The Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities (RCH) was founded at the University of Kentucky in 2001. Under the interim directorship of Mark Richard Lauersdorf, the mission of RCH is to provide infrastructure, technical assistance, and grant writing assistance to university faculty who wish to undertake humanities computing projects, and to encourage and support interdisciplinary projects among individuals and groups from UK and around the world. We are affiliated with the Stoa Consortium for Electronic Publication in the Humanities and we work closely with the Special Collections and Digital Programs Division of the University of Kentucky Libraries and the Center for Visualization & Virtual Environments, and we also receive support from UK's Center for Computational Sciences.

Mission Statement:

A research unit of the University of Kentucky, the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities (RCH) brings together faculty and students from Engineering and the Humanities for research projects with benefits for all involved. RCH provides infrastructure, technical assistance, and grant writing assistance to individuals and groups who propose projects under its auspices.

RCH also encourages and supports interdisciplinary projects among individuals and groups from UK and around the world.

Who We Are:

Where We Are:

The Collaboratory is located in rooms 351 and 352 of the William T. Young Library on the campus of the University of Kentucky in Lexington. The rooms are in Core 1, in the North end of the West Wing of the third floor of the library. See the Floor Map on the library's website (we're in the upper left corner).

What We Do:

As described in our Mission Statement, RCH serves to encourage interdisciplinary collaborative research in humanities computing. We provide infrastructure and grant writing assistance to individuals and groups at the University of Kentucky. We work closely with other groups on campus to contribute to the growth of technology at UK.

Our Facilities:

The Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities is housed in Rooms 3-51 and 3-52 of the William T. Young Library. With the generous support of the Provost's Office, the Vice President for Fiscal Affairs and Information Technology, the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies, and the Dean of Arts & Sciences, the equipment in RCH was substantially upgraded in 2003. Its resources now include three servers and a fleet of Gateway E-4000s. Other onsite equipment includes an Apple PowerMac G4, two Gateway 450X laptops, an Epson Perfection 2400 PhotoScanner and Epson Stylus Photo 2200 printer, and a Lexmark laser printer. We also have access to the facilities of the UK Libraries Special Collections and Digital Programs Digital Lab, located in 105 Margaret I. King Library, and the Tech Atelier in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages. The DL houses a nextScan Eclipse microfilm scanner, a Mekel 525 GS microfilm scanner, a PhaseOne PowerPhase FX Digital Camera w/MAC G4 Workstation, a Plustek OpticBook 3600 book scanner, and three Epson Expression 1680 Pro Firewire USB scanners. The Tech Atelier supports the development of digital multimedia, including audio and video.

How Can RCH Help Me?

RCH provides a variety of guidance to faculty in the development of digital humanities research projects.

• Knowledge and experience with current standards and practices for Digital Humanities.
• Training in XML technologies for faculty and students, including the Text Encoding Initiative and XSLT for HTML display.
• Familiarity with recent initiatives encouraging Open Access and the use of technology in the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies.
• Computing support for the development and hosting of online projects.
• Experience with grant proposal writing and knowledge of University requirements regarding indirect costs, allowable cost sharing, required paperwork, etc.
• RCH is recognized in the national and international Digital Humanities communities.

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Sponsors/Collaborators:

The Center for Computational Sciences (http://www.ccs.uky.edu/) is a major sponsor, providing system administration, research assistantships, and participation in a visiting speaker program. Other major sponsors include the President's Office, the Vice President for Information Technology, Research and Graduate Studies, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Departments of Computer Science and Modern and Classical Languages. The William T. Young Library provides internet access through Ethernet and the high-capacity ATM network, and the College of Engineering provides system administration in the RCH lab.

On-campus collaborators

• The Stoa Consortium (http://www.stoa.org/)
• Special Collections & Digital Programs, Margaret I. King Building (http://www.uky.edu/Libraries/Special/UKDP/)
• Center for Visualization & Virtual Environments (http://www.vis.uky.edu/)

Off-campus collaborators

• Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies (http://www.chs.harvard.edu/)
• Perseus Digital Library (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/)
• Ancient World Mapping Center, UNC Chapel Hill (http://www.unc.edu/awmc/index.html)

Current Projects:

Our current projects encompass a variety of topics and technological concerns. We will link to web sites as they are developed:

• Funded Projects
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  • EDUCE: Enhanced Digital Unwrapping for Conservation and Exploration: The goal of this work is to create readable images of texts (damaged books, rolled papyrus), without opening them, using minimally invasive scanning, virtual unwrapping, and visualization. Achieving this goal will reveal texts thought lost, reviving perhaps sole extant copies of manuscripts that cannot be safely analyzed by any other known means. This challenge requires research advances in collaborative systems that support non-invasive volumetric scanning, texture and shape modeling and simulation, visualization for editorial analysis and enhancement, and underlying computational mechanisms that support massive data storage and processing. Directed by W. Brent Seales, Joseph N. Gray and Ross Scaife. Funding from the National Science Foundation through August 2009.
  • The Russian Folk Religious Imagination: A collaboration between scholars at UK and in Russia to produce a set of digital resources on Russian folk religious belief focusing on legends, songs and rituals. The finished project will include texts of religious legends, songs and ritual descriptions in both original Russian and in new English translations, scholarly commentary and critical textual analysis of the texts as well as images of folk iconography, pictures and video of rituals and recordings of legends and songs. We will provide access to material difficult to obtain in the west and in Russia and will draw on a variety of sources for a coherent analysis of folk belief. Directed by Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby with technical assistance from Mark Lauersdorf and Dot Porter. Funded through an NEH Digital Humanities Initiative Start-Up Grant.
  • Digital Library for the Enlightenment - The Spanish Novel: The DIGITAL LIBRARY FOR THE ENLIGHTENMENT THE SPANISH NOVEL, a collaborative project between international scholars, will create an online digital research library of literary and bibliographical materials of the Spanish novel of the Enlightenment (1700-1850), which appears to offer little continuity and suffers from major gaps in documentation. This scholarly collection will reconstruct the canon for the 18th-century novel in Spain and, in combination with an extensive critical apparatus, it will constitute a quality reference work and research tool in the field of Eighteenth-Century Studies. Directed by Ana Rueda with technical assistance from Mark Lauersdorf and Dot Porter. Funding provided through a University of Kentucky College of Arts & Sciences Major Research Grant.
  • Electronic Aelfric Project: Digital portion of The Ælfric of Eynsham Project, to publish selected Anglo-Saxon homilies by Ælfric of Eynsham. Directed by Aaron Kleist, with Dot Porter as Research Associate. Funded through the NEH Scholarly Editions program through June 2008.
  • A Digital Edition of Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 25: An electronic edition of Cambridge, Pembroke College MS 25, an eleventh century collection of Latin sermons which were frequently translated into Old English. Directed by Paul Szarmach and Thomas N. Hall, with Dot Porter as Research Associate. Funding from the NEH Scholarly Editions program through June 2008.
  • Venetus A Project, part of the Homer Multitext Project (in collaboration with Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies): A project to create a complete image-based edition of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice, Venetus A, a tenth-century Byzantine manuscript containing the earliest copy of Homer's Iliad, plus several layers of annotations.
  • Pleaides: An Online Workspace for Ancient Geography (in collaboration with the Ancient World Mapping Center): The Pleiades project will establish a functioning, international community of scholars, teachers, students and enthusiasts to collaborate in the updating and expansion of the spatial and historical reference information assembled by the NEH-supported Classical Atlas Project. RCH and The Stoa Consortium will provide public hosting of the Pleiades Workspace during the term of the grant. Funding from the NEH Research and Development program.
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• Developing Projects
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  • Neo-Latin Colloquia Project: Graduate students and faculty associated with the UK Institute for Latin Studies are creating a variety of materials for the renewed study and enjoyment of neo-Latin colloquia scholastica, texts that date primarily from the 16th and 17th centuries.
  • Carolingian Canon Law (CCL) Project: The Carolingian Canon Law project is producing a searchable, electronic rendition of one of the major works of Carolingian canon law, in a presentation that shows its relation to other works of canon law used by Carolingian jurists. It thus will enable scholars to study the conceptual corpus of early medieval canon law in one of its most vibrant periods before the compilation of Gratian’s Decretum in the twelfth century. Through the creation of a "fuzzy edition" of the Collectio Dacheriana, this project maps the extent of variation in "standard" legal texts known to Carolingian jurists, and identifies particular points of variation. In addition to clarifying the textual history of medieval canon law, the project will provide historical and bibliographic annotation of several hundred canons used by jurists before, during, and after the Carolingian period.

Past Projects:

The following projects were directed by Dr. Kevin Kiernan during his tenure as founding Director of the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities:

• The Digital Atheneum: New techniques for restoring, searching, and editing humanities collections
• Electronic Boethius: Alfred the Great's Old English version of the Consolation of Philosophy
• The ARCHway Project: Architecture for Research in Computing for Humanities through collaborative research, teaching, and learning
• Electronic Beowulf: image-based edition of Beowulf manuscript, transcripts, collations, glossary, with search facilities.

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