We are thrilled to announce that Wired Humanities will have a sub-contract for expanding our Yucatec Maya open-access dictionary thanks to a grant recently awarded to Professor Paul Worley at the University of North Dakota.  Paul works with Native intellectuals who are creators of contemporary Mayan oral literature. He wishes to work with us to create a dictionary modeled after our Nahuatl dictionary, bridging historical and modern language samples to support the interpretation of cultural heritage materials of the past, present, and future.

We also wish to acknowledge the contributions of historical Yucatec Mayan language material from the work of Matthew Restall and additional historical and modern examples compiled by David Bolles.  We are so pleased to see this project, started with the significant input of former UO student, Kaitlan Smith, moving forward again!  Thank you, Paul Worley, for stepping up and giving us this opportunity.

Tsikbal Ich Maya Project (from Worley's blog)

We are delighted to announce that Wired Humanities has been awarded funding for two years to create an open-access Zapotec Dictionary. This support is a part of the Department of Education grant received by Latin American Studies and the Center for Latin@ and Latin American Studies at the University of Oregon. We have taken our winning formula for the Nahuatl Dictionary, cloned it, and modified it, and are now filling it with Zapotec data (to include Zapotec of the Valleys, of the Sierra, and of the Isthmus).  Many thanks to our database technician, Ginny White, and to our new and continuing student staff.

Zeferino Mendoza (photo by Richard Hanson)

We also wish to express our appreciation for the participation of Zeferino Mendoza, a teacher and native speaker of Teotitlan del Valle, for contributing content to this project, and to Michel Oudijk (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and Gabriela Pérez-Báez (Smithsonian Institution) for their collaboration in expanding our historical and contemporary language samples.

Thanks to support from Justyna Olko’s Nahua Culture Change grant, underwritten by the European Research Council, work is now progressing on the Early Nahuatl Library. This represents a collaboration of numerous scholars who will be transcribing and translating largely textual manuscripts in Nahuatl from different time periods and locations around New Spain and early national Mexico. If you visit this page, please begin with the Alphabetic Listing, where you will find our first insertion. More manuscripts are soon to follow!

After fifteen years of serving the University of Oregon as the sole Digital Humanities unit on campus, WHP is being replaced (as of October 2012) by a new and more broadly defined Digital Scholarship Center (DSC) housed in the UO Libraries.  The new DSC will take over services offered to faculty across campus and across the disciplines, not just in the Humanities. We will provide a link here to the new DSC website as soon as it is up and running.  The UO Libraries will also be making announcements soon about the new DSC.

Meanwhile, some of WHP’s more recent projects will be carried forward and reshaped by the new DSC, some of our projects will simply be archived, and some, particularly those relating to research on Mesoamerica, will continue to grow independently of the new DSC. We do not have immediate plans to change the URLs for our Mesoamerican projects. For further information about the latter please contact Stephanie Wood, swood (at) uoregon (dot) edu.

Our collaborator, Professor Justyna Olko of the University of Warsaw, Poland, has just received news that she is the recipient of a grant for 1.3 million Euros for her “Nahua Culture Contact” project.  Her work dovetails with the online Nahuatl dictionary and the Early Nahuatl Library at WHP.  This grant will also support our continued collaboration with the Instituto de Docencia e Investigación en Etnología, Zacatecas (IDIEZ), which works with Nahuatl language preservation and revitalization.  The IDIEZ director, John Sullivan, is a co-editor of our open-access Nahuatl dictionary.  We are so thrilled that all this work is being honored by the most prestigious grant a scholar can obtain in Europe. Here’s a link to a news piece in Polish about the ERC award.

WHP Director Stephanie Wood has won support from Fulbright for a collaboration with the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin to help advance digital collections relating to Mesoamerica. This collaboration, involving the museum director Dr. Viola Koenig, the Mesoamerican Curator Maria Gaida, and additional staff, will take place July 25–August 15, 2012. This work also relates to WHP contributions to the Getty Research Portal.

WHP Director Stephanie Wood joined the Advisory Board of the Getty Research Portal and had the pleasure of giving a presentation about digital scholarship relating to Mesoamerica at the Getty Resesarch Institute on the date of the public launch, May 31, 2012. Check out the new research portal at: http://portal.getty.edu/portal/landing. This tool is aimed at art historians and indexes open access e-books and some journal articles. As it grows, it will become more global in content.  Increased coverage of Mesoamerica and Asia (especially East Asia) are major goals.

UO Team During AHPN Tour

WHP joined Carlos Aguirre (History, Latin American Studies) and Gabriela Martínez (SOJC) in multiple collaborations in Guatemala in March, signing an accord with the human rights archive, Archivo Histórico de la Policia Nacional (AHPN), and preparing to work with the Archivo General de Centro América and the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala. This is all part of a larger collaboration with Steve Huter and the Network Startup Resource Center, which generously provided funding for this third outreach to Guatemalan colleagues. We also had the helpful assistance of UO Libraries videographer Andrew Kirkpatrick and UO law student Greg Krupa. Professor Martínez is producing a documentary about the AHPN; see the trailer.

WHP faculty partner David Hollenberg and his Yemeni Manuscript project has been featured in the Spring 2012 issue of the Oregon Quarterly. We will be together in Berlin in May to present some of the details of our recent collaboration to add scholarship to the manuscripts that are being hosted by Princeton.