MITH is delighted to announce that the University of Maryland has been awarded two Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Enhancing Music Notation Addressability (EMA) was awarded $59,971, and will be led by MITH Research Programmer Raffaele Viglianti. EMA originates from the idea that music notation, like text, can be “addressed” in new ways in a digital environment, allowing scholars to identify and name structures of various kinds. However, how can one virtually “circle” a section of music notation? and how can a machine interpret this “circling” to retrieve music notation? To research these questions, we are teaming up with the Du Chemin: Lost Voices project, which is reconstructing songs from 16th c. France.
We will work on analytical music annotations already produced by students and scholars as part of the Du Chemin project and re-model them as Linked Open Data nanopublications. In the sciences, nanopublication is providing the research community with ways of managing attribution and documenting quality of even small contributions. The nanopublication model facilitates accurate citation and promotes massively collaborative scholarship. We seek to extend these benefits to humanities scholarship. To support and publish nanopublications of music annotations we will develop a prototype application able to interpret a search query and return a meaningful selection of music notation encoded according to the Music Encoding Initiative format.
The University of Maryland’s Center for the History of the New America (CHNA) has partnered with MITH to develop the Transforming the Afro-Caribbean World (TAW) project. Co-led by Julie Greene (Department of History and co-Director, CHNA) and MITH Assistant Director Jennifer Guiliano, TAW was awarded $28,961 to bring together scholars of the Panama Canal, Afro-Caribbean history, and experts in the digital humanities, data modeling, and visualization for a two-day planning workshop that will discuss a large-scale effort to explore Afro-Caribbean labor, migration, and the Panama Canal.
The U.S. project to construct the Panama Canal exerted a huge impact on the Americas, generating a tidal flow of migration from dozens of nations to the Panama Canal Zone in the early 20th century—and then beyond it to sites across the hemisphere, permanently altering the geography, economy, politics, and cultures of the Western Hemisphere. The TAW workshop has several aims: 1) digitization of a subset of the proposed records to evaluate potential costs and preservation issues; 2) exploration of structured data tools to reveal new insights about these records; 3) the creation of annotated bibliographies for use by teachers and the public as they begin to explore the centennial anniversary of the opening of the canal; and 4) identification of other archives and repositories to be included in a larger project. Ultimately this start-up grant will produce a work plan and report outlining a potential large-scale collaboration to map and explore the movement of Afro-Caribbean laborers between 1903 and 1920.
For more information please contact Raffaele Viglianti (EMA project) or Jennifer Guiliano (TAW project).