Projects

Projects funded in summer 2008

• Science Fiction Cover Art Digital Research Collection: project director Judith Adams-Volpe
  Cover art from approximately 300 pulp fiction books in the George Kelley Paperback & Pulp Fiction Collection is available as a sector of the Pulp Fiction Cover Art collection in UBdigit. Images of the front and back covers are presented for each book. The graphically intense images are augmented by generous metadata tagging, facilitating research and investigation by theme, cover art content, author, artist, and more. The science fiction cover art images reflect the social, cultural, and technological trends of the times, ranging from the 1940s to the 1990s. The George Kelley Paperback & Pulp Fiction Collection consists of over 30,000 volumes and is one of the largest and best preserved collections of pulp fiction in the world. These Science Fiction cover images join the Crime Fiction cover art sector and together comprise the Pulp Fiction Cover Art collection. Feast your eyes on bug-eyed monsters, aliens, intergalactic space vehicles, otherworldly landscapes, space warriors and vixens!
  
  
  
• Workers of the World: project director Josephine Anstey
  Workers of the World is a guerilla-style performance for autonomous cleaning robots. The robots are set down in a public location and as they clean they chat using text based on the plays of Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet and Peter Weiss. They are aware of people passing, or stopping to watch and listen to them. They respond in a variety of ways depending on their mood. They may be jocular or irritated, but their remarks always point up the differences between workers and the rest. Workers of the World is a production of the Intermedia Performance Studio, and it premiered at the Buffalo Infringement Festival 2008. Collaborators are Josephine Anstey, Stephen Hibit, and Patrice Seyed. Soft/Hardware: iRobot Create Robot, Everex Cloudbook, Open Source Software.
  
  
  
• The Tesserae Project Intertextual Scanning Tool: project directors Neil Coffee, Jean-Pierre Koenig, and Shakthi Poornima
  Comparison of different texts has been fundamental to the analysis of literary and linguistic meaning since antiquity. It is now possible to envision a computing interface that will allow us to view and navigate through the landscape of similarities between texts. The Tesserae Project draws on the fields of literary studies, linguistics, and computing to make such a tool for intertextual analysis freely available online. This site currently offers an early-stage version from a pilot project undertaken by Neil Coffee, Jean-Pierre Koenig, and Shakthi Poornima. This tool allows the user to search for identical or similar phrases in two texts, and, for Latin and Spanish, ranks phrases lower if they contain very common words.
  
  
  
• Toby: project director Ronan Crowley
  Toby is an interactive realization of Joyce's draft material for Ulysses, created in Microsoft PowerPoint 2008. The first draft due to be Tobied, in keeping with the porcine theme, will be one of two copybooks for episode fifteen "Circe." This document, Spielberg catalogue V.A.19, is part of the La Hune material in the UB Libraries Poetry Collection and contains the earliest draft of the episode known to be extant. Toby prioritizes the concrete materiality of Ulysses in progress. Joyce wrote each of the eighteen chapters of the novel in series of children's copybooks or on sets of loose sheets (and usually employed a combination of the two methods). Toby reconstructs individual copybooks in a human-readable format, preserving the layout and material arrangement of the physical document. Draft copybooks are represented in sets of "screen grabs," each comprising a facing verso and recto. A reader can leaf through the pages of the virtual document by using the keypad. Before he started work on a draft of any particular episode, Joyce assembled a great number of notes for it. He scribbled short phrases on little writing blocks or on menus, on bus tickets and in the margins of newspapers. He made jottings on stray bits of paper or the backs of advertisements. On one occasion he even made a note on the cuff of his shirtsleeve. Loose sheets of paper, commonly termed "notesheets," survive for the last seven episodes of Ulysses, covered with lists of words and phrases. These repositories collect together the original off-the-cuff notes. Rarely plot indicators or aides mémoires, the phrases were worked directly into the text of the novel. As such the notesheets provided the raw material for the drafts of an episode. When a reader looks at a copybook in Toby, by clicking on the image of a friendly porker, the notesheet constituents of that particular two-page spread of the document are indicated.
  
  
  
• Tool Development for Northeast North American Indigenous Languages Archive: project directors Jeff Good and Michalis Petropoulos
  The Northeastern North American Indigenous Languages Archive (NNAILA) is a new digital language archive housed at the University at Buffalo within the UB Libraries. NNAILA is currently in its pilot phase, with a focus on digitizing materials from Onondaga, an Iroquoian language spoken in parts of central New York and in the area near Brantford, Ontario. The archive's primary goals are to preserve recordings of indigenous languages of Northeastern America and to make the data in those recordings accessible to the academic community and to the indigenous communities whose languages are represented in the archive's collections. In order to facilitate access to the archive's resources by Onondaga community members, especially language teachers and their students, we are developing a web-based toolkit which will allow users to construct and annotate personal digital collections of materials from the archive. The first version of the toolkit is planned to be put online for use by Onondaga community members in the fall of 2009.
  
  
  
• 1968: I odezwa sie z góry/Voices from the Mountaintop: project directors Keith Griffler and Marta Ciesla
  The multimedia project "1968: I odezwa sie z góry/Voices from the Mountaintop" investigates the historical incidents of 1968 seminal within African American and Polish history. The project features a collaboration between the Department of African American Studies and Polish Studies Program to provide access to digital multimedia materials on 1968, at the same time encouraging the transnational study of history that is central to the goal of each. The finished product will be produced in the formats of a hypermedia digital archive and an interactive DVD. The hypermedia digital archive is envisioned to contain video, audio and still photos of the oral performances, street demonstrations, and clashes; original interviews with participants of the events in Poland and the United States; historical texts; and scholarly analysis. The interactive DVD will narrate and interpret the key events of 1968 and their lasting impact on both nations and the world in the form of an innovative English/Polish bilingual project with subtitled versions in each language.
  
  
  

Ongoing and legacy digital humanities projects

• Uncrowned Queens and Uncrowned Kings: project directors Peggy Brooks-Bertram and Barbara Nevergold
  The co-founders of the Uncrowned Queens Institute for Research and Education on Women, Inc. has formed a partnership with the Buffalo & Erie County Library. On October 4th, the Uncrowned Queens Institute and the Library will launch the first-in-the nation Uncrowned Community Builders Affiliate at the Frank E. Merriweather, Jr. Library. The purpose of the kiosk is to provide even greater access to the Uncrowned Queens site and to afford a better opportunity for the public to contribute to the number of individuals identified as Uncrowned Queens and Uncrowned Kings. This is consistent with our model of the community writing its own history. The Institute has developed a major concept for a digitally interactive kiosk that will house the technology to allow community members direct access to the Uncrowned Community Builders programs online here at the University at Buffalo. The kiosk will have a built-in computer, monitor, flat-bed scanner, camera, and microphone. An individual can access the Uncrowned Queens/Kings websites, sign-on as a member, receive a password and begin to write their bio or that of someone else and send it to the website, along with their photo and audio file to upload to the website. The website will offer step-by-step tutorials to assist individuals in writing their bios; workshops will also be offered at the Merriweather Library, periodically; and future plans are to have student interns available to assist patrons. Since the formal kiosk is not available at this time, we have agreed, with Library administration, to establish a "footprint" space that will house a dedicated computer and scanner to serve the basic functions outlined above. However, we have provided you with an image of the "kiosk in context" so that you can see what it looks like. We have selected October 4th as our launch date for this initiative because October is National Archives Month. With a theme of "The Individual in History", we see this as an appropriate signature for this event.
  
  
  
• The Electronic Poetry Center: project director Loss Glazier
  The Electronic Poetry Center, sponsored by various departments at the University at Buffalo, is an online resource for digital poetry. It was founded in 1995 by Loss Pequeño Glazier and Charles Bernstein, making it one of the oldest resources for poetry on the World Wide Web. It was the sponsor of E-Poetry 2001, the world's first festival exclusively dedicated to electronic poetry. In addition to its focus on digital poetry, it also is dedicated to the promotion and archiving of other "contemporary formally innovative poetries" This is a reflection of its origins in the University at Buffalo's Poetics Program, a program founded in 1991 by Charles Bernstein and Robert Creeley, which maintains a long-standing interest in experimental, progressive, and avant-garde poetics. The extensive curated archives at the site make it a popular destination for the study and enjoyment of contemporary poetry: a 2000 estimate has the site receiving 10 million visits a year. It is partnered with similar organizations, including UBUWeb and the University of Pennsylvania's PennSound project. (Wikipedia article, Electronic Poetry Center, consulted September 14, 2008)
  
  
  
• Litgloss: project director Maureen Jameson
  Litgloss began as a small course development grant project in 1998 with a mission to prepare an annotated version of a French novella. With further funding from the University at Buffalo, it expanded to over a hundred texts in 15 languages. In 2003, the NEH awarded a substantial grant to the project to enable (1) the development of a content management system to facilitate extensive collaborative work, and (2) the conversion of the content to TEI-encoded XML. The NEH-funded work is nearing completion.
  
  
  
• The Assyrian Palaces Digital Project: project director Samuel L. Paley
  The Assyrian Palaces Digital Project is exploring questions through the palace’s digital model:

  • Why was certain bas-relief motifs placed so that they were visible through doorways?
  • Was this part of some decorative plan that related to the functions of the rooms and the narrative propaganda of Assyrian kingship?
  • How was the palace lighted?
  • Were the bas-reliefs painted and how much paint was used?
  • Are there new architectural, spatial and decorative relationships that can be discovered from the study of an interactive, digital model of the palace and the citadel mound in comparison with other Assyrian palaces and citadels constructed during the Assyrian Empire. (To this end, more digital models of other Assyrian buildings have been proposed as part of the larger project.)

  Considering the state of preservation of the Citadel of Nimrud, the far-flung distribution of the fragments of decoration of its buildings, the dangers to its existing, preserved remains from natural environment, pollution and robbery, and the present political situation in the area, there will be no real experience for this generation of students to walk through its rooms and see and appreciate its grandeur. This is the reason why the virtual reality reconstruction is being prepared: it will bring together all existing information about the citadel and will provide a visualization of the first of the great Late Assyrian palaces in its architectural context in a way not possible even at the site museum. Students and scholars who would not be able to visit Iraq in the best of times will be able to study the buildings and everyone will be able to visit its ruins with new incites learned from the virtual reality model. It is the plan of the collaborators in this project to expand the work to other Assyrian sites and their public buildings, palaces and temples. A preliminary project has been funded to include the 8th-century palace of Tiglath-pileser III at Nimrud (The Shelby White-Leon Levy Fund for Archaeological Research at Harvard University) and the 7th-century palace of Sennacherib at Nineveh (also discovered by Layard), the latter with Professor Sarah Jarmer Scott of Wagner College using the digital cameras of Mr. Adam Lowe of Factum Arte, Madrid ,to document bas-relief in 3D. UB has assisted the project with digital research funds. Private funding has also been received to continue the work of the project.