Subject: Funding (NSF): Last Humanities DLI-2 projects announced; new NSF program welcomes "computational humanities"
NINCH-ANNOUNCE (david@ninch.org)
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2000 14:17:26 -0400
Message-Id: <v0421010fb60cf9cd0c6a@[192.100.21.22]> Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2000 14:17:26 -0400 To: ninch-announce@cni.org, bb-all@ninch.org 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
NEW NSF PROGRAM (INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY RESEARCH)
WELCOMES HUMANITIES PROPOSALS
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/ 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
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
University of California at Los Angeles, Cuneiform Digital
Library Initiative, $650,000, Robert Englund.
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
University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Indexing Handwritten
Manuscripts, $450,000, Raghavan Manmatha.
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.
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