Check out Andvari Co-PI Lilla Kopár’s new publication

Be sure to have a look at Lilla Kopár’s latest publication hot off the presses from Cambridge University Press:

“Eddic poetry and the imagery of stone monuments” in Carolyne Larrington, Judy Quinn, & Brittany Schorn’s (Eds.) A Handbook to Eddic Poetry: Myths and Legends of Early Scandinavia.

http://www.cambridge.org/fm/academic/subjects/literature/european-literature/handbook-eddic-poetry-myths-and-legends-early-scandinavia?format=HB&isbn=9781107135444

A huge congratulations to Dr. Kopár! We all look forward to reading.

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New Project Contact

Looking to contribute to Project Andvari?

Have burning questions for the project team?

Spot a typo on our website?

You can now get in touch with the Project Andvari team via our newly-minted project email address:

projectandvari@gmail.com

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And — as always — you can see all the latest news about Project Andvari here at our project blog, on our twitter account, and on our project site, http://www.andvari.org/.

 

 

Project Andvari — Stage II

As you may have heard, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced it’s recipients for their Digital Start-Up grants this past spring. Eighteen excellent projects were selected to receive support for research initiatives ranging from 19th Century African-American communities to  statistical assessment of artistic styles to new tools for textual analysis.  Also among the selected projects? That’s right…

PROJECT ANDVARI — STAGE II!

After a brief hiatus, Project Andvari is getting started on the pilot implementation of all the initial work performed during Stage I. This included…

• Identification of a project team and advisory committee
• Convening of a project workshop to develop the functional parameters of an aggregation portal for early medieval Northern European art and artifacts
• Convening of a secondary workshop on the development of a iconographic thesaurus to be implemented in the proposed platform
• Completion of a crowdsourcing initiative to refine the iconographic thesaurus with much thanks and praise to our partners over at Micropasts
• Oodles of conference posters, presentations, talks, papers, etc.
• And more! (all of which can be read about in the NEH White Paper for Stage I)

Moving forward, the project plan consists primarily of developing our pilot platform with sample data records from the British Museum, the Riksantikvarieämbetet (Swedish National Heritage Board), and the Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery and delivering a functioning portal that will allow for further development and refinement. Based on the desired functionality documented in the initial project workshop, the portal will allow for collocation of resources from multiple collections, facilitating metasearching in a manner previously unavailable to the majority of researchers.

Thus far, the project team has begun the process of developing our workplan using the Producteev application, a freely-available project management tool. Development tasks have been assigned and our advisory board members are anxiously awaiting the convening of our first full-team Skype meeting for the Stage II period.

So, whats next? Stay tuned to the project blog for periodic updates on development activities, following along the Project Andvari twitter feed, and let us know if you are interested in knowing more about the granular details of our work.

Many thanks to the National Endowment for the Humanities, all the project team members and advisory committee participants, and to everyone that has followed the project during our down-time.

 

Andvari Vocabulary Workshop

On November 7 and 8, the Project Andvari team got together with an excellent group of workshop participants from around the country (and the world) to help lay out the foundation of the proposed iconographic controlled vocabulary to be implemented along with the Andvari pilot platform. This much-needed resource will help the project team, contributing institutions, and scholars the world over by providing a standardized classification system for the iconographic content of the early medieval north, thereby supporting scholarship and promoting innovative connections between previously separated objects and collections. The workshop was very successful and could not of happened without the support and contributions of all those in attendance. So, a very big thank you to Worthy Martin, Daniel Pitti, Karen Overby, Daniel Pett, Marcus Smith, Youngok Choi, Christopher Roberts, Danielle Joyner, Kevin Gunn, and Sam Russell for all of your hard work! Stay tuned for more updates on the development of the Project Andvari controlled vocabulary and for updates on the forthcoming pilot platform.

Below are some pictures of the workshop care of Kevin Gunn. Please be sure to check out his blogpost on the workshop.

        

 

2014 NEH Digital Humanities Project Directors Meeting

A huge thanks to Kevin Gunn for fantastic blogging of the NEH Project Directors meeting on Monday. The Project Andvari team was on hand to learn about some of the other amazing projects being funded through NEH support. Check out Kevin’s post for a great summary of the day’s events.

Digital Scholarship and beyond

The 2014 NEH Digital Humanities Project Directors Meeting occurred September 15th at the new headquarters of the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, DC. The morning meeting was open for project directors only while the afternoon session was open to the general public.

The Keynote Speaker was Michael Witmore, Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library. His talk was titled ‘Adjacencies Virtuous and Vicious in the Digital Spaces of Libraries.’  From the NEH web site:

This talk will explore how techniques of discovery — scanning shelves, exploring digital texts and catalogues — may change the nature of research conducted in Libraries. The argument: with the advent of massively searchable digital corpora, the uses and advantages of “nearness” in Libraries will change.

As more and more books become availabe online (e.g. see the recent EEBO announcement), this type of work will increase in value.

Dr. Witmore began by talking…

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NEH-ODH Stage II Proposal Submitted

Project Andvari has submitted a Stage II Start-Up Grant proposal to the NEH Office of Digital Humanities. This grant will provide support for the development and implementation of a pilot platform that will both prove the feasibility of our proposed system and demonstrate the enhancement features that will make Andvari a unique resource in the ever-increasing arena of digitally-enabled medieval research. Continuing collaboration between the Catholic University of America, the University of Mississippi, and the University of Virginia will help to bring this proposed platform into fruition.

To everyone that helped to make the Stage II proposal possible, a sincere thanks!!

Stay tuned for future updates on the results of the proposal.

Updates on Post-Workshop Progress

Be sure to check out a summary of Project Andvari’s progress since the initial workshop in November 2013, available right here. More updates to come soon, so be sure to follow along on the blog and at @ProjectAndvari.

Digital Humanities Volunteers @ CUA

Led by Kevin Gunn — the Coordinator of Religious Studies and Humanities Services here at CUA, a group of ambitious graduate volunteers has helped Project Andvari by producing an extensive report on existing vocabularies, indexes, and thesauri that pertain to our project goals either in terms of content or structure. Their list includes such works as the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon stone sculpture in England, Friedman’s Medieval iconography: a research guide, and the Thesaurus iconographique: système descriptive des représentations. Additionally, they delivered an excellent assessment of ontology development applications — like HIVE and ThManager — that will be extremely useful for us as we shift towards thesaurus development activities. And as if that wasn’t enough, the volunteers also put together a formal budget for the preceding year and a list of possible grant opportunities for ongoing support.

A big thank you to Kevin, Anita, Sam, Jeremy, Kirsten, and Katherine. You’ve been a huge help!

Official Debut of the Project Andvari Logo

Check out the official Project Andvari logo featured as the new website banner for the project blog. Andvari — our official project mascot — features prominently in the logo and was modeled on the depiction in the Drävle Rune Stone. The logo was designed by Péter Sávai, a graphic artist from Hungary whose website can be accessed here. A modified logo should be appearing soon on our Twitter feed, so be sure to keep a careful eye out for this and other Project Andvari updates.

Artefacts: Encyclopédie en ligne des petits objets archéologiques

Sponsored by the Centre National de la Recherché Scientifique, Mason de l’Orient et la Méditerraneé, and Université Lumière Lyon 2, Artefacts: Encyclopédie en ligne des petits objets archéologiques (Online Encyclopedia for small archeological objects) is a fantastic new resource for small archaeological objects dating from the Neolithic Period to the Modern Era.

Not only does the site provide excellent records for objects, they include high-quality images, reproductions of artists renderings (if available), and geo-spatial data on find sites and geographic distribution. Additionally, object records include bibliographic citations and references that can be accessed through available hyperlinks.

This repository is a sterling example of a digital resource that can greatly facilitate research. Project Andvari hopes to follow in the footsteps of Artefacts: Encyclopédie en ligne des petits objets archéologiques by providing a quality interface to enhance the study of the material culture of early medieval northern Europe.

Be sure to check out the repository by visiting it here.