The National Endowment for the Humanities Brett Bobley Chief Information Officer

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 is one recent example.

Encoded Archival Description (EAD) now the standard for creating Internet- accessible 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.

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 Oyez, Oyez, Oyez is a Supreme Court Web site developed at Northwestern University

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.

NEH Divisions Research Education Preservation and Access Challenge Public Programs

Contact Information White Paper on NEH, Science & Technology: Brett Bobley, CIO: