Research Support

The Forum for Digital Culture supports digital projects in all fields of study through all phases of research, from the initial acquisition of a project’s data through the stages of integrating, analyzing, publishing, and archiving the data.

The staff of the Forum for Digital Culture provide consultation, software training, data management, and other technical support for the digital projects of faculty and students. For more information or to schedule a consultation, contact the Forum’s Director of Technology, Sandra Schloen (sschloen@uchicago.edu).

The Forum for Digital Culture primarily supports research projects in the humanities and related social sciences but may also support work in the natural sciences. Computational support and guidance is provided through all phases of a project, from the initial acquisition of data through the stages of integrating, analyzing, and publishing the data and then preserving it over the long term. This is done in a cost-effective and sustainable manner by means of two powerful and professionally maintained computational platforms that were designed by University of Chicago researchers and are well suited for computational work in the humanities and social sciences.

The Forum for Digital Culture also gives researchers and artists a way to publish digital materials as durable, citable, and peer-reviewed Web publications with ISBN numbers via the University of Chicago’s new Online Publication Service.

Research Projects Supported by the Forum

Projects at the University of Chicago

The following projects affiliated with the University of Chicago have received computational support from the Forum for Digital Culture:

Antiwar Sabotage in Russia (Ania Aizman, Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures)
ARTFL: American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (Robert Morrissey and Clovis Gladstone, Department of Romance Languages & Literatures)
Beshrew Me! Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and Early Modern Domestic Culture (Ellen MacKay, Department of English Language & Literature)
Capturing the Stars: Women’s Networks and the Advancement of Science at Yerkes Observatory, 1895–1940 (Richard Kron, Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics; Kristine Palmieri, Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute on the Formation of Knowledge; Andrea Twiss-Brooks, University Library)
The CEDAR Initiative: Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research (Ellen MacKay, Department of English Language & Literature; Jeffrey Stackert, Divinity School)
Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes (Mehrnoush Soroush, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
Chapakhana: Mapping the Spread of Print in South Asia (Ulrike Stark, Department of South Asian Languages & Civilizations)
The Chicago Demotic Dictionary (Janet Johnson and Brian Muhs, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
The Chicago Digital Bible (Jeffrey Stackert and Sarah Yardney, Divinity School; with Doren Snoek, St. Andrews University; Ronald Hendel, University of California, Berkeley)
The Chicago Hittite Dictionary (Theo van den Hout and Petra Goedegebuure, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
Cinemetrics (Yuri Tsivian and Maria Belodubrovskaya, Department of Cinema & Media Studies)
The Craft Almanac (Erica Warren, Department of Art History)
Cushitic-Omotic Morphological Index (Gene Gragg, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
Cyrillic Unicode font conversion (Meng Li, Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations)
Database of Afro-Asiatic Basic Lexicon (Brendan Hainline, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Middle Eastern Studies)
DeepScribe: AI for Cuneiform Tablets (Sanjay Krishnan, Department of Computer Science; Miller Prosser, Sandra Schloen, and Jeffrey Tharsen, Forum for Digital Culture; Edward Williams, independent scholar; Susanne Paulus, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
Demotic Ostraca Online (Foy Scalf and Brian Muhs, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
Digital Dictionaries of South Asia (Gary Tubb and James Nye, Department of South Asian Languages & Civilizations)
Digital Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese 古漢語詞源字典 (Jeffrey Tharsen, Forum for Digital Culture)
Dispersed Chinese Art Digitization Project (Wu Hung and Katherine Tsiang, Department of Art History)
The Egyptian Book of the Dead (Foy Scalf and Brian Muhs, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures; with Rita Lucarelli, University of California, Berkeley)
The Energy History Visualization Project (Elisabeth Moyer, Department of Geophysical Sciences)
Excavations at Cerro del Villar, Spain (David Schloen, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures; Carolina López-Ruiz, Divinity School and Department of Classics; with José Suárez Padilla, University of Málaga, Spain)
Excavations at Corral Redondo, Peru (Maria Cecilia “Nené” Lozada, Department of Romance Languages & Literatures)
Excavations at Dalverzin Tepe, Uzbekistan (Harrison Morin, Ph.D. student, Department of Middle Eastern Studies)
Excavations at Nineveh, Iraq (Timothy P. Harrison, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures; with Khaled Abu Jayyab, University of Toronto)
Excavations at Nippur, Iraq (McGuire Gibson and Augusta McMahon, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
Excavations at Tell Keisan, Israel (David Schloen, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures; with Gunnar Lehmann, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; Bernd Schipper, Humboldt University of Berlin)
Excavations at Tell Tayinat, Turkey (Timothy P. Harrison, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
Excavations at Tel Yaqush, Israel (Yorke Rowan and David Schloen, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
Excavations at Tiwanaku, Bolivia (Alan Kolata, Department of Anthropology)
Excavations at Zincirli, Turkey (David Schloen, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures; with Virginia Herrmann, U.S. Department of State; Kathryn Morgan, Duke University)
FIORE: The “Florence Illuminated” Online Research Environment (Niall Atkinson, Department of Art History; with Anne Leader, University of Virginia; George Bent, Washington and Lee University; Peter Sposato, Indiana University; Lorenzo Vigotti, University of Bologna)
Gathering and Researching Images from Orlando Furioso (Federica Caneparo, Department of Romance Languages & Literatures)
Gender and Politics in Early Modern European Republics: Venice and Genoa, 15th to 18th centuries (Maria Adank, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History)
Genomes, Migrations, and Culture in the Early Civilizations of the Middle East (John Novembre and Maanasa Raghavan, Department of Human Genetics; James Osborne and David Schloen, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
HARP: Hoard Analysis Research Project [for ancient Greek coin hoards] (Alain Bresson, Department of Classics)
An Index to the Chant of the Mozarabic Rite (Don Randel, Department of Music)
Indigenous American Sign Systems (Edgar Garcia, Department of English Language & Literature)
Intertextuality: Zhuangzi versus the Taishō (Haun Saussy, Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations)
Landscapes of Ancient Persia through Cold War Surveillance Eyes (Mehrnoush Soroush, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures; Dominik Lukas, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Anthropology; Ruijie Yao, M.A. student, Center for Middle Eastern Studies)
LEM: Language, Events, and Mind Lab (Monica Do, Department of Linguistics)
Marathi Online (Philip Engblom†, Department of South Asian Languages & Civilizations)
Megiddo 3: Final Report on the Stratum VI Excavations (Timothy P. Harrison, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
Messkataloge Digital Database (David Kretz, Ph.D. student, Department of Germanic Studies)
Metapictures (W. J. T. Mitchell, Department of Art History)
METEOR: Middle Egyptian Text Editions for Online Research (Janet Johnson, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
Modern Philology Metadata (Timothy Campbell, Timothy M. Harrison, and Josephine McDonagh, Department of English Language & Literature)
A National Repository of Policing Data for Ethical Research (Christopher Graziul, Department of Comparative Human Development; Robert Vargas, Department of Sociology; Brooke Luetgert, Forum for Digital Culture)
An Organon for the Information Age (David Schloen, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures; Samuel Volchenboum, Department of Pediatrics; Malte Willer, Department of Philosophy)
Ottoman Inscriptions Project (Hakan Karateke, Department of Middle Eastern Studies)
People of the Green Sahara: Excavations at Gobero, Niger (Paul Sereno, Department of Organismal Biology & Anatomy)
Persepolis Fortification Archive Project (Matthew Stolper, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures; with Wouter Henkelman, École Pratique des Hautes Études; Annalisa Azzoni, Vanderbilt University; Mark Garrison, Trinity University, San Antonio)
Perseus under PhiloLogic (Helma Dik, Department of Classics)
Power, Identity, Resistance: The Smart Guide (Jennifer Spruill, The College)
Ras Shamra Tablet Inventory (Miller Prosser, Forum for Digital Culture; Dennis Pardee, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
Sereno Fossil Lab (Paul Sereno, Department of Organismal Biology & Anatomy)
Shang Clan Signs Project (Yung-ti Li, Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations)
Sign and Gesture Archive (Diane Brentari, Department of Linguistics; Susan Goldin-Meadow, Department of Psychology)
Slavic Graduate Student Resource List (Anne Eakin Moss, Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures)
South Side Home Movie Project (Jacqueline Stewart, Department of Cinema & Media Studies)
Spoken Yucatec Maya (John Lucy, Department of Comparative Human Development)
Textual Optics Lab (Hoyt Long, Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations; Robert Morrissey and Clovis Gladstone, Department of Romance Languages & Literatures)
Thinking Music: Global Sources for the History of Music Theory (Thomas Christiansen, Department of Music; with Carmel Raz, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics; Lester Hu, University of California, Berkeley)
Village Harmony: South African Choral Music (Mollie Stone, Department of Music)
Washo Documentation Project (Alan Yu, Department of Linguistics)

Projects based at other universities

Beyond the University of Chicago, the following research projects have received computational support from the Forum for Digital Culture (not a complete list):

Amache Research Project (Bonnie Clark, University of Denver; April Kamp-Whittaker, University of New Mexico)
CLEMENT: Commerce and Law in Early Modern England, Transcribed (Emily Kadens, Northwestern University)
Corinth Excavations, Roman Pottery from East of the Theater, 1981–1990 (Kathleen Warner Slane, University of Missouri, Columbia)
CRANE: Computational Research on the Ancient Near East (Timothy P. Harrison, University of Toronto [now at UChicago]; Lisa Cooper, University of British Columbia; Michel Fortin, Laval University; Sturt Manning, Cornell University; Graham Philip, Durham University; David Schloen, University of Chicago)
The Excavation of Antioch-on-the-Orontes 1932—1939 (Alan Stahl and Julia Gearhart, Princeton University; Andrea De Giorgi, Florida State University; Asa Eger, University of North Carolina, Greensboro)
Excavations at Ashkelon, Israel (Lawrence Stager†, Harvard University; Daniel Master, Wheaton College; David Schloen, University of Chicago)
Excavations at Gezer, Israel (Steven Ortiz, Lipscomb University; Samuel Wolff, Israel Antiquities Authority)
Excavations at Hippos (Sussita), Israel (Michael Eisenberg and Arleta Kowalewska, University of Haifa)
Excavations at Idalion, Cyprus (Pamela Gaber, Lycoming College; Andrew Wright, University of Chicago)
Excavations at Shengavit, Armenia (Mitchell Rothman, Widener University and University of Pennsylvania)
Excavations at Tell el-Judaidah, Turkey — Publication Project (Lynn Swartz Dodd, University of Southern California)
Excavations at Tell Qarqur, Syria (Rudolph Dornemann, Milwaukee Public Museum; Jesse Casana, Dartmouth College)
Excavations at Tel Shimron, Israel (Daniel Master, Wheaton College; Mario Martin, University of Innsbruck)
Gadachrili Gora Regional Archaeology Project, Republic of Georgia (Stephen Batiuk and Khaled Abu Jayyab, University of Toronto; Mindia Jalabadze, Georgian National Museum, Tbilisi)
Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project (Aaron Burke, University of California, Los Angeles; Martin Peilstöcker, Humboldt University of Berlin)
Melville Electronic Library (John Bryant, Hofstra University; Christopher Ohge, University of London; Wyn Kelley, Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
The Peripheral Manuscripts Project: Digitizing Medieval Manuscript Collections in the Midwest (Elizabeth Hebbard and Michelle Dalmau, Indiana University, Bloomington; Ian Cornelius, Loyola University Chicago; Sarah Noonan, St. Mary’s College)
Piers Plowman and Late Medieval England (Ian Cornelius, Loyola University Chicago; Timothy Stinson, North Carolina State University)
Reimagining Royal Space: The Qilij Arslan II Kiosk in Konya, Turkey (Patricia Blessing, Dept. of Art and Art History, Stanford University; Richard McClary, University of York)

Digital Collections Supported by the Forum

In addition to the projects listed above, the Forum for Digital Culture provides staff support and software for managing the following digital collections in the University of Chicago Library and the Visual Resources Center of the Department of Art History: