Grants advance digital humanities research at UNC Library
Linking digital manuscript images with transcriptions: the Dusenbery journal
June 1, 2009 -- Recent grants totaling $53,000 will advance digital library research and development at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library.
In March, the National Endowment for the Humanities awarded $50,000 to the Library's Documenting the American South (DocSouth) program to develop a transcription and annotation tool for historical and literary archives.
With the grant, DocSouth will seek to address one of the most significant obstacles for students and scholars who wish to study historical manuscripts online—how to pair a high-resolution image with a textual transcription that can be searched and browsed, and how to link both the image and transcription to scholarly annotations.
DocSouth investigators hope to create a product that will allow librarians to digitally trace handwriting in an original document, encode the tracings in a language known as Scalable Vector Graphics, and then link the tracings at the line or even word level to files containing transcribed texts and annotations.
The research and development project, to be completed May 31, 2010, will use and create entirely open-source technologies, allowing other institutions to adapt and build upon the research.
The test bed for the project will be the personal journal of James Lawrence Dusenbery, who graduated from UNC in 1842. Erika Lindemann, professor of English and comparative literature at UNC, previously transcribed the journal, which provides insight into antebellum culture and literature, and the academic and social life of students before the Civil War.
A $3,000 grant announced May 1 by UNC's University Research Council will underwrite preparation and encoding of the journal transcription and preparation of the journal image files for the NEH project. A $5,000 gift to the Library in 2008 from an anonymous donor is also being used to support the project.
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