Introduction
The Arts and Humanities Institute (AHI) at Boise State University is applying for a National
Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grant in order to create an endowment for the first Digital
Humanities program in the state of Idaho. The Digital Humanities program will include among its
featured projects a regional focus on the Intermountain West (including Idaho and its non-coastal
neighboring states Montana, Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada). Through this program, the Arts and
Humanities Institute will leverage resources to support and enhance (1) current humanities projects at
Boise State University, including Melville’s Marginalia Online and the Western Writers Series; (2)
capacity and infrastructure, including Graduate Student or Post-Doctoral support, that will assist projects
such as Stories of Idaho; (3) a long term faculty-development program including workshops, visiting
experts, and training in the skills and techniques necessary to engage in a robust Digital Humanities
program; and (4) collaboration with other institutions and economic innovators in the Intermountain
West and beyond.
The program we envision will strengthen and promote the humanities locally and nationally by
expanding projects at Boise State that already enjoy distinction in their fields and by building our capacity
to respond to innovative ideas powered by rapidly-developing technology. Melville’s Marginalia Online
catalogs and tracks the recovery of books from Herman Melville's dispersed library and digitally
reproduces his markings and notes in surviving volumes; the Western Writers Series has published
booklets of biography and criticism since 1972, and Western Writers Series Online will publish
interviews, transcriptions of primary source materials, reports on collections and exhibits, and critical
essays that deepen readers’ understanding of western authors and their work. From the outset, these
established projects will help to anchor the Digital Humanities program within broader trends—digital
and conventional—that have helped reshape humanities research in the U.S. for the past two decades.
They will also serve as a valuable resource to new projects planned for the grant period such as the
Stories of Idaho project, which will use interactive oral interviews, image, and history archives and
applications to engage our students and our community in dramatically new ways that can be replicated
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nationally. Its work involves collaboration among professional historians, museum professionals,
independent scholars, and the Idaho public, bridging traditional gaps between the university and
surrounding regions.
Boise State University as Home to a Digital Humanities Program
Boise State University is the intellectual and pedagogical nerve-center of Idaho and much of the
Intermountain West, a hub of cultural, technological, and economic innovation in a region better known
for its range lands and its outdoor sports. The university is part of a state system of higher education that
has historically assigned its universities discrete missions. Boise State’s unique mission being civic
engagement. Boise is the capital of Idaho and the dominant urban center in the southwestern third of the
state, with a ten-county hinterland that is predominantly rural, with a traditional political and cultural
identity. Boise also happens to be at the center of a high-tech zone, with industry giants Hewlett-Packard
and Micron employing thousands of local residents, and other smaller tech enterprises springing up
regularly. Boise State willingly accepts the role of intellectual leader and collaborator in this dynamic
city, and has historically done so quite effectively with the business, engineering, and public policy
communities.
The Arts and Humanities Institute at Boise State University began functioning in 2010 and was
formally constituted in the spring of 2012, in part to help the university build more effective bridges to
Boise’s cultural institutions. The AHI has a threefold mission: to further the research and creative activity
of Boise State faculty and students, to encourage interdisciplinary work in the Arts and Humanities and
between them and other disciplines, and to nourish collaborative relationships in the community.
Underlying the mission of the AHI is the knowledge that while the region (known as the Treasure Valley)
is culturally conservative , the Institute can embrace an adventurous and innovative role that fosters
intellectual exchange and debate along with a spirit of open-minded inquiry that elevates humanistic
concerns in the region.
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The Arts and Humanities Institute represents the significant progress Boise State University has
made in recent years. As a state university that originated as a junior college but is now adding doctoral
programs and enjoying national recognition for its come-from-behind football program, Boise State
University is exactly the type of institution that stands to gain profoundly from the opportunities and
exposure associated with a strong digital infrastructure and vibrant digital presence. Under the leadership
of President Bob Kustra, Boise State University is thoughtfully but rapidly adopting methods of research
and teaching that reach into the twenty-first century. As much of the academic world focuses its labors
and its resources on buttressing STEM education, humanities fields have been increasingly pressured to
justify their legitimacy in terms of practical criteria and learning outcomes. The new standards of
accountability present opportunities for sophistication and reinvention that can be cultivated and realized
by Digital Humanities programs. Boise State, moreover, is fortunate that President Kustra has insisted
that the university’s own commitment to prioritize STEM research and education would be wrong-headed
without the balance and reinforcement of humanistic knowledge, creativity, and critical thinking skills
fostered by humanities disciplines. The Arts and Humanities Institute at Boise State University is integral
to this presidential vision, and one of the pillars of the work of the AHI will be the digital humanities.
Our Proposed Digital Humanities Program
The establishment of Digital Humanities as a method of research dissemination and engagement
and as a field of study in its own right is complete, but the legitimacy of the field should not be taken to
indicate that its practices and its research and creative products have become commonplace. As explained
by Kenneth M. Price, Director of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and Editor of the Walt
Whitman Archive, uneven access to resources “greatly affects who can do digital humanities and where,”
which is especially true in Idaho and the Intermountain West, where one finds no programs or centers like
the one we propose to create.1 This in itself begins to answer the question of significance: in an era of
See Kenneth M. Price, “Collaborative Work and the Conditions for American Literary Scholarship in a Digital
Age,” in The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age, Eds. Amy E. Earhart and Andrew Jewell (Ann Arbor,
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rapid growth of information technologies, a region like the Intermountain West, expansive, relatively
under-resourced, with its population centers in scattered pockets, is to this point poorly served and in real
need of an institutional nexus that will sponsor projects and offer programming that brings that population
together.
In this application we propose above all to create a Digital Humanities program capable of
incubating new digital projects on an ongoing basis, building faculty, staff, and graduate student expertise
in digital methods, and nurturing ties between Boise State University and the vast Intermountain West by
way of both those ongoing new projects and the human capital that the program will create through
training in digital methods. Below, we describe in detail three previously-mentioned projects that serve as
a foundation for the program. Collectively these projects indicate some of the directions our Digital
Humanities program will follow, but central to each of them is the notion of access, which is perhaps the
single greatest contribution of the “digital” to humanities. By cataloging, editing, and reproducing books
and marginalia currently spread out among different holding institutions and private collections,
Melville’s Marginalia Online makes accessible to researchers a unique cache of sources for the work of
one of America's greatest novelists. Stories of Idaho takes accessibility in a completely different
direction: by effectively crowd-sourcing the history of Idaho’s peoples, it initiates a new phase in the
production of historical knowledge. These projects indicate the directions that our Digital Humanities
program will take – with the important expectation that those “directions” will lead to new, novel
destinations.
The resource and funding requirements for individual projects vary, but each can be expected to
include some or all of the following needs during the grant period: web and application development,
professional development, software, equipment and hardware, server space and web hosting, course buy-
MI: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 12. Among institutions in the Intermountain West (as defined in the
opening paragraph of this document), Brigham Young University in Provo, UT, operates DH@BYU, but Boise
State University will be the only state institution with a program-driven digital humanities initiative in the
Intermountain West, and it will be the only program with a strong focus on regional humanities cultures and
histories.
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outs, stipends, student assistance, and research travel. The AHI commits to supporting faculty and staff
through buy-outs and stipends, as well as travel. Exact requirements will emerge as projects originate and
develop, and according to whether or not some projects' pursuit of additional sources of funding (as in the
case of Melville's Marginalia Online) prove to be successful.
Melville's Marginalia Online (Project Director: Steven Olsen-Smith)
Melville's Marginalia Online, at http://melvillesmarginalia.org/, maintains an online
bibliographical catalog and produces electronic editions of texts, markings, and annotations of books
owned by American author Herman Melville (1819-1891). Withdrawn from formal schooling after the
bankruptcy and early death of his father, Herman Melville pursued a personalized program of close,
concerted, solitary reading that lasted until his death, when his library of some 1,000 volumes was
dispersed among second-hand booksellers and surviving friends and family members. Marked and
annotated copies continue to turn up (with close to 300 volumes currently known to survive), and the new
gains in evidence play an important role in ongoing efforts to understand Melville's thought and craft as
well as the relationships of literary production to broader ideological contexts of history, culture, and
literacy. Broadly construed as a rich record of individual and collective experience, the detailed record of
Melville's engagement with diverse authors and texts offers significant opportunities for humanistic
inquiry along with a magnificent and complex example of self-definition through intellectual and artistic
cultivation. By electronically cataloging and updating the record of Melville's reading, and by
reproducing his markings and notes, Melville’s Marginalia Online succeeds and augments two standard
20th-century print resources: Merton M. Sealts Jr.’s “Check-List of Books Owned and Borrowed” (194850, 1966, and 1988) and Wilson Walker Cowen’s Melville’s Marginalia (1965; rpt. 1987).
Melville's Marginalia Online launched in January 2006 with considerable attention from the
academic community, including press coverage by the Chronicle of Higher Education (52.24 [17
February 2006] A14-19) about the project's recovery of erased annotations in Melville's copy of Thomas
Beale's The Natural History of the Sperm Whale, revealing unique evidence of Melville's creative
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processes and new information about the genesis and evolution of Moby-Dick (1851). In similar fashion,
the site's published editions of Melville's marginalia in Matthew Arnold's New Poems, Nathaniel
Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse, and The New Testament and Psalms illuminate thematic and
rhetorical aspects of Melville's own writings and the growth of his thought. In 2008, with financial
support from the Idaho Humanities Council (an NEH affiliate), the project published its "Online Catalog"
of nearly 800 bibliographical entries on books and documents known to have been owned or borrowed by
Melville, and the catalog continues to be updated as Melville's books re-emerge in auction and estate sales
and through scholarly discovery. For instance, Melville's multi-volume set of James Boswell's Life of
Johnson was reported to the project in 2009 by its owner, who had unknowingly purchased it cheaply at a
used book sale; and in 2010 the project's editors Steven Olsen-Smith and Peter Norberg identified the
New York Society Library's copy of William Johnson Neale's History of the Mutiny at Spithead and the
Nore as borrowed by Melville, with erased pencil marginalia that conform to Melville's style of marking
alongside subject matter he worked into his surviving manuscript of Billy Budd, Sailor. Melville's marked
and annotated copy of Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry was discovered by Olsen-Smith and
the project's bibliographical editor Dennis Marnon in the basement of the Brooklyn Public Library, where
it had existed for the past century uncatalogued and unknown. Along with digitally reproducing dispersed
volumes that have traditionally remained out of reach to most researchers, the project makes new
contributions to knowledge through technical recovery of erased marginalia and through archival research
and discovery by its editors.
The original format at Melville's Marginalia Online used a software combination of Microsoft
Word and Adobe Portable Document Format to digitally represent surrogate pages and marginalia from
Melville's surviving books. The project's current conversion to high-resolution photographs of Melville's
books was made possible by the generosity of several institutions and persons. Through its Open
Collections Project, Harvard University has presented the project with full scans of more than a dozen
titles including multi-volume sets of Shakespeare and Spenser. Under a 2009 NEH Digital Humanities
Fellowship awarded to the project's Associate General Editor Peter Norberg, arrangements were
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established with Villanova University's Digital Library that have since resulted in digitization of the
holdings of the Berkshire Athenaeum (close to a dozen marked and annotated copies) and Georgetown
University's Woodstock Theological Center. Selected volumes have also been scanned for the project by
University of Virginia's Small Special Collections Library and Yale University's Beinecke Library. At
Boise State University, the project photographically captured Melville's copy of Dante's Commedia after
receiving it on loan from private collector William Reese, and by similar arrangement the project
borrowed and scanned the New York Society Library's copy of Neale's History of the Mutiny at Spithead
and the Nore. These acts of institutional and private cooperation have made it possible for the project to
adopt the photographic format currently displayed through the front page and "Browse Volumes" link on
its website. (For purposes of comparison, the original PDF format remains temporarily available through
the project's "Online Catalog".)
To facilitate its conversion to photographs, the project has acquired an open-source markup tool,
"Coordinate Capture," created by Matt Cohen, of the University of Texas, Austin, under an NEH grant to
digitize Walt Whitman's annotations. The tool was installed by Cohen's former graduate assistant Travis
Brown, now Assistant Director of Research and Development at the Maryland Institute of Technology in
the Humanities. Starting in summer 2012, with a grant newly awarded by Boise State University's Osher
Life-Long Learning Institute, Olsen-Smith and Elisa Barney Smith, of the Department of Electrical &
Computer Engineering, will collaborate on a technical upgrade to the markup tool using Tesseract (an
open-source Optical Character Recognition program) to generate searchable files for the site's
photographic images of the text areas in Melville's books. In the process of that upgrade, the project will
develop its markup software further to meet Textual Encoding Initiative standards for its digital editions
of Melville's marginalia. For that task, the editors and developers will work closely with staff of the
Melville Electronic Library directed by John Bryant (whose letter of support for this grant proposal is
included in the appendix) to ensure that Melville's Marginalia Online and MEL will be fully interoperable
to capitalize on the many significant links between the author's marginalia and his surviving manuscripts
and published writings.
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The conversion to photographs has vastly improved the quality of material published at Melville's
Marginalia Online, which will shortly display digital copies of over 30 marked and annotated books
known to survive from Melville's library. In 2011/12, through the auspices of Boise State University's
Arts and Humanities Institute, College of Arts and Sciences, and Department of English, the project was
granted an annual budget, enabling recent development of its web interface and a project-level
fundraising initiative to generate financial support from users and private parties. Along with taking part
in the present NEH Challenge Grant proposal initiated by Boise State University's Arts and Humanities
Institute, the project editors are pursuing an NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant
to continue digitization of Melville's books at participating institutions. If successful, the project will
enjoy a windfall of new photographic material for production and publication during the challenge grant
period, and its editors and contributing scholars are in the process of establishing editorial branches at
other institutions to take part in publication of this material at http://melvillesmarginalia.org/.
Project needs under an NEH Challenge Grant will include a developer trained in Python to
perform the necessary upgrades to the markup tool, travel expenses and release time for the project
director's work at cooperating institutions, a graduate student assistant to assist in staff training for the
fully developed tool, and additional hardware and software upgrades for the project's workspace at Boise
State University.
Western Writers Series Online / Western Print Culture Online (Project Director: Tara
Penry)
Under the Arts and Humanities Institute's digital humanities initiative, the forty-year-old Boise
State University Western Writers Series (WWS) will become the Western Writers Series Online
(WWSOnline), a wholly digital publisher of scholarship on writers and texts of the North American West.
When it was founded in 1972, the Western Writers Series provided leadership in a then-emerging field of
western American studies by offering a publication outlet for scholars and an information source for
readers. In recent years, the Western Writers Series Advisory Board and BSU administration have
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concurred that the series requires significant changes if it hopes to retain its position of leadership in the
field of western studies. WWSOnline will fulfill the original mission of the series more effectively by
reaching a wider international audience of scholars, teachers, and interested readers. The initiative aims to
do more than digitize print publications, instead designing its product with the web environment and Web
2.0 communities in mind.
Like the WWS, the WWSOnline is intended for an audience of teachers, students, and general
readers interested in the literature of the American West. WWSOnline will publish interviews,
transcriptions of primary source materials, reports on collections and exhibits, and critical essays that
deepen readers’ understanding of western authors and their work. Critical essays submitted to
WWSOnline will undergo scholarly peer review. WWSOnline is an open access project, supported by
Boise State University with faculty time and budget previously dedicated to the WWS.
An early proponent of multicultural study, the Western Writers Series published N. Scott
Momaday (1973) and Plains Indian Autobiographies (1973) among its first numbers. (Both titles are now
available in the WWS Digital Editions.) With the support of the Advisory Board in the 2000s, especially
emeritus board member Prof Laurie Ricou (U of British Columbia), WWS expanded its field of interest to
include the North American West (and thus Canada and northern Mexico) – a choice that will continue in
these online initiatives. The move from print monographs to the web will facilitate discovery across
ethnic and cultural interests in the region – as people come to the site for information about one author,
they may discover images, headlines, links, or resources promoting understanding of another writer from
another subregion, ethnicity, or cultural group within the North American West.
In addition to moving the well-established and trusted Western Writers Series brand online, this
project aims to create publishing and learning opportunities for the study of print culture in the American
West, with a new initiative called Western Print Culture Online. As WWS editor and project director Tara
Penry wrote recently while surveying the relationship between book history and the American West, “the
feast of print culture has long been a moveable one, and the American West has been a full participant.
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The conjunction of western studies and book history looks promising.”2 Capitalizing on the brand
familiarity of Western Writers Series Online, Western Print Culture Online will be similarly designed to
provide an authoritative, open-access space for sharing scholarship, resources, and reviews relating to the
study of books and print in the North American West.
Resource requirements include web development, graduate student assistance, professional
development for the principal investigator, and software purchases subject to needs identified by web
development staff.
Stories of Idaho (Project Director: Leslie Madsen Brooks)
Traditionally, historians have defined public history as history projects and programs created by
trained historians for a public audience. However, in an age when digital tools are making it easy to
access historical documents and photos, as well as to share and interpret that information, members of the
public can and should become co-creators in public history projects. Dr. Leslie Madsen-Brooks’s
proposed project, Stories of Idaho, embraces such participation and enables a synthesis of the knowledge
of historians, archivists, conservators, and the lay public.
The project was inspired by a genre of museum exhibit—or, rather, by the limitations of museum
exhibition more generally. If museum exhibits, as some museum studies scholars have held, actually tell
visitors as much about their developers and the era in which they were created as they do about the
exhibits’ intended topics, then the exhibits around the state that purport to tell the story of Idaho reveal
much about Idahoans’ views of their history during the middle of the twentieth century. Visitors to these
museums typically learn about Native Americans, fur trappers, traders, pioneers (including Mormons),
and perhaps briefly the Chinese in Idaho. Space and resource limitations preclude these county and
regional museums from providing a more comprehensive, in-depth history of the state. Many of these
museums do not have the staffing or financial resources to renovate their permanent exhibits—and these
exhibits are appreciated by teachers because they do align in many ways with the state’s social studies
2
“Book History Comes West,” Western American Literature Summer 2011: 203
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content standards for elementary and secondary education, so there has not been much movement to
renovate them.
Still, the history of Idaho has a broader audience than schoolchildren. Madsen-Brooks proposes to
create a new mobile app and website called Stories of Idaho, a digital platform that will emphasize
polyvocality and diversity of perspective to provide a more holistic view of the history and culture of the
people of Idaho. The app and digital platform will draw upon archival sources, museum collections, oral
histories, interviews, historic films, and project-specific documentary videos. The project’s core content
will be authored by historians and graduate students in history, but other content can be added and
remixed by Stories of Idaho users.
The content will be searchable, but also browseable by topic. Themes might include, but are not
limited to, the histories in Idaho of the Church of Latter-Day Saints; the Chinese experience in Boise;
major infrastructure projects such as dams and bridges; the wolf and its management; the arts of Idaho’s
native peoples; Idaho as a refugee resettlement site; mining and resource extraction; Japanese American
internment in Idaho; the ways the railroads influenced Idaho’s development, particularly in Pocatello; and
the Old Idaho State Penitentiary.
The project is perhaps best described through its proposed user experience. A typical user—let’s
call her Marta—opens the app. Presented with a selection of topics, Marta decides she’d like to learn
more about the history of the Chinese in Idaho. Stories of Idaho presents Marta with a selection of text,
video, audio, and images about the Idaho Chinese experience. Marta reads about the history of Boise’s
Chinatown and studies the images accompanying the text. The text does not shy away from controversy;
it tells about the destruction of Chinatown, the push of the Chinese community out of the geographical
heart of Boise, and the racism faced by Asian Americans in Idaho in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. The history includes the perspective of former residents of Chinatown as well as the urban
developers who wanted to keep Boise’s development and economic growth in step with other cities of its
size. As she turns over this controversy in her mind, Marta follows a link to a walking tour of the area
where Boise’s Chinatown existed; she decides to take the self-guided tour. At certain points she is
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prompted to hold her device in front of her, and a layer of augmented reality appears on the screen,
showing her what used to be there or introducing her to a former resident of Chinatown. Satisfied with her
experience, Marta uses the in-app function to share highlights of her tour on Facebook and Twitter.
Later, Marta decides to browse more of the content available in Stories of Idaho. She sees that the
project is soliciting stories from Idahoans about their own experiences around certain themes, including
immigration. Marta is a native Idahoan, but her family moved here from Mexico in the early 1980s. Using
some interview prompts suggested by Stories of Idaho, she videotapes a brief interview with her parents
and submits it to the project. She is delighted when her interview is posted to the site as featured content,
and project coordinators contact her for more information about her family’s experiences when
developing the next module of content for Stories of Idaho.
Marta can also remix content on the Stories of Idaho website, combining it in new ways to share
her own experiences as an Idahoan. She can assemble a collage or storyboard of museum artifacts,
images, music, and her own photographs, and she writes about what the collected objects mean to her.
She submits the collage to Stories of Idaho, and it is posted immediately. She sends the link to friends
and family.
Users without mobile devices can access much the same content via a website on their laptop or
desktop computers. In addition to the content made available inside the app, the Stories of Idaho website
also will offer resources for teachers, including lesson plans, and will provide a list of museum, archival,
and published resources for researchers. Furthermore, like Marta, site visitors will be invited to submit
their own stories—in text, photos, audio, or video—to the Stories of Idaho project. These stories will be
considered for inclusion in the project’s searchable database of multimedia content; particularly
interesting stories will be featured where appropriate. Visitors can remix content as well.
This grassroots contribution to digital historical practice is not unprecedented in Boise. The Boise
Wiki (http://boise.localwiki.org), currently in alpha and scheduled to launch into beta late this summer,
invites contributions from current and former Boiseans. The wiki, another project conceived by MadsenBrooks, innovates public history practice by transferring the responsibility of crafting and editing local
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history to lay stakeholders. Whereas the Wikipedia model asks for pure objectivity and requires the
citation of “outside” sources, the Boise Wiki assumes that local, insider knowledge is valuable. This kind
of subjectivity allows the community to explore what happens when its members craft history by
beginning not with the national narratives they learned in school, but with their own lives. Stories of
Idaho may recruit participation from some of the most engaged contributors to the Boise Wiki.
Research for the project’s core narratives will be undertaken in part at the state archives and the
special collections of universities around the state. Boise State University’s special collections department
in particular holds dozens of manuscript collections significant to Idaho, and especially to the state’s
environmental history. Primary sources, including maps, documents, and artifacts, to be featured in
Stories of Idaho will come from a network of museums around the state, with the initial participation
coming from a representative urban museum—the Bannock County Historical Museum in Pocatello—and
a typical rural museum—the Owyhee County Historical Museum. (See appendix for letters of
commitment from each museum’s executive director.) Furthermore, Boise State history professor Jill Gill,
who is compiling the first-ever statewide archive of Idaho’s African-American history by undertaking
oral histories and combing through documents in residents’ attics and garages, will partner with the
project to flesh out what has been a significant gap in Idaho historiography: the African-American
experience in Idaho from the nineteenth century through today.
If museum exhibits tell us as much about the time in which they were constructed as about the
content they purport to share, then an app and website likely function the same way. Whereas the
museums’ decades-old exhibits highlight an older educational paradigm where students and visitors are
meant to absorb content rather than interact with it, the learning objectives underlying Stories of Idaho
highlight different paradigms. Specifically, through its showcasing of multiple viewpoints and sources,
and through its solicitation of contributions from the public, Stories of Idaho will show its app users and
website visitors that histories are constructed, not pure recitations of past events. Users and visitors will
come to understand they, too, can use primary sources to construct and share their own understanding of
Idaho’s history—and the app and website will invite them to do just that.
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Incubating New Projects
Having originated at Boise State University, the three digital projects described above
demonstrate significant potential for its projected Digital Humanities program, with the Melville and
Western Writers projects supplying immediate national reputation and substance, along with a start-up
initiative in Stories of Idaho, which will likely prompt similar local-history online projects in the
surrounding region. From the innovative crowd-sourcing methods projected for Stories of Idaho and its
ties to local resources, to the successful institutional and private partnerships cultivated by Melville's
Marginalia Online, these projects illustrate the determination of the principal investigators, their longterm visions for innovative scholarship at Boise State, and their creative response to financial and
logistical obstacles that typically prevent ambitious humanities projects from taking hold at state
institutions of Boise State's background and means. It is of course the rise of the internet and of digital
humanities as a discipline that have made such opportunities possible for institutions like Boise State. By
establishing an endowed Digital Humanities program with the help of an NEH challenge grant, the Arts
and Humanities Institute will foster a technical infrastructure and professional environment to sustain its
three core projects and, as importantly, facilitate others.
As the Arts and Humanities Institute began to gather information in preparation for this
grant application, it brought together a large group of faculty and staff at Boise State University who have
a range of experience with the digital humanities. Like the three principal investigators named above,
some are deeply involved in using technology in their research and teaching; others have dipped a toe in
the water and are intrigued by the possibilities. And then there are the newly-hired faculty who bring
with them ideas for digital projects that we simply do not know about yet. All of these faculty and their
projects are the future of the digital humanities at Boise State University, and they will be the focus of our
program’s professional development practices. For an example, let us take a moment to imagine the ways
that a Digital Humanities program at Boise State University might work with a faculty member who is at
the “intrigued” stage.
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The first point of contact between that faculty member (we will call him Professor Djorovic) and
the Digital Humanities program will probably come when he receives word of the program’s schedule of
workshops for the coming school year. Those workshops will have originated in discussions held at the
level of the program’s Advisory Board. They will likely have been planned to respond to known needs at
the university but also to encourage faculty to explore potentially unfamiliar methods and technologies.
The workshops, led by local faculty, staff, or visiting practitioners, are introductory. During this particular
school year, they will address using new media to disseminate research; manipulating GIS data as a tool
for tracing change (demographic, land use, etc.) over time; introductory methods for digitizing,
annotating, and sharing document collections; introducing students to digital methods of research and
analysis; and others. For purposes of our example, let’s say Professor Djorovic would like to explore the
potential of GIS for his current research on demographic and environmental change in a particular region
of Europe.
The workshop enlightens Professor Djorovic to the basic practices and potential uses of GIS.
When the workshop concludes, he meets with a member of the staff of the Digital Humanities program,
who connects him with Boise State University faculty with GIS expertise; the program also provides
funding to support this consultation and collaboration. Program staff and local experts help Dr. Djorovic
scaffold his own learning and implementation of GIS. Were such expertise not available locally, the
Digital Humanities program would help Dr. Djorovic locate more sophisticated GIS instruction. In
addition, the staff of the Digital Humanities program also helps Dr. Djorovic explore professional
development on a national level, including THATCamps, workshops and programs of other established
Digital Humanities programs, and ESRI’s online and in-person training. Professor Djorovic will
eventually need to decide if he wishes to be trained in the tools and methods of GIS or would rather
consult with others who are, but whichever path he chooses, the Digital Humanities program will provide
him direction and training. The role of the Digital Humanities program would not end there, though. It
would help Professor McGill find and apply for outside funding; it would direct Dr. Djorovic to
appropriate venues for sharing his research.
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This individual intrigued by the potential of Digital Humanities represents just one example of the
way that Boise State University’s Digital Humanities program would incubate new research. The program
would not just follow demand from the faculty at the university. It would take stock of the work that is
ongoing at the university and seeking ways of enhancing it. This could happen via more directed
professional development. Imagine, for instance, that Professor Djorovic is not an isolated individual but
part of an existing group of researchers at Boise State who are already working together on a project or
projects that require knowledge of GIS; they’ve achieved a certain level of expertise, but need more. The
Digital Humanities program would respond to this by setting up specialized training to meet that need.
This could well mean bringing in outside experts with the level and type of expertise required. Or it could
simply involve the faculty with ongoing projects applying to the program for the release time to make it
possible to pursue the research.
The Impact of a Digital Humanities Program at Boise State University and in the Region
New humanities faculty increasingly arrive at Boise State with experience in digital methods of
research, creative activity, pedagogy, and assessment. But while they offer the university up-to-date
preparation and practices, they need an institutional environment that will be able to support their work
and enable them to further develop their digital skills. The regular schedule of faculty development
programs and workshops described above will meet a diversity of needs and skill levels, enabling us to
make digital applications a regular part of the humanities scholarship of our faculty. Boise State
University already has researchers with global reputations in their fields. The availability of digital tools
and knowledge necessary to make their work available digitally, and to enhance or even reconfigure their
research through digital methods and tools—whether by scanner, GPS, digital teaching platforms or
mechanisms of new media—will offer career-altering forms of professional development.
The benefits of digital humanities to Boise State University’s students will be no less
transformative. On the graduate level, members of the program will offer regular seminars on digital
humanities topics and practices as well as internships and Graduate Assistant positions with the
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program’s projects. The History Department is already the lead department in the Boise State University
Mobile Learning Initiative for 2012-2013, and at the focus of that initiative is the Master of Applied
Historical Research. On the undergraduate level, the work of our Digital Humanities program will
contribute to the creation and testing of new methods in the classroom and outside of the classroom where
a variety of approaches to digitized pedagogy are being conceived.
The program's aims of intellectual and cultural enrichment will benefit the state of Idaho as a
whole. Idaho is relatively lightly-populated and rural, with the largest population concentrations existing
in the Treasure and Magic Valleys, Pocatello, and North Idaho. Without promoting specific political or
ideological points of view, the projects described in this application will expand opportunities in Idaho for
intellectual inquiry and discussion of historically meaningful issues that have traditionally received little
serious attention within Idaho's largely homogenous and socially conservative culture. For instance,
Stories of Idaho will document historical episodes such as the purging of Boise's once-thriving Chinatown
district, of which so few vestiges remain that most residents are unaware that the state ever had a sizeable
Asian population. The project will present neglected aspects of Idaho’s past using tools and methods that
will broadcast a fuller vision of the Intermountain West and Idaho's place in its history. In a similar
manner, the Western Writers Series Online will make available the published content of its 40-year print
history along with new online content that enhances existing material while making new contributions to
knowledge about local and regional authors. In much of the mainstream and regional culture, conceptions
of Western American literature remain anchored to traditional images of "the mountain man, the cowboy,
and the pioneer"—to quote Boise State's own "Western American Literature" course description as it
appeared as recently as 2010 in the university's Undergraduate Catalog. By taking a broader and more
inclusive approach to the region's literary history, the Western Writers Series Online promises to provide
the fullest and most diverse resource available to the citizens of Idaho. Even Melville's Marginalia Online
offers locally relevant cultural and intellectual stimulus on issues surrounding this consummate American
writer, whose religious skepticism and heterodox tendencies brought him into conflict with the religious
conservatism of his own day and resulted in the posthumous erasure of marginalia (probably by surviving
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family members) now being documented and recovered at the project. (Olsen-Smith's annual courses on
Melville and his contemporaries offered for community members over the age of 50 through Boise State's
Osher Life-Long Learning Institute have produced wait-lists for the past three consecutive years.)
Through freely accessible digital venues and supportive local programming, exhibitions, and symposia,
these projects and others will bring public humanities engagement in Idaho to unprecedented levels.
Finally, the work of the Digital Humanities program will have national and international
applications. In part, this is inevitable – one of the purposes of “going digital” is to make information
universally available. Innovations in research methods and methods of presentation achieve more than a
local impact thanks to the fact that they are immediately available globally. But the projects we have
initiated at Boise State University have intrinsic international implications, beyond the mere fact that they
involve some type of digitization. Melville’s Marginalia Online already has such a reputation and
regularly logs web visitors from Finland and Japan among other areas of the world; Stories of Idaho, with
its novel, multiplatform approach to presenting Idaho’s history as well as its innovative understanding of
the nature of knowledge discovery and creation, will have implications far beyond the borders of our
state.
The University’s Commitment to the Humanities
Since 2008, the Arts and Humanities Institute at Boise State University has shared a place at the
top of President Kustra’s priorities for the university. His support in the face of much pressure to privilege
research and teaching in the STEM disciplines has inspired and motivated arts and humanities faculty to
new levels of research productivity and commitment. In the intervening years, what began as the modest
hope for a bit more support for research and creative activity in these areas has grown into a full-fledged
institute, supporting six residential fellows, over a dozen research projects, a slate of public programming
and community collaborations, and a plan for space in a Fine Arts building which rests atop the list for
capital improvements at the university.
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The AHI is currently funded by the Division of Research, and is directed by Dr. Nick Miller
(professor of history) along with an administrative assistant. It has an advisory board of seven faculty in
addition to the director; these faculty are drawn from the Art, English, History, Modern Languages and
Literatures, Music, Philosophy, and Theater Departments. Two colleges, the College of Arts and Sciences
and the College of Social Sciences and Public Affairs, are directly involved in the AHI’s governance via
particular departments. The Institute thus has the support of the university administration and the
departments directly involved in its programming. However, it must be noted that the AHI is housed in
the Division of Research precisely to maintain its autonomy from any academic department or college
and because its position outside of disciplines offers more potential as a collaborator between colleges,
most importantly between Arts and Humanities disciplines and others outside those fields. The AHI is
home to the Idaho Film Collection and is negotiating the inclusion of the Idaho Center for the Book; both
of these are interdisciplinary, interdepartmental projects that reflect the strategy of the AHI. Finally, the
AHI is providing funding for over a dozen projects, including the digital projects Melville’s Marginalia
Online and the Boise Wiki. One of next year’s AHI Fellows, Dr. Jill Gill, is a member of the team
producing Stories of Idaho. The AHI has developed strong working relationships with organizations in
the preservation community in Boise, including the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Preservation
Idaho, and the Boise City Department of Arts and History (see letter from Terri Schorzman). The Arts
and Humanities Institute has therefore already become part of the fabric of Boise State University and the
community, thanks to the commitment of the administration, the faculty, and the wise governance of
university and institute leaders.
As for the future: President Bob Kustra has emphasized the development of the Arts and
Humanities Institute, and has taken a special interest in the Institute’s role in helping the humanities
successfully manage the waves of technological change that have influenced research and teaching
globally. We are pleased to report that President Kustra has made fundraising for the AHI a priority of
the next capital campaign for the university. An early challenge of any new initiative is to gain traction
with the university administration, and the establishment of the AHI as a fundraising focus at Boise State
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is a testament to this support. At present, evidence of institutional commitment to our fledgling Institute
consists of funding of AHI Fellows, staff, and programming, at $165,000.00 per year (FY 2011 and 2012,
with commitments at that level for 2013). In addition, thanks to the efforts and funding of the Vice
President for Research and Economic Development, a beautiful space of 3,640 square feet has been
opened for the AHI in the Ron and Linda Yanke Family Research Park, a new facility along the Boise
River. The AHI space will serve as gallery, exhibit, and meeting space, and has already housed an art
exhibit since its completion on March 1, 2012. The AHI plans to expand into newly vacated space in
August, 2012, some of which will be devoted to the Digital Humanities program.
Fundraising to Meet the Challenge
President Kustra’s emphasis on funding the Arts and Humanities Institute has great importance
for the Institute's projected fundraising, an area in which Boise State University has an established history
of success. Last year it surpassed $185.4 million during the first-ever comprehensive effort to raise funds
to benefit its people, places, and programs. This makes it the most successful higher education
fundraising campaign in Idaho history. At its official end on June 30, 2011, the seven-year Destination
Distinction campaign reached nearly 106 percent of the original $175 million goal and affected all areas
of campus. The campaign engaged more than 23,000 donors and included gifts ranging from as small as
a few dollars up to $13 million. In all, this first campaign created new scholarships and funded three
endowed chairs, several fellowships, graduate programs, research centers and new and renovated
buildings. The campaign also booked an additional $28,250,948.62 in its Fund for the Future. These
planned , revocable gifts will be received in the future and represent a only a small part of the growing
support for Boise State amongst our some 70% of graduates who still call the Boise area home.
As validation of our fundraising success, Boise State University was named a winner of the
National Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) 2011 Educational Fundraising
Award for its efforts to advance the university during the past three years. The awards honor superior
fundraising programs across the country and are a component of CASE’s Circle of Excellence program.
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Boise State was selected to receive an Overall Performance Award based on a blind analysis of three
years of fundraising data. Some 874 higher education institutions were eligible for the awards. Boise
State was one of only 24 institutions to receive an Overall Performance award. Because the Boise State
fundraising program was judged by a panel of its peers, the award was not only a recognition of its high
value to the institution, but also an acknowledgement of its stature among advancement professionals.
University leadership and the Boise State University Foundation strongly support the creation of
a Digital Humanities program in the Arts and Humanities Institute at Boise State. In coordination with
the Boise State University Foundation, University Advancement leadership will execute plans for raising
funds to meet the NEH funding requirement. The Boise State University Foundation was formed in 1964
as a private, non-profit corporation securing financial support for Boise State University. It manages a
$70 million endowment fund which consistently outperforms peer institution endowment returns. Boise
State University President Bob Kustra has identified the AHI Digital Humanities project as among the
most important to achieve our desired status as a Metropolitan Research University. The support of the
president will be illustrated in his visits with prospects, public remarks on behalf of the AHI, and
provision of human and financial resources to support the AHI digitization effort.
The Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations will solicit lead and major gifts from family
foundations and national foundations. The Director of the Boise State Annual Fund will integrate this
Challenge Grant into our highly successful and rapidly expanding student calling program, located in the
University Advancement offices. Our Planned Giving Executive Director will lend support in the
identification and solicitation of both current and long-term gifts to the Digital Humanities initiative in the
AHI. The feasibility of a successful AHI fundraising program is high, thanks to the support of the
president, our recent campaign cultivations, and our status as the lead institution in Idaho’s major
population center with a reputation for public engagement and philanthropy. Boise State University
Advancement proposes to meet the 3:1 match required by the NEH Challenge according to the following
timetable:
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NEH Funds
Non-federal
Funds
Year One
Year Two
$150,000
$450,000
$75,000
$225,000
Year
Three
$75,000
$225,000
Year
Four
$200,000
$200,000
Year Five
Total
$0
$400,000
$500,000
$1,500,000
The Gift Range chart for our AHI $1.5 Million Campaign for the Digital Humanities program is as
follows:
Campaign
Goal
Gift Range
Number of
Gifts
Needed in
Range
Number
of
Prospects
Needed
for Range
Total
Number
of
Prospect
s Needed
Total for
Range
Cumulativ
e Total
% of
Goal
$1,500,000
$150,000
$100,000
$75,000
$50,000
1
3
6
15
25
3
9
18
45
75
3
12
30
75
120
$150,000
$300,000
$450,000
$750,000
$150,000
$450,000
$900,000
$1,650,000
10%
30%
60%
110%
Timin
g
The fundraising plan will build upon the momentum created by the first comprehensive campaign at
Boise State. Special lecture series by AHI faculty members and associated receptions have generated
strong prospect lists as well in early 2012. The Development Directors , Corporate and Foundation
Relations Director, Annual Fund Director, Planned Giving Director and University Advancement VP and
AVPs will finalize a strategic fundraising plan in May 2012 which provides for the discovery, cultivation,
solicitation and stewardship of our highest capacity prospects. On-campus visits, office calls, road trips,
faculty introductions and one-on-one lunches and dinners with the president will be coordinated.
Collateral materials will be developed to communicate the vision of the AHI, and a tailored message on
the importance of digitization to the humanities will be created. The prospect list, calls made, results of
calls and next steps will all be coordinated through and monitored by the AVP for Development. This
strategy and organization is the same one that generated significant success in our first comprehensive
campaign.
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Assessment
Assessment will take place on 4 levels:
1. Upon receipt of the Challenge Grant, the Digital Humanities program will establish an advisory board
consisting of faculty and staff of Boise State University and established Digital Humanities practitioners
from outside the university. In the beginning, we would argue that a ratio of 1:1 external to internal board
members would be appropriate, with a target size for the entire board of 8 members. The Director of the
Digital Humanities program (see appendix) would act as non-voting chairperson of the board. The
purpose of the board would be to assess the work and results of the Digital Humanities program according
to best practices in the field with the involvement of outside experts who may or may not be drawn from
the Advisory Board.
2. As projects come online, we will track visits to the given websites. This would be an acceptable
general method of assessment for projects such as Melville’s Marginalia Online and the Western Writers’
Series Online.
3. Stories of Idaho would present a slightly greater challenge, as it would be both application and web
based, so its presence and influence could not be measured directly by visits to a website. Project
evaluation will be fourfold and will target users, contributors, and experts. The evaluation process seeks
to answer three primary questions:
• What aspects of Idaho history do users find most engaging, and why? What aspects of the
content are most attractive to users?
• What part of the experience of the app and website do users find most conducive to broadening
or deepening their understanding of Idaho’s history, and why?
• What are the advantages and liabilities of an approach that blends professional historians’
narratives with amateur or lay public contributions?
Users of the app and website will be prompted to complete a survey to provide feedback on the project.
Those who contribute digital materials to the project—for example, Marta’s videotaped interview of her
parents—will receive different surveys from more casual users. When the app and website are nearing the
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end of their beta phase, the principal investigator will solicit evaluations by historians of Idaho and
leaders in the digital humanities. Finally, the principal investigator will analyze users' demographics and
patterns of use based on data generated by the website’s analytics package; this data will allow for a better
alignment of content, features, and audience. All of this data and analysis will inform updates to the
Stories of Idaho app and website.
4. Finally, more standard means of assessment will be carried out to assess the extents to which projects
are making contributions to knowledge in their fields. The Director of the program and advisory board
members will locate and document reviews of work done within the various projects, monitor citations of
projects in published research, and keep track of principle investigators' contributions to appropriate
conferences and meetings as well as their active membership in appropriate organizations and disciplinary
bodies.
Recent National Endowment for the Humanities and Idaho Humanities Council Grant Activity
Received
Jaqueline O’Connor, Department of English, NEH Enduring Questions Grant for course on “What is
Justice.” May 2011 to April 2013, $21,643.00
Jaqueline O’Connor, Department of English, “Illegal Bodies: Law and Emotion in the Work of Tennessee
Williams.” November 2011 to June 2012 (Idaho Humanities Council). $3,500.00 (Match of $4,363.00)
Samantha Harvey, Department of English, “Arts and Humanities Institute Public Lecture Series on ‘The
Idea of Nature.’” November 2011 to May 2012 (Idaho Humanities Council). $2,000.00 (Match of
$2,000.00).
Clay Morgan, Department of English, “Latin-American Arts Festival.” November 2011 to May 2012
(Idaho Humanities Council). $4,000.00 (Match of $5,883.00).
Pending
Lisa Brady, Department of History, “Powering the Pan-Pacific: Energy, Environment, and History” (NEH
Summer Institute for College and University Teachers. October 2012 to December 2013. $199,999.00.
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Challenge Grant Budget for Endowment for the Boise State University Arts and Humanities
Institute Digital Humanities Program: 2013-2017
The endowment that results from the receipt of the NEH Challenge Grant will be used entirely on staffing
a Digital Humanities Program. The Arts and Humanities Institute will provide resources necessary to
purchase faculty time, faculty and staff travel, and professional development workshops. Each of the three
projects described in the application requires programming and design expertise – these are the expenses
to which the endowment will be devoted.
Total NEH funds requested:
$500,000
Year 1: $150,000
Year 2: $75,000
Year 3: $75,000
Year 4: $200,000
Total nonfederal contributions:
$1,500,000
Total Grant Funds (NEH plus Match):
$2,000,000
Planned Expenditures:
Direct
Fundraising costs
$37,500
Endowed
Principal
Rate of return to be expended
Projected annual expendable income
Uses of endowment income
Technical support: developers, design services, students
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$1,962,500
4%
$78,500
$78,500