Faculty Grant Projects for 2005-2006
Maggie Bickford, Art History:
Visual Inspection of Chinese Art: Maggie Bickford has applied for and received a President's Innovation Grant to work on Computer-assisted Visual Inspection and Analysis in Art History. This draws on her research on Chinese painting and the technical means by which it is produced as well as its social and historical context. She is interested in enhancing and processing images of Chinese art, in order to compare details and formal elements. Together with a student, Prof. Bickford already has made significant discoveries using this technique. She plans to explore it further, and to develop a methodology that can be replicated by other scholars of Chinese art, as well as her own graduate students. STG will work with Prof. Bickford to develop a framework for studying Chinese art, and to explore, and then codify the transformations that she is applying to the digitized images.
James Campbell, American Civilization
The Voyage of the Sally: This faculty grant consists of two components. In an earlier faculty grant, STG worked with Jim Campbell and Susan Smulyan on Freedom Now, which contains primary sources and essays about the civil rights movement. Prof. Campbell would like to update it with new materials that he and his students have created. STG will add the new materials, and in doing so will re-architect the website so that routine updates and edits can be handled by Prof. Campbell or his students.
Prof. Campbell also wants to develop a new web publication as part of the work of the Slavery and Justice Commission at Brown. Brown has all the documents pertaining to the first slave voyage the Brown brothers invested in. These include the ship's logbook, and all their business correspondence. Working together with the Center for Digital Initiatives, STG will transcribe the documents so they will be easier to read and search. We will then construct a web site using these documents and supporting materials to illustrate the progress of the slave voyage. In the future, the website may develop further into an analysis of the influence of the slave trade on the economic life of a city like Providence.
James Derderian, Watson Institute
The Global Security Matrix: James Derderian has an ongoing project on Global Security, one of whose components is the Global Security Matrix, a visual illustration of the state of global security and and how risks are perceived differently by different sectors of the world's population. He and his students have developed a great deal of material for the Matrix, but need technical help making it more interactive and more visually informative. STG will work with Prof. Derderian and his students to discover an informative visual design for the information they are trying to disseminate, and develop a robust infrastructure for the information in the Global Security Matrix.
Brooke Harrington, Sociology
Personal Resource Database: Brooke Harrington researches organizations and management. She would like to experiment with a database in which she can store and sort the bits of popular culture and ephemera that she uses in her research, key-wording them so that they are easier to find and correlate. STG will discuss the database structure with Prof. Harrington, and develop an online database for her. We do not plan to digitize the films and ephemera that she would like to store in it. We will work with CDI to develop the database structure because we can draw on their experience of specialized keywording for digital archives.
Burr Litchfield, History
Gazetteer of Florence: Burr Litchfield is working on a book on renaissance Florence, to be published as an e-book by ACLS. Part of this project is a web site, corresponding to an appendix in the book, that contains a digital gazetteer of Florence, based on a late renaissance axonometric map of the city. STG will develop the website for the project and also create the infrastructure for editing and using the gazetteer.
Massimo Riva, Italian Studies
Additional VHL Support: Currently, STG is providing about 250 hours of funded support to the Virtual Humanities Lab project. Massimo Riva and Vika Zafrin, (manager of the VHL), are requesting additional support for VHL. VHL is continuing the work of the Decameron Web and the Pico Project, both supported by STG in the past. They are building digital resources for the study of Renaissance Italian literature, collaborative workspaces, and exploring the methodology of digital scholarship. STG will do the following three things: expand the annotation system we developed for the Pico Project, review the VHL DTDs for usability and conformance to current practice, and develop a side-by-side text display.
Bob Scholes, Modern Culture and Media
Modernist Journal Project support: Bob Scholes' Modernist Journals Project has received NEH funding, and is well advanced with its goal of publishing digital facsimiles of The New Age, an important British journal for the history of Modernism. They plan to continue to publish other relevant journals as well. Now that the digitizing and cataloging work is almost done, the MJP would like to develop better digital object repositories, digital object management systems and start to develop APIs for these systems. This is work that goes hand in hand with CDI's digital repository, but addresses problems that are unique to the MJP data structures.This is a project in which STG, MJP and CDI will collaborate closely, and learn from each other's expertise.
Roberto Simanowski, German Studies
Wayland Collegium Seminar: Roberto Simanowski has received a Wayland Collegium grant for a faculty seminar on Digital Aesthetics that will take place during the 2005-2006 academic year. He would like STG to build the website and web infrastructure for the seminar. The website will be used to manage the seminar, as well as to provide a public record of discussions and conclusions once it is over.
Beth Taylor, English
Prospect Journal: Beth Taylor directs the creative non-fiction writing program, and for the past 5 years has produced an online journal of the best student writing from her class. The journal, prospect, was developed and maintained by STG. Currently, STG receives MS Word files of the articles, processes them and uploads them to the web. This is a labor intensive way of updating the journal website that is no longer necessary with the web applications now available to us. We would now like to revise the Prospect website using a content management system to simplify the work currently done by STG, and so that Beth Taylor and her colleagues can ultimately manage the editing and publication process themselves.