Last year, the Department of Energy announced a partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities to facilitate access to high performance computing resources for research in the Humanities.  At the Supercomputing 2008 conference in Austin, Texas, the Endowment announced the winners of the NEH/Department of Energy Humanities High Performance Computing program.  The goal of the program is to provide opportunities for humanities scholars whose research requires high performance computing to collaborate with computer scientists and others at centers already familiar with the challenges of intensive data mining, visualization and other demanding applications.  

The three grants awarded provide computer time on DOE machines at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The grants also provide training and support to enable scholars to take full advantage of those resources in accordance with the DOE High-End Computing Revitalization Act of 2004 (P.L. 108–423) which authorized the Department to “provide for sustained access by the research community in the United States to high-end computing systems and to Leadership Systems, including provision of technical support for users of such systems.”  The grants announced were: 

• The Perseus Digital Library at Tufts University for its project Large-Scale Learning and the  Automatic Analysis of Historical Texts.  The Perseus project will be using advanced computational linguistic technologies to experiment with the analysis of ancient texts for the study of classics and other fields.

• The University of California, San Diego for its project Visualizing Patterns in Databases of  Cultural Images and Video.  UC San Diego will be creating computerized visualizations of  large databases of digitized cultural heritage materials and performing statistical analyses on the data to discover new ways of studying art and culture.

• The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia for  its project High Performance Computing for Processing and Analysis of Digitized 3-D Models of Cultural Heritage.  IATH will process previously-acquired raw datasets of culturally valuable objects such as artistic statuary, archaeological artifacts, and historical architecture in order to create highly accurate 3-D models for the study of art and architecture.

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Guidelines for applying and additional information on the NEH Web Site

Perseus Digital Library Project: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper

Cultural Analytics: http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/09/cultural-analytics.html

IATH at the University of Virginia: http://www.iath.virginia.edu