The National Endowment for the
Humanities
Brett Bobley
Chief Information Officer
www.neh.gov
bbobley@neh.gov
Some History

In 1967, NEH gathered together leading
humanities scholars and computer
scientists and posed two questions:
1967 NEH Computing
Conference

Question 1: "At what stage should an
agency, in making grants involving
computer use, insist on some
standardization of format so that
projects are not isolated repositories but
are subject to general access
throughout the country?"
1967 NEH Computing
Conference

Question 2: "Will the computer call for a
reorganization of humanistic knowledge,
and will computer capacity make
possible a significantly new kind of
encyclopedia of humanistic
knowledge?"
Key Items




Creating technology standards for accessing
humanities content
Preserving humanities materials and making them
accessible via technology
Studying technology as a subject and understanding
its impact on reading, writing, and understanding
Researching ways in which technology can enable us
to perform new humanities scholarship
Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)
has produced a set of guidelines for
formatting humanities texts to ensure
their most effective retrieval.
 TEI- SGML DTD (document type
definition) is widely used.
 the Women Writers Project at Brown
http://www.wwp.brown.edu/ is one
recent example.

Encoded Archival Description
(EAD)
now the standard for creating Internetaccessible archival finding aids
 examples: the Online Archive of
California at the University of California,
Berkeley.
 the Online Archive of New Mexico at the
University of New Mexico.

Thesaurus Linguae Graecae
Project (1972)
grant given to the University of
California at Irvine for TLG.
 dedicated to amassing and maintaining
in an electronic database all extant
Greek texts from Homer to the fall of
Byzantium
 provides unified access to over 10,000
works by more than 3,330 authors.

Papyri Project
under the direction of Columbia U.
 to digitize important papyrus collections
 create an integrated information system
via the Internet by developing common
standards for digital imaging of papyri
and formatting electronic data about this
ancient writing material.

Digital Library Initiative
joint project with NSF and others.
 develop standards and best practices
that will be critical to the effective use of
digital technology in the humanities
 addressing currently unsolved technical
problems concerning the digital
preservation of text, sound, and video
and its delivery via the World Wide
Web.

Technology as Subject
the impact of new technologies on the
way we read, write, distribute, and
understand text & literature.
 the relationship of electronic texts to
oral and print cultures
 to what extent can traditional ethical
theories be applied to developments
made possible by modern technology?

Digital Parallel Production
Grants
joint project with Corporation for Public
Broadcasting
 funding television documentaries that
utilize interactive datacasting elements
 Crucible of the Millennium -- a four-hour
series will be enhanced by the addition
of a "virtual" exploration of an Aztec
pyramid.

H-Net
NEH funded the H-Net project at
Michigan State University.
 humanities-based discussion groups
moderated by top scholars.
 over 90,000 subscribers.

http://www.h-net.msu.edu/
Teaching with Technology

helped propel advances in digital technologies for
humanities education

The Valley of the Shadow at the University of
Virginia, a website about the civil war
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/vshadow2/

Oyez, Oyez, Oyez is a Supreme Court Web site
developed at Northwestern University
http://oyez.nwu.edu/
Challenge Grants

At the Electronic Text Center of the University of
Virginia (whose archive of 45,000 texts is regularly
accessed by over 50,000 online users a day), an
NEH Challenge Grant will support enhancements to
the technology infrastructure and address training
needs that will enable this pioneering digital effort to
enjoy continued growth.
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/
NEH Divisions
Research
 Education
 Preservation and Access
 Challenge
 Public Programs

Contact Information
www.neh.gov
 White Paper on NEH, Science &
Technology:

www.neh.gov/publications/workingpapers.html

Brett Bobley, CIO: bbobley@neh.gov