Calling all Digital Humanists

By DaMiri Young, HPC Systems Administrator

Currently on campus there is much talk of engaging scientists, engineers, artists, philosophers and other scholars to collaborate their research. This concept is being echoed at many institutions and campuses in fact.

But how do the so called "soft sciences" i.e., Humanities, Art, and Social Sciences fit into the research space normally dominated by the "hard sciences" like Engineering, Physics, and Mathematics? Furthermore, how might these diverse groups collaborate on scholarly research using advanced techniques like Parallel image processing, Natural Language Processing, and High-Performance computing?

As the UNT Office of Research has identified, there are many ways to integrate these diverse disciplines. Along with several other research "cluster" initiatives, the office has fostered creation of the Initiative for Advance Research in Technology and the Arts (iARTA). This project aims to team artists, engineers, and scientists to explore advanced media applications. The office has also requested a percentage of high-performance compute infrastructure on campus be set aside specifically for this purpose, more information here.

The following timeline highlights some of the milestones that have paved the way for Digital Humanities.

1963

Three scholarly and educational organizations--the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Council of Graduate Schools in America, and the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa--co-sponsor the establishment of a National Commission on the Humanities and instruct the Commission to conduct a study of "the state of the humanities in America." Barnaby Keeney, President of Brown University, is chair.

1964

In April, the commission releases a report recommending "the establishment by the President and the Congress of the United States of a National Humanities Foundation."

In August, Congressman William Moorhead of Pennsylvania proposes legislation to implement the Commission's recommendations.

In a speech at Brown University on the importance of federal support for higher education, President Johnson lends his support.

1965

In March, Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island introduces the Johnson Administration's legislation to establish a National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities.

On September 29, President Johnson signs the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965, establishing the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) as separate, independent agencies. He selects Barnaby Keeney, who headed the original commission, to become the first NEH chairman. While Keeney completes the academic year at Brown, Henry Allen Moe, President of the American Philosophical Society, is interim chairman. The agency's first home is 1800 G Street, NW, in a building largely occupied by the National Science Foundation.

1973

NEH begins a collaboration with the National Science Foundation, the Science, Technology, and Human Values program.

1974

NEH supports the establishment of the Yale-New Haven Teacher Institute with an initial grant of $2.8 million. The Institute becomes a national model for partnerships between a university and nearby public schools.

The Endowment begins support for American centers of advanced study in the United States and abroad.

1981

Francis Steegmuller's NEH-supported translation of The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1830-1857, wins the American Book Award for Translation.

President Reagan establishes a Presidential Task Force on the Arts and the Humanities and charges it with "developing ideas to stimulate increased private giving for cultural activities." The Task Force recommends continuing the existing NEH and NEA structures.

1984

Funding begins for the Dartmouth Dante Project, a computerized database of commentary written about The Divine Comedy in the six centuries following Dante's death.

"German Expressionist Sculpture," organized by the Los Angeles Museum of Art, attracts 1.9 million visitors to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C.

1986

President Reagan proclaims the week of February 9-15 as National Humanities Week in honor of the Endowment's twentieth anniversary.

1993

The Great Depression, Henry Hampton's seven-part, NEH-supported documentary series airs on PBS and wins an Emmy.

NEH awards sixty-one small grants for research in the archives of the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere.

The Endowment makes available $1 million in emergency funds for museums, libraries, schools, and other cultural institutions in the Midwest to recover from damage caused by record flooding.

President Clinton declares October 1993 "National Arts and Humanities Month."

1998

In November, President Clinton presents National Humanities Medals to the second group of awardees: Stephen Ambrose, E. L. Doctorow, Diana Eck, Nancye Brown Gaj, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Vartan Gregorian, Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Garry Wills.

As part of the three-year Schools for a New Millennium initiative, twenty grants are awarded to develop innovative projects to integrate technology into classroom instruction.

NEH funding begins for the Digital Library Initiative, and interagency effort led by the National Science Foundation that supports research on ways to digitize collections in the sciences, the humanities, and medicine.

Intra-agency working groups are established to examine the Endowment's achievements and opportunities in five programmatic areas: regional America; teaching and lifelong learning; humanities, science, and technology; humanities in an international context; and extending the reach of NEH programs.

1999

Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace wins a Pulitzer Prize. Wallace's research was supported with an NEH fellowship.

President Clinton presents National Humanities Medals to the third group of awardees: Patricia M. Battin, Taylor Branch, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Garrison Keillor, Jim Lehrer, John Rawls, Steven Spielberg, and August Wilson.

NEH launches an initiative to develop ten regional humanities centers throughout the United States.

NEH launches the My History is America's History website and guidebook. Developed in partnership with the White House Millennium Council, the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, and private funders, the nation-wide initiative invites Americans to discover the connections between family stories and U.S. history.

NEH joins NEA and the Institute of Museum and Library Services to recommend recipients of Save America's Treasures grants. The program to protect threatened cultural resources is a public-private partnership of the White House Millennium Council, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the National Park Service.

2005

NEH and the Library of Congress announce the first grants in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a new, long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers now in the public domain. Two-year projects in California, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Utah, and Virginia receive support to digitize thousands of pages of each state's most historically significant newspapers published between 1900 and 1910.

NEH and the National Science Foundation announce fellowships and institutional grants in a new inter-agency partnership, "Documenting Endangered Languages", a multi-year effort to preserve records of key languages before they become extinct

2006

The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services announce "Advancing Knowledge: The IMLS/NEH Digital Partnership" to help teachers, scholars, museums and libraries take advantage of developing technology.

2007

The Endowment awards the first Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants for projects designed to explore and develop innovative uses of technology in humanities education, scholarship, and public programming.

Harvey Mansfield, one of America's leading political scientists and a widely published author, delivers the 36th Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, "How to Understand Politics: What the Humanities Can Say to Science."

2009

DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will dedicate a total of one million compute hours on its supercomputers and technical training to humanities experts.

UNT's Office of Research and Economic Development launches several collobaritive research initiatives including investing millions of dollars into high-performance computing infrastructure. Of this, a percentage set aside for work in digital arts and humanities.

Are you a Digital Humanities scholar in need?

So in closing, a proposal. To our fellow Humanists, Artists, and Social Scientists on campus: present your verifiable and reasonable need for High-Performance Computing at the site below, and you'll be connected with the right department. The following projects at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) are examples of what would be considered verifiable and reasonable need:

• The Perseus Digital Library Project, led by Gregory Crane of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., will use NERSC systems to measure how the meanings of words in Latin and Greek have changed over their lifetimes, and compare classic Greek and Latin texts with literary works written in the past 2,000 years. Team members say the work will be similar to methods currently used to detect plagiarism. The technology will analyze the linguistic structure of classical texts and reveal modern pieces of literature, written or translated into English, which may have been influenced by the classics.


• In addition to tracking changes in ancient literature, NERSC computers will also be reconstructing ancient artifacts and architecture with the High Performance Computing for Processing and Analysis of Digitized 3-D Models of Cultural Heritage project, led by David Koller, Assistant Director of the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) in Charlottesville, Va.


• In contrast to the other Humanities High Performance Computing projects that will be done at NERSC, the Visualizing Patterns in Databases of Cultural Images and Video project, led by Lev Manovich, Director of the Software Studies Initiative at the University of California, San Diego, is not focused on working with a single data set. Instead, this project hopes to investigate the full potential of cultural analytics using different types of data including: millions of images, paintings, professional photography, graphic design, user-generated photos; as well as tens of thousands of videos, feature films, animation, anime music videos and user-generated videos.

Nearly 20% of HPC resources which roughly equates to over 100,000 compute hours has been set aside for projects verified as genuine supercomputing in the Arts and Humanities. So if you are a Digital Humanities scholar in need, head over to the CITC's HPC site for more information.

Your move.

External Links

http://citc.unt.edu/hpc

http://energy.gov/

http://iarta.unt.edu

http://nea.gov

http://www.neh.gov/

http://www.neh.gov/whoweare/timeline.html

http://research.unt.edu

http://www.supercomputingonline.com/latest/humanities-hpc-connect-at-nersc