Support for Computational Research and Online Publication
The Forum for Digital Culture supports digital projects in every branch of the arts and humanities through all phases of research, from the initial acquisition of a project’s data through the stages of organizing, 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, send email to the Forum’s Director of Technology, Sandra Schloen, at sschloen@uchicago.edu.
The Forum for Digital Culture supports projects in every branch of the arts and humanities through all phases of the project, from the initial acquisition of the project’s data through the stages of managing, analyzing, and publishing the data and then archiving it in a standards-compliant fashion so it is preserved long into the future. This is done in a cost-effective and sustainable manner by means of two sophisticated, professionally maintained computational platforms that have been designed by scholars and are tailored for research in the humanities.
Online Publication of Scholarly Data
Online publication of the fruits of their computational research remains a challenge for scholars, who badly need a reliable mechanism for publishing on the Web the digital materials they have created in such a way that these materials are:
- Free and open-access for researchers and students to use for non-commercial academic purposes.
- Edited and peer-reviewed to ensure the quality and coherence of both the data and its mode of organization.
- Citable and reconfigurable as individual items of information at a high level of granularity.
- Kept accessible over the long term by professional system administrators in an institutional setting with a sustainable funding mechanism.
The Forum for Digital Culture is in the process of establishing an innovative Online Publication Service to meet this need, in close collaboration with the University of Chicago Library. For more information, send email to the Forum’s Director of Online Publications, Miller Prosser, at mcprosser@uchicago.edu.
Projects Supported by the Forum
The following projects have received computational support from the staff of the Forum for Digital Culture (not an exhaustive list):
- ARTFL: American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (Robert Morrissey and Clovis Gladstone, Romance Languages & Literatures)
- Antioch-on-the-Orontes archaeological project (Andrea De Giorgi, Florida State University; Asa Eger, University of North Carolina, Greensboro; Alan Stahl and Julia Gearhart, Princeton University; Tasha Vorderstrasse, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures [UChicago])
- Ashkelon (Israel) archaeological project (Lawrence Stager†, Harvard University; David Schloen, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures [UChicago]; Daniel Master, Wheaton College)
- Capturing the Stars: Women’s Networks and the Advancement of Science at Yerkes Observatory, 1895–1940 (Richard Kron, Astronomy & Astrophysics; Emily Kern, History)
- CEDAR Beshrew Me! Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and Early Modern Domestic Culture (Ellen MacKay, English and Theater & Performance Studies)
- CEDAR Book of the Dead (Foy Scalf and Brian Muhs, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
- CEDAR Epic of Gilgamesh (Christopher Woods, University of Pennsylvania [formerly UChicago])
- CEDAR Hebrew Bible (Simeon Chavel, Jeffrey Stackert, and Sarah Yardney, Divinity School)
- CEDAR Herman Melville (John Bryant, Hofstra University (emeritus); Christopher Ohge, University of London; Wyn Kelley, MIT; Eric Slauter, English [UChicago])
- CEDAR Indigenous American Sign Systems (Edgar Garcia, English; Claudia Brittenham, Art History; Jon Clindaniel, Computation Social Science; Mark Payne, Classics and Comparative Literature)
- CEDAR Piers Plowman and Late Medieval England (Ian Cornelius, Loyola University Chicago; Timothy Stinson, North Carolina State University; Julie Orlemanski, English [UChicago])
- Cerro del Villar (Spain) archaeological project (José Suárez Padilla, University of Málaga; David Schloen, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures [UChicago]; Carolina López-Ruiz, Divinity School and Classics [UChicago])
- Chapakhana: Mapping the Spread of Print in South Asia (Ulrike Stark, South Asian Languages & Civilizations)
- Cinemetrics (Yuri Tsivian and Maria Belodubrovskaya, Cinema & Media Studies)
- Chicago Demotic Dictionary (Janet Johnson and Brian Muhs, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
- Chicago Hittite Dictionary (Theo van den Hout and Petra Goedegebuure, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
- Corral Redondo (Peru) archaeological project (Maria Cecilia [Nené] Lozada, Romance Languages & Literatures)
- CRANE: Computational Research on the Ancient Near East (Timothy P. Harrison and David Schloen, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures [UChicago]; Lisa Cooper, University of British Columbia; Michel Fortin, Laval University, Québec; Sturt Manning, Cornell University; Graham Philip, Durham University, U.K.)
- Cyrillic Unicode font conversion (Meng Li, East Asian Languages & Civilizations)
- Database of Afro-Asiatic Basic Lexicon (Brendan Hainline, Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations)
- DeepScribe: AI for Cuneiform Tablets (Susanne Paulus, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures; Sanjay Krishnan, Computer Science; Miller Prosser, Sandra Schloen, and Jeffrey Tharsen, Forum for Digital Culture; Edward Williams, independent scholar)
- 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, 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, Art History)
- Genomes, Migrations, and Culture in the Early Civilizations of the Middle East (Maanasa Raghavan and John Novembre, Human Genetics; James Osborne and David Schloen, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
- Gobero (Niger) archaeological project (Paul Sereno, Organismal Biology & Anatomy)
- HARP: Hoard Analysis Research Project, for ancient Greek coin hoards (Alain Bresson, Classics)
- Idalion (Cyprus) archaeological project (Pamela Gaber, Lycoming College; Andrew Wright, Forum for Digital Culture [UChicago])
- Intertextuality: Zhuangzi versus the Taishō (Haun Saussy, East Asian Languages & Civilizations and Committee on Social Thought)
- LEM: Language, Events, and Mind Lab (Monica Do, Linguistics)
- Marathi Online (Philip Engblom†, South Asian Languages & Civilizations)
- Megiddo (Israel) archaeological project (Timothy P. Harrison, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
- Metapictures (W. J. T. Mitchell, English and 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, English)
- Nippur (Iraq) archaeological project (August McMahon and Abbas Alizadeh, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
- An Organon for the Information Age (David Schloen, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures; Samuel Volchenboum, Pediatrics; Malte Willer, Philosophy)
- Ottoman Inscriptions Project (Hakan Karateke, Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations; Firat Ciftci, Forum for Digital Culture)
- Persepolis Fortification Archive Project (Matthew Stolper, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures [UChicago]; Wouter Henkelman, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris; Annalisa Azzoni, Vanderbilt University)
- Perseus under PhiloLogic (Helma Dik, Classics)
- Ras Shamra Tablet Inventory (Miller Prosser, Forum for Digital Culture; Dennis Pardee, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
- Shang Clan Signs Project (Yung-ti Li, East Asian Languages & Civilizations)
- Sign and Gesture Archive (Diane Brentari, Linguistics; Susan Goldin-Meadow, Psychology)
- South Side Home Movie Project (Jacqueline Stewart, Cinema & Media Studies)
- Spoken Yucatec Maya (John Lucy, Comparative Human Development)
- Tell Keisan (Israel) archaeological project (David Schloen, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures [UChicago]; Gunnar Lehmann, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel; Bernd Schipper, Humboldt University of Berlin)
- Tell Tayinat (Turkey) archaeological project (Timothy P. Harrison, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
- Tel Yaqush (Israel) archaeological project (Yorke Rowan and David Schloen, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)
- Textual Optics Lab (Hoyt Long, East Asian Languages & Civilizations; Robert Morrissey and Clovis Gladstone, Romance Languages & Literatures)
- Tiwanaku (Bolivia) archaeological project (Alan Kolata, Anthropology)
- Village Harmony: South African Choral Music (Mollie Stone, Music)
- Visualizing Renaissance Florence (Niall Atkinson, Art History and Romance Languages & Literatures; John Padgett, Political Science)
- Washo Documentation Project (Alan Yu, Linguistics)
- Zincirli (Turkey) archaeological project (David Schloen, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures)