[OHM] Fwd: OHM grant proposal

Jo Walsh metazool at fastmail.net
Mon Dec 29 04:55:15 UTC 2014


dear all,

I'm sorry that I'm so late to the open historical map party, I didn't
realise it was happening.

There's a field of "digital humanities" which may still be a useful buzz
phrase for funding applications.
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/ddh/about/index.aspx

There is Sean Gillies' work on ancient world linked data for the
Pleaides project, which started as a name search for something called
the Barrington Atlas. The GeoJSON format was in part a spinoff from the
Pleaides project as were the Shapely libraries in python.
http://pleiades.stoa.org/help/lod Sean's name would look good on any
application.

I would love to be able to cross the data gaps over the dark ages. At
EDINA we worked with the Institute of Name Studies to produce a
thousand-year linked data historical gazetteer. for England. The data
should have been OdBL licensed but this is not spelled out in the final
project :/. However, you can still query and crawl for much of it with
URLs shaped like this:
http://unlock.edina.ac.uk/ws/search?name=Telford&format=json&gazetteer=deep

Here, the Maps Department of the National Library of Scotland have
become co-involved in proposals and added gravitas. There's been a
student effort to massively improve building coverage and historical
addressing in Edinburgh as part of this funded project
http://www.mesh.ed.ac.uk/

I've got a bag of papers I was hurriedly given, that belonged to an
EDINA colleague who groundbroke a lot of the historical place-name
search work there in the early 2000s and died quite suddenly a couple of
years ago. I have always meant to go through his papers and summarise
the best parts as an in memoriam effort on behalf of Andy Corbett.
Perhaps i can find some time now.
http://nkos.slis.kent.edu/2002workshop/Geo-Crosswalk.htm

I hope to make it to this, if i can get workplace to send me:
http://lanyrd.com/2015/wikilovesmaps/

I'm still bugging about historical text mining to help extract
structured geodata. I've seen enough convincing prototypes to know that
there's loads more yield in this area no tbeing pressed. There's a nice
feedback loop extracting names from historical maps, using the names to
search other map, linking related names to produce a higher quality
historical name search. I'm still not managing to make this the day job
that it should be.

I look forward to seeing where this effort goes, anyway. :D Thank you
all for everything you've done with it so far.

On Sun, Dec 28, 2014, at 08:07 PM, Jeff Meyer wrote:
> Karl -
>
> This insider's perspective is fantastic. Very helpful.
>
> There's much we can do about the lack of a start-up grant on our own,
> but the partnership angle is interesting.
>
> We'll need to be very attentive to the rest of the advice. Another
> piece of feedback we've received (from David R?) is that the panel
> members' feedback can differ from the project officers' feedback.
> So... Your notes are gold.
>
> For the odds, well... To paraphrase Wayne Gretzky... you never make a
> shot you don't take. : )
>
> - jeff
>
> On Friday, December 26, 2014, Karl Grossner
> <karlg at stanford.edu> wrote:
>> Hello OHMers, happy holidays -
>>
>> A friend and colleague who has followed the discussion of NEH grant
>> possibilities for OHM wrote me to share some thoughts drawn from
>> their experience as a review panel member for a recent round of DH
>> Implementation Grants. I thought they were pretty relevant, so copied
>> them in below. My biggest takeaway is the need for innovation in
>> humanistic inquiry, which confirms what some have suggested --
>> framing the effort as supporting a particular historical study, and
>> simultaneously a proof-of-concept. This may fit a 'start-up' grant
>> model better than an implementation one at this stage.
>>
>> Karl
>>
>>
>>  * The Implementation grants are ‘Low Risk / High Reward’ That is,
>>    project ideas may be fabulous, however, funded projects in the
>>    ‘Implementation’ round already have some element of success and
>>    stability. “Implementation” means just that. They will fund
>>    projects that are already up and running in some form. The funding
>>    is to enhance or elaborate what has already been done. Stronger
>>    proposals are those that have:
>>  * Evidence that PIs are already in a successful partnership, such as
>>    having co-authored or presented on the project jointly prior.
>>  * Have already obtained ’support’ for the project which could be NEH
>>    Start Up funds, or campus or other external funding, or
>>    recognition of any sort.
>>  * Statement of Innovation concerns innovation in both technology and
>>    humanistic inquiry - really creative innovations in both areas.
>>    The percentages of grant winners in past years is approx. 15%.
>>    Very slim. My panel reviewed 18 proposals (out of 54? submitted).
>>    Of those 18, 4 were outstanding, 11 were good and showed promise
>>    for future developments, 3 were turkeys. Only 1 of the 4 that my
>>    panel ranked as outstanding went on to receive funding, and that
>>    particular one had obtained NEH Start Up funds previously. The
>>    other few that NEH funded in this round were reviewed by the other
>>    panels and I don’t have background on those. We were told that
>>    many successful grants had be submitted previously, so it often
>>    takes more than one try (I am sure you are aware of that).
>>
>> Preservation, sustainability and data management of the project are
>> important and requires thought and planning. This was a weakness of
>> many of the middle level proposals. The higher ranked proposals
>> mostly used their library or state-level repository partnering, and
>> included many details about how the storage, preservation, etc
>> would work.
>>
>> …. it is helpful to talk to the NEH grant officers throughout the
>> writing process to make sure, firstly, that the idea is appropriate
>> for the grant, as well as to get a pre-review.
>
>
> --
> Jeff Meyer Global World History Atlas www.gwhat.org jeff at gwhat.org
> 206-676-2347
>
> OpenStreetMap: Mapping with a Human Touch
>
> osm: Open Historical Map (OHM)[1] / my OSM user page[2]
> t:@GWHAThistory[3] / @OpenHistMap
>
> f:GWHAThistory[4]
>
>
>
>
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Links:

  1. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Open_Historical_Map
  2. http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/jeffmeyer
  3. https://twitter.com/GWHAThistory
  4. https://www.facebook.com/GWHAThistory
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