14.0352 funding (NSF/NEH/NEA -- U.S.)

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Date: 10/14/00

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                   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
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    <<mailto:david@ninch.org>mailto:david@ninch.org>
    ==============================================================
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    ==============================================================
    
    
    
    
    --[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/>. 
    
    
    ==============================================================
    



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