Five digitisation projects are to be awarded funding of around £600,000 ($1,150,000) under a transatlantic collaboration between JISC and the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).A call for proposals issued last November invited scholars in England and the USA to collaborate on digitisation, the aim of the £600,000 ($1,150,000) programme being to unite scholarly collections split between the two countries, explore innovative approaches to digitisation and match expertise in one country with collections to be digitised in the other.
The funded projects are:
- The St Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative (Southampton University / Thomas Jefferson Foundation)
- The World Wide Web of Humanities (Oxford Internet Institute / Internet Archive)
- Shakespeare Quartos Archive (Oxford University / Folger Shakespeare Library)
- PhiloGrid (Imperial College / Tufts University)
- Concordia (King’s College London / New York University)
Read on to find out more about the projects
You can also listen to a podcast from the JISC/NEH launch event at King’s College London about issues in international digitisation, including interviews with key figures in the collaboration.
[audio:http://www.jisc.ac.uk//media/avfiles/news/interviews/podcast36digitisation.mp3]
The St Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative (Southampton University / Thomas Jefferson Foundation)
The St Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative will develop a digital archive of diverse archaeological and historical data related to the experiences of the enslaved men and women who laboured on 17th-, 18th- and 19th-century sugar plantations in the Caribbean. An international team of scholars will digitise and deliver the first collection of its kind from two 18th-century plantations and their slave villages, one located on Nevis and the other on St Kitts.
Find out more on the St Kitts project page
The World Wide Web of Humanities (Oxford Internet Institute / Internet Archive)
This project will create and assemble a suite of open source tools for data collection and curation, to support new methodologies for Internet research built around large collections of web data, using automated tools to extract, index, and analyse the data. The collection will be designed to help researchers and policy makers gain an understanding both of the state of the art of e-Humanities and of historical trends and developments in the field
Find out more on the World Wide Web of Humanities project page
Shakespeare Quartos Archive (Oxford University / Folger Shakespeare Library)
The University of Oxford and the Folger Shakespeare Library will be leading a range of institutions which are reuniting all 75 pre-1641 quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays into a single online collection with contributions from the world’s leading repositories in the UK and USA. The project will also develop an interface and tools to enable close examination and comparison of these internationally significant treasures, which will be freely available to scholars, teachers, students and actors across the globe.
Find out more on the Shakespeare Quartos archive project page
PhiloGrid (Imperial College / Tufts University)
Based initially upon texts and services from the Perseus Digital Library available under Creative Commons and open source license, Philogrid is continuing the development of a virtual research environment for Greco-Roman antiquity, allowing users to uncover connections between fragments of classical texts that previously would have taken extensive scholarly investigation
Find out more on the Philogrid project page
Concordia (King’s College London / New York University)
This project will bring together the content of three existing, highly respected collections (including 50,000 papyrological and 3,000 epigraphic texts) and newly digitised content (an additional 950 epigraphic texts plus complete topographic and toponymic records for over 3,000 historical geographic features) to create an research resource for Greek and Roman Libya and Egypt, and beyond.