The DDHI has been selected to receive a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The award, which totals $400,000 in NEH outright and matching funds, is a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (Level III). The grant will run for two years, beginning in early 2023, and will fund an exciting new collaboration between Dartmouth and the University of Kentucky.
Our collaboration will bring together two previously separate digital humanities projects: the DDHI and the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS). Under the leadership of Dr. Doug Boyd at the University of Kentucky, OHMS has become the premier platform for managing digital oral history collections. Archivists, librarians, and other curators of oral history archives currently use OHMS to create indexed and time-correlated versions of oral history interviews. OHMS also provides a web-based viewer that allows users to search and explore individual interviews.
This grant will allow Dartmouth and Kentucky to work together to incorporate the DDHI’s core capabilities into the OHMS platform. Starting with the DDHI’s current methods for encoding and linking interview data entities, we will add powerful new encoding and annotation features to the OHMS application, including Named Entity Recognition (NER). We will also design new data visualization features for the OHMS viewer. Those features will enable users to produce DDHI-style maps, timelines, and other visualizations of interview data.
In addition to the DDHI team at Dartmouth and the OHMS team at Kentucky, this collaboration will also include the information management and software development firm AVP, which has extensive prior experience in developing applications for use in archives and libraries. We will also draw on the expertise of a talented panel of advisors with experience in archival science, oral history, and the digital humanities.
This NEH-funded project will greatly enhance the long-term sustainability of the DDHI. At the conclusion of this grant, the DDHI’s tools and methods will be available on a free and open-source basis to the curators of hundreds of existing oral history collections—and, by extension, to all the students, researchers, and other people who use those collections online. The DDHI team is thrilled to have the opportunity to work with Dr. Boyd, AVP, and our panel of advisors on this exciting new initiative.
For more news on this award and other NEH grants received by Dartmouth in 2022, please see this story from Dartmouth News.