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WHP has been in conversation with David Hollenberg, the newly appointed Assistant Professor of Arabic Language and Religious Literature at the UO, and director of the Yemeni Manuscript Digitization Initiative (YMDI). YMDI is a collective of scholars and librarians dedicated to preserving and virtually disseminating the manuscripts of Yemen, and is now hosted by the UO. Working with Princeton University Library and the Free University, Berlin, YMDI recently received a National Endowment for the Humanities/Deutschland Forschungsgemeinshaft Bilateral Digital Humanities Grant of $330,000 to train Yemeni technicians to produce archive-quality images of three private libraries of Yemen, virtually link them to manuscripts held by Princeton University and the Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, and store and disseminate them through Princeton University Library’s digital library.  These grants are administered by Princeton University and the Free University of Berlin. WHP is currently exploring ideas for a grant proposal hosted by UO which would develop scholarship around the manuscripts that are being digitized.

You can find more information on the project at YMDI’s website.

Professor Justyna Olko of the University of Warsaw has received a grant in collaboration with the Wired Humanities Projects for a series of lectures on Nahuas of early Mexico entitled, “Encounters between the Old and New Worlds: Case Studies from the Aztec/Nahua Mexico.” The European Social Fund is underwriting her visit and some work we are doing together, while she is here, on Nahuatl-language manuscripts, on a loanword project she is directing, on WHP’s online Nahuatl lexicon, and our planning for a meeting in Vienna in 2012.

Professor Olko will be delivering the following presentations, all in the evening and all in 375 McKenzie Hall:

Thursday, September 23, 7:00-8:30: Aztec Universalism: Ideology and Status Symbols in the Service of Empire (lecture)

Monday, September 27, 7:00-8:30: Nahua Insignia of Rank: Functions and Meanings before and after the Spanish Conquest (lecture)

Tuesday, September 28, 7:00-8:30: Tradition, Novelty, and Prestige: Imagery of Elite Status in Colonial Central Mexican Indigenous Society (an ethnohistorical workshop)

Wednesday, September 29, 7:00-8:30: Public Talk: The Empire Strikes Back: The Ideology of Just War among Aztecs and Spaniards (public talk)

PLEASE JOIN US FOR THESE TALKS!

The Wired Humanities Projects staff are in the process of moving offices from the University of Oregon Annex, Suites 3 & 4, into two new spaces.  You can now find us in Room  142 in the Knight Library, on the east wall of the Reference area.  We are hoping this central campus location will increase our accessibility to faculty with digital research projects and facilitate growing collaboration with library colleagues. It will also be a more convenient location for work-study students on our team.  Please come give us a knock and say hello!

We also have space in the Center for Advanced Technology in Education, in Suite 215 of the Rainier Building. We have a growing number of grant-funded projects with colleagues at CATE, which prompted us to share some space there, as well.

Contact information: we are in the process of getting a new phone number in the Knight Library, so for now, please email: swood@uoregon.edu or call 541-346-5771 (which rings at CATE).

WHP Director Stephanie Wood has been named by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, the Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Department of State, and the Council for International Exchange of Scholars, to be listed on the Fulbright Specialist Roster. She will be available for collaboration with European institutions in the area of Mesoamerican Studies, particularly with a digital component, for a five-year period beginning in the academic year 2010-2011.

We have recently learned that WHP will have federal funding for another summer institute on Mesoamerican Cultures and their Histories, to take place again in Oaxaca, Mexico, in July 2011.

Hearty congratulations to the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, especially Jeff Hanes and Lori O’Hallaren and the many colleagues to helped contribute to the Title VI East Asian National Resource Center proposals, for winning nearly $2million in grant funds to be spent over the coming four years!  WHP proudly had a small role in helping shape the proposal with regard to potential digital projects in the Library that have Asia as their focus. We look forward to helping carry these projects out through the new Center for Digital Scholarship proposed by Deb Carver, Dean of the Libraries.

WHP has entered into discussions with the designer of the Mayan Epigraphic Database, Rafael Alvarado (UVA), about collaborating to unite his database with our online Mayan Dictionary, currently under development with consultation from Matthew Restall (Penn State) and edited primarily by new Virginia Commonwealth University graduate student, Kaitlan Smith.

Alvarado’s project started life as an experiment in networked scholarship, something WHP has also been developing with our Distance Research Environment (DRE). We are additionally excited to add glyphs to our Mayan dictionary as a way of bridging classic-period writing systems with colonial and modern Yucatec Mayan. We will also be adding Ch’olan, where necessary, to provide headwords for glyphs that do not express Yucatec Mayan.

Spending three days at UVA immersing ourselves in cartography and Geographic Information Science, in particular.  This is a wonderfully organized and presented workshop thanks to NEH and Bethany Nowviskie!

Here Ginny shows us a photo of Stephanie Wood and Susan Garfinkel (of the Library of Congress) taken during an exercise in Open Mapping in gardens designed by Thomas Jefferson.

WHP, in collaboration with Dr. Jonathon Richter (Director, Center for Learning in Virtual Environments), Professor Gabriela Martínez, and graduate students Alina Padilla Miller and Yasmin Acosta-Myers, has just received news from NEH that we have won another grant (“Digital Dissemination and Impact” Supplement) to underwrite the creation of “Virtual Oaxaca” — a map-based, three-dimensional space where we can capture and keep alive our journeys around Oaxaca this summer using simulated islands in Second Life (and, later, Open Sim).  We will be adding still images, videos, drawings, and curricular materials to the various spaces we will create (archaeological sites, artistic communities, museums, and the ethnobotanical garden), enabling their preservation and dissemination, while also creating a rich educational experience for teachers and students alike.  This relates to our NEH-funded Summer Institute, but it is one step toward our vision of a larger, Virtual Americas project.  The Smithsonian Latino Center, MERLOT, and the New Media Consortium are partners in this exciting new Virtual Oaxaca endeavor.  Our local partner, CLIVE, is housed in the UO’s Center for Advanced Technology in Education (CATE).

We just received the good news from Larry Johnson, CEO at the New Media Consortium, that we have won the contest for a free sim island in Second Life good through the end of September.

Our plan is to create a Virtual_Oaxaca, where we can attach all the wonderful photos, video clips, and curricular materials interested teachers will be gathering and sharing during the NEH Summer Institute, July-August, 2010. Here’s the NMC’s blog with our fuller proposal.  Larry said, “We got many great proposals, but yours was by far the strongest.”  Thank you, Jonathon Richter, for your brilliant contributions to this project!