Funding

WHP is funded by a mix of external grant funding, private donations, and non-recurring, annual funding from the Vice President for Research at the University of Oregon. Formerly, funding was also generously provided by the Center for the Study of Women in Society.

The Wired Humanities Projects do not have the budget to offer fellowships, but we welcome the collaboration of faculty, students, and volunteers.  Together, we could create a collaborative project and seek external funding.

Current Grants

  • “Mesoamerican Cultures and their Histories: Spotlight on Oaxaca,” 2009–10 — NEH Summer Institute grant. Amount funded: $185,561, through December 2010. This institute is aimed at schoolteachers from around the United States who wish to increase or enhance the Mesoamerican cultural and historical content in their curricula. Twenty-five teachers will meet in Oaxaca July 11 through August 7, 2010, to explore archaeology, ethnohistory, the arts, and film with the end goal of increasing international understanding and appreciation for the heritage of the growing numbers of Hispanic students in our schools across the United States. There will also be an optional technical track. This institute will have the involvement of faculty from the University of Oregon (Lynn Stephen, Gabriela Martínez, and Stephanie Wood) and Mexican colleagues (from such institutions as the Biblioteca Burgoa, the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, and the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia), with whom we hope to have increasing opportunities for collaborative research. Space for the institute will be provided free by the Fundación Alfredo Harp Helú (FAHH), in a gesture of co-sponsorhip and international cooperation.  The FAHH is also underwriting a new university in Oaxaca (La Salle) and has a growing interest in seeing the University of Oregon and this new university have an exchange agreement for both students and faculty.  This could have a far-reaching impact on Latin American Studies and Romance Languages at the UO, among other units. Digital curricular materials developed by participating teachers will be shared via the Internet.
  • Nahuatl Dictionary, 2009–12 – An NEH/NSF Documenting Endangered Languages grant for an online, searchable, trilingual Nahuatl-Spanish-English Dictionary, 2009–12.  Amount funded: $350,000. This grant pays through the end of June 2012. This is another project involving international collaboration between WHP and a team in Mexico, in this case, at a university in Zacatecas, Mexico. This dictionary aims to preserve and support modern, spoken Nahuatl today by providing native speakers with the first-ever dictionary that will give them a definition of a given word in Nahuatl.  Historically, all dictionaries were really vocabularies that translated Nahuatl to the language of the colonizing cultures.   This dictionary project also proposes to have interfaces that will support the translation of thousands of manuscript written in Nahuatl between about 1540 and 1820. This body of material represents an unparalleled resource across the Americas for seeking indigenous perspectives on history. Finally, the dictionary will also serve the needs of linguistics researchers, for it will combine historical and modern language information with information about vowel length, glottal stops, and will have a field that employs the International Phonetic Alphabet.  Between the two teams, we already have more than 10,000 headwords, and we are increasing the number by 1,000 per month. Grant funds support both the team in Mexico and WHP, including our staff, students, and interns (we are currently 11 people in all). Additionally, it will support one graduate student in Linguistics, whom Susan Guion agreed to supervise.  Robert Haskett, Professor of History, is very interested in this dictionary; he uses it himself and sends students our way for internships.  Students of Romance Languages will also benefit from work on not only this dictionary but the clones we have made and are building in other indigenous languages of Mexico, including Mixtec, P’urhépecha, and Mayan. We also have plans for Zapotec.  Spanish majors have the option of helping develop these dictionaries for PLE credit, through courses taught by Amanda Powell, Cecilia Enjuto Rangel, and Amalia Gladhart. Amalia is also writing an expanded version of this opportunity for undergraduate research into the Title VIa proposal she is preparing to submit for Latin American Studies.
  • Text-Image-Linking Environment (TILE), 2009–12 – This is an NEH Preservation and Access grant, for the “Text-Image-Linking Environment” (TILE), 2009–12.  Amount funded: $400,000 in all, with the amount to the UO being $14,000, for participation during 2010-11.  The goal is the creation of a tool that would be a new web-based modular image markup set for both manual and semi-automated linking between encoded text and image of text, and image annotation. WHP has a subcontract for this NEH grant because of an earlier NEH grant we held from 2006-2008, a Collaborative Research grant to create a digital collection of Mexican pictorial manuscripts and maps.  The manuscripts with which we work sometimes diverge considerably from European traditions, making them a useful case study in this cutting-edge digital humanities research project organized by John Walsh, School of Library and Information Science, Indian University Bloomington, and Dorothy Carr Porter of the Digital Humanities Observatory, Irish Royal Academy, co-PIs.  Also participating are Neil Fraistat and Doug Reside of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), University of Maryland. MITH works closely with the Oxford Digital Library and the E-Science and Ancient Documents project at the University of Oxford. Melissa Terras is one of the Oxford links, although her home department is Library, Archive, and Information Studies at University College London.  This grant places WHP in a highly regarded digital humanities group internationally and could lead to winning further grants. The tool that we gain from this project will also benefit all collaborative projects with UO faculty, such as the team developing the Gender in History Digital Resources Collection (in Romance Languages, English, Art History, etc.), or Professor Julee Raiskin (Women’s and Gender Studies) and her graduate students, who are developing a digital Travel Ads analysis project.

Past Grants

  • “From the Yucatan to the Halls of Moctezuma: Mesoamerican Cultures and the Histories,” National Endowment for the Humanities, Education Division, Summer Institute for School Teachers. October 1, 2007 to December 31, 2008. $175,000. Supported a team of 12 staff, graduate students, undergraduate work-study students, and interns, while it also provided income for the Yamada Language Center for classroom and lounge space rental, and gave stipends to 26 schoolteachers from around the United States.

Outstanding Proposals

  • Digital Collection of Chinese Scrolls. We await word from the East Asia Global Scholars group, who put out a call for proposals for research, travel, and course materials that would benefit a growing East Asian Initiative at the University of Oregon. Funding potential: up to $6,000, which we would consider as seed money to be parlayed into a larger grant once we develop the prototype. What WHP proposes is to adapt our Distance Research Environment for the close study of the details of historical Chinese scrolls, two of which are held in the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art collections, and a third one that was digitized and “digitally washed” by the Social Science Instructional Lab. The resulting digital collection would be served open and free to the world to advance research and teaching. This annotation of the atomized scrolls is proposed to involve Professor Ina Asim (History), her graduate students and colleagues in China, plus undergraduates who will work with WHP. Stephanie Wood visited the Library of Congress on October 20, 2009, and met with John Hebert, Chief of Geography and Maps, who agreed to provide digital images of additional scrolls held there for future expansion of this digital collection. He also consulted on the potential application of Historical Geographic Information Science (HGIS) to the scrolls project, for many of the paintings have geographic dimensions.
  • GIS Workshops at the University of Virginia. A team of four UO people, including Stephanie Wood and Ginny White of WHP, Karen Estlund and Jon Jablonski of the Libraries, collectively prepared proposals for two rolling application periods for all of us to go to the University of Virginia in November and May to increase our training in GIS.  WHP has already been working with Jim Meacham in InfoGraphics and Jessica Phelps, a graduate student in Geography, to bring HGIS to a growing number of projects at the UO that have geographic and historical dimensions, such as the Chinese Scrolls project.  We have already had success in gaining admission for Karen and Jon for the November workshop, and Ginny and Stephanie are hoping to hear in a couple of months about the workshop in May.
  • Fulbright Senior Specialist. Stephanie Wood has applied for a Fulbright fellowship as a Senior Specialist in Mesoamerican Ethnohistory and Digital Humanities to underwrite a symposium she will be co-directing at the University of Warsaw in June 2010. Even if the fellowship is not awarded, the University of Warsaw will pay her travel, lodging, and per diem for this important two-week visit. She and Justyna Olko, on the faculty in Warsaw, have assembled an impressive group of scholars from all over Europe, Mexico, and the United States to gather and discuss cultural encounters set in motion by Spanish conquest and colonization of the Americas. While this project does not involve additional UO faculty or students at the moment, it will serve as a model for additional summer institutes and symposia that could be held at the University of Oregon.  Also, as a result of this symposium, it is expected that Professor Olko’s graduate students may become more deeply involved with WHP projects, such as the indigenous-language dictionaries and the Mapas Project, and wish to do study-abroad at UO.

Funding Needs

  • Mapas Project Expansion. WHP currently seeks donations for the expansion of its Mapas Project, as we add dozens of manuscripts, increasing the representation of additional cultures and regions and so that we may reach back to include sixteenth-century pictorials and forward into the nineteenth century.
  • Age of Exploration Maps.  WHP has just begun a digital collection of maps from the European Age of Exploration that are in a private collection. These maps will provide excellent counterpoints to the indigenous-authored pictorials in the Mapas Project, and help demonstrate the evolution of cartography in the European tradition as well as highlight worldview and the construction of concepts of dominion and the “other.”
  • Project Space in Mexico. WHP seeks permanent office and project space in Mexico, where we have so many collaborative activities. Regions of focus for research, field work, and summer institutes currently include Oaxaca, Puebla/Tlaxcala, and Zacatecas.

Proposal Writing Assistance

WHP has provided proposal-writing assistance to various colleagues, including:

  • Massimo Lollini, Petrarch Project, fall 2009.
  • Jon Jablonski and Karen Estlulnd, GIS workshops at the University of Virginia, summer 2009. Awarded, these workshops will take place in November 2009.
  • Gabriela Martínez and Lynn Stephen, “Latino Roots,” a digital ethnography about Mexican migration into the U.S. Northwest, NEH Digital Start-Up Grant, late summer 2009.
  • Ina Asim, Digital Collection of Chinese Scrolls, summer and fall 2009.
  • Lynn Stephen and Amalia Gladhart, Title VI grant proposal, May 2009.
  • Gabriela Martínez, “Latin American Digital Audiovisual Archive,” NEH Digital Start-Up Grant, October 2008.
  • Carol Stabile, “Playing it Like a Girl: Gender and World Building in ‘World of Warcraft,’” NEH Digital Start-Up Grant, October 2008.
  • Barbara Altmann and Regina Psaki, “Galiens li restorés,” NEH Collaborative Research Grant, fall 2005.

Grant History

Go here to see our history of grants, where, since 2006 we have attracted more than $825,000 in federal funding for various projects.

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