on system architectures, content representation and
metadata and network services. Although the project will address a wide
range of multimedia digital libraries issues, it is unique in it's
comprehensive approach to musical content and the internet - pressing
contemporary issues capturing intense public and commercial interest. The
project will involve a large team of interdisciplinary researchers at
multiple sites. There is as of yet no comparabledigital music library to
that presented in the proposal. As a digital library system, the DML will
provideintegrated multimedia access to a large corpus of musical material.
As a research and educational resource for alarge, diverse group of
communities, the project promises to draw out new uses and user needs and
stimulatecreative activities in many areas.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
This project will attempt to organize the topical matter of an academic
discipline in a comprehensive and innovative way by creating a dynamic
reference work of exceptionally large scope using information technologies.
The goals of the project are: - to design and implement a customized
work-flow system through which academic philosophers can collaboratively
write, maintain, track and summarize the new ideas being published in print
and electronic media-to produce a comprehensive reference work useful
notonly to scholars, but to the general public as well- to develop XML
standards for the materials of philosoph yapplicable to other topical areas
research funds from the Digital Libraries Initiative would be part of
alarger base of support for the project and targeted toward advances in
work-flow system development and building user interface tools that can
fully exploit the features of a dynamic reference work. Examples of these
include evolving concept maps, dynamic cross-referencing based on user
needs, etc. The methods used to achieve this can serve as an example for
other disciplines in the humanities and sciences.
Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative
The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative proposes to develop tools and
techniques leading to the systematic digital documentation and new
electronic publication of cuneiform sources. Despite the 150 years that
have passed since first decipherment of cuneiform many basic research tools
remain to be developed that will allow this material to be studied in depth
by specialists and generally made available to the public. This project,
conducted in close collaboration with a number of organizations (including
the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the California
Digital Library) will: Create virtual archives of widely dispersed early
cuneiform tablets Implement an integrative platform of data presentation
combining raster, vector and 3D imaging with text translation and markup
Establish for collaborating museums a lasting archive procedure for fragile
and often decaying collection of cuneiform records The project's dataset
will be built using platform-independent text encoding and markup
conventions and linked to accurate, high-resolution images. Typologies and
extensive glossaries of technical terms will be included, later
supplemented by linguistic tools for accessing the primary sources by
non-specialists.
"Shuhai Wenyuan Classical Digital Database and Interactive Internet Worktable"
This project entitled "Shuhai Wenyuan Classical Digital Database and
Interactive Internet Worktable" willcreate a digital corpus and
internet-based resources to allow world wide use of seminal texts from
China's classical period. The project will involve bringing together
specialists in Classical Chinese language, thought,and culture, and
information technologists to produce tools and access methods to materials
that have thus far been limited to a select group of students and scholars.
By doing so the project intends to open up new areas ofstudy and research
for learners of all ages.
The data content will be freely available via the web and offer Chinese
texts, English examples, cultural and philosophical notes, grammar notes,
and a search engine designed for a variety of tasks.
Indexing Handwritten Manuscripts
This project will research and develop innovative techniques for indexing
handwritten historical manuscripts. Automatic indexingof historical
archives to create indexes similar to those at the back of most printed
books would potentially make available a wholenew set of materials to
scholars and students. Conversion of printed materials usually involves
Optical Character Recognition(OCR) to convert them to machine-readable
form. OCR does not work well on handwritten text. The investigators propose
to use ascheme known as Word Spotting in which a document page is segmented
into words and lists of words are created. By matchingword images against
each other multiple instances of the same word are then identified. A user
then provides the ASCII equivalentto a representative word image from the
lists and links to the original documents are automatically generated. For
this approach tosucceed, a number of problems need to be solved including
new techniques for "cleaning up" a document by removingnon-meaningful
visual artifacts, extending existing algorithms for word segmentation of
handwritten documents, and building newalgorithms to find similarity
between handwritten word images.
==============================================================
NINCH-Announce is an announcement listserv, produced by the National
Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH). The subjects of
announcements are not the projects of NINCH, unless otherwise noted;
neither does NINCH necessarily endorse the subjects of announcements. We
attempt to credit all re-distributed news and announcements and appreciate
reciprocal credit.
For questions, comments or requests to un-subscribe, contact the editor:
<<mailto:david@ninch.org>mailto:david@ninch.org>
==============================================================
See and search back issues of NINCH-ANNOUNCE at
<<http://www.cni.org/Hforums/ninch-announce/>http://www.cni.org/Hforums/ninch-announce/>.
==============================================================
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2000 12:08:40 +0100
From: NINCH-ANNOUNCE <david@ninch.org>
Subject: Funding (NEH/NEA): Budgets Increased (NHA Release)
NINCH ANNOUNCEMENT
News on Networking Cultural Heritage Resources
from across the Community
October 13, 2000
NEH/NEA Budgets Increased
>Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2000 13:25:29 -0400 (EDT)
>From: John Hammer <jhammer@cni.org>
>To: Multiple recipients of list <nha-announce@cni.org>
>>
>TO: NHA Members & Friends
>FR: John Hammer and Jessica Jones
>
>RE: Short end-of-the-appropriations-cycle report for possible use in
>newsletters ---
* * * * * * * * * * *
On October 11, President Clinton signed HR 4578, the Interior and Related
Agencies appropriations bill for FY-2001. Flanked at the Rose Garden
signing by NEA Chairman Bill Ivey and NEH Chairman Bill Ferris, the
President hailed the bill as "a truly historic achievement, achieved in a
genuine, bipartisan spirit to create a permanent basis for preserving our
natural heritage and advancing our common artistic and cultural values".
The bill includes $5 million additional for the National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH) bringing the total to $120.26 million. This is the
second year in a row that the NEH has been increased. (In the years
1996-1999, NEH was flat funded at $110 million, down nearly 40% from the
FY-95 appropriation of $177 million.)
The important story in HR 4578 is that the National Endowment for
the Arts (NEA) was boosted $7 million, the first increase since 1995. The
improved circumstances for the NEA reflect the declining power of the
Conservative Action Team (CAT) in the House of Representatives. Although
there was some hostility in the Senate after the 1994 elections in which
the GOP captured control of both houses, the House has been the graveyard
for improving arts funding up to this year. For NEH supporters, the NEA
news could not be more welcome -- Some of NEH's closest and firmest
supporters in Congress have been leaders in opposing further improvement
of NEH funding until the NEA problem begins to be resolved. With the
passage of this appropriation, both agencies will be in the best position
to rebuild in years.
Senator Slade Gorton (R-WA), chair of the interior appropriations
subcommittee, deserves special praise for pressing the House leaders to
relent. The face-saving strategy developed by Senator Gorton, probably in
consultation with Rep. Ralph Regula (R-OH), his counterpart in the House,
was to separate the $7 million increase for NEA into a different budget
line tagged to Challenge America Arts Fund (i.e., synonymous with the
major existing initiative of NEA) to be administered by NEA. Many were
amazed that the House GOP leaders would settle for such a slight cover --
Apparently their reading was that it is time to step back from the issue.
Here are the comparative appropriations figures for NEH, NEA, and the
Institute of Museum and Library Services
Table: Cultural Agency Appropriations (in millions of dollars)
........ FY-2000 .. FY-2001 .. FY-2001 .. FY-2001 .... FY-2001 . Conference
........ Enacted .. Request .... House ... Senate . Conference .vs. Enacted
__________________________________________________________________________
NEH ... 115.260 .. 150.000 .. 115.260 .. 120.260 .... 120.260 ..... +5.000
NEA .... 97.628 .. 150.000 ... 98.000 .. 105.000 .... 105.000 ..... +7.372
IMLS ... 24.307 ... 33.378 ... 24.307 ... 24.907 ..... 24.907 ..... +0.600
Source: Conference Report 106-914 to accompany HR 4578 (29-Sep-00).
_________________
Byline: John Hammer & Jessica Jones, National Humanities Alliance
==============================================================
NINCH-Announce is an announcement listserv, produced by the National
Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH). The subjects of
announcements are not the projects of NINCH, unless otherwise noted;
neither does NINCH necessarily endorse the subjects of announcements. We
attempt to credit all re-distributed news and announcements and appreciate
reciprocal credit.
For questions, comments or requests to un-subscribe, contact the editor:
<<mailto:david@ninch.org>mailto:david@ninch.org>
==============================================================
See and search back issues of NINCH-ANNOUNCE at
<<http://www.cni.org/Hforums/ninch-announce/>http://www.cni.org/Hforums/ninch-announce/>.
==============================================================
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : 10/14/00 EDT