neh digital implementation grant

7/21/2019 NEH Digital Implementation Grant

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4. Narrative

Humanities SignificanceCELL: Research Tools for Electronic Literature

aims to create an expanded toolset and

ongoing outreach to establish cooperative communication among databases devoted to

electronic literature. The project is led by the Consortium for Electronic Literature (CELL), aninitiative of the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO). To date, CELL includes 10 research

1

centers that are developing online database projects dedicated to research in electronic

literature (e-lit). The CELL team include humanities scholars, experts in database design,

information/library science, and in digital humanities project management.

The first phase of CELLs projecta search engine released in early 2015 that harvests and

aggregates records from across the partner databaseswas funded by an NEH Digital

Humanities Start-Up Grant and developed at the NT2 Lab in Montreal. With our project well

underway and our consortium representing the primary scholarly resource in the field of e-lit,

this second phase of the project seeks $322,996

from the Digital Humanities Implementation

Grant, with the following f

ive goals in mind: improve our existing web-based CELL tools fore-lit standardize a field-wide taxonomy for works of e-lit design and prototype visualization

tools create a unified e-lit name authority and train a new generation of editors to curate

content.

The ELO is the leading organization devoted to the writing, publishing, and reading of

literature in electronic media. The umbrella organization for the CELL partners, the ELO

includes its own database project, the Electronic Literature Directory (ELD), in the consortium.

The ELO website offers the most succinct definition of e-lit: Electronic literature, or e-lit,

refers to born-digital works with recognized literary aspects that take advantage of the

capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer. Within the

broad category of electronic literature are several forms and threads of practice, some of

which are: hypertext fiction and poetry, on and off the Web kinetic poetry presented in Flash

and using other platforms computer art installations which ask viewers to read them or

otherwise have literary aspects conversational characters, also known as chatterbots

interactive fiction novels that take the form of emails, SMS messages, or blogs poems and

stories that are generated by computers, either interactively or based on parameters given at

the beginning collaborative writing projects that allow readers to contribute to the text of a

work literary performances online that develop new ways of writing. This definition is2

valuable in highlighting the flexibility and range of e-lit as it refers to digital texts. E-lit is not an

emerging field: it has arrived. The U.S. Library of Congress recently held a showcase of e-lit

and is engaged in cataloging the field. Similar initiatives are underway in other countries. E-lit

appears in anthologies and university courses. However, no comprehensive tools exist for

e-lit research

. N

o standard bibliographical protocol can describe or catalog e-lit and previousprotocols of print-based literature do not apply. Existing tools are unable to keep up with the

innovative forms and rapid pace of publication that stem from the creation of e-lit. The lack of

appropriate research tools is

partly because of the unique aspects of born-digital literary

objects: they are inherently dynamic and less "fixed" than print artifacts, rendering e-lit difficult

1See http://eliterature.org/cell/for a description of the consortium and its members.2See http://eliterature.org/what-is-e-lit.

1
http://www.aegirproject.org/http://eliterature.org/what-is-e-lithttp://eliterature.org/cell/


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to document and study. Other research groups have come up with different terms and

approaches, and what CELL is striving for is the creation of a shared protocol.

E-lit is the

site

for contemporary literary innovation and creativity in digital media. Scholarship on e-lit

reflexively explores the humanities place in technology-rich environments. Moreover, e-lit is a

barometer of the overall trajectory of texts in digital environments and deals with concerns

shared by virtually all digital humanities projects. The innovations in handling these complexartifactsnot only in a single database but across an international consortium of

databaseswill provide lessons and insights for a wide range of projects. CELL codifies the

overall trajectory of literature in digital environments, providing concepts and relationships for

the emerging condition of texts today.

In order to test, expand, and ensure the wide usability of CELL research tools, we require

support from the NEH, including the following five specific goals:

1. improve our existing web-based CELL tools, ensuring they display extensive andaccurate aggregated server results harvested from across the consortium databases, and

they reflect the diverse needs and audiences of the field

2. standardize a field-wide taxonomy for works of e-lit, based on those implemented in

the CELL search engine and other tools, including the development of CMS modules andguidelines for implementation in other database projects

3. design and prototype visualization tools allowing CELL partners to mine data from theaggregated search and semantic information available on the CELL site

4. create a unified e-lit name authority, to improve the data harvested by the searchengine, to create more faceted and complex results, and to integrate CELL with other

authority tools (e.g. VIAF)

5. and finally, to ensure that the ELOs own role in CELL continues to be robust and

sustainable, train a new generation of editors to curate contentin the growingElectronic Literature Directory, which is added automatically to the CELL search engine.

The first stage of the CELL website went online in early 2015, including a search engine

providing the first field-wide search of materials related to e-lit, along with links to actual worksand reviews. With these tools in place, we can move to the implementation stage from

September 2015-August 2018. Technical development will again take place at the NT2 Lab.

Innovation: methods and digital technologyOur project will allow scholars from within the field and in the general public to search for and

retrieve richly connected research on e-lit. While e-lit databases existindeed, our

consortium represents all the significant projects

no consistent standard exists for terms and

notations used for encoding and retrieving research in these databases. Some partners use

highly controlled data, others use more open, folksonomic approaches. Some are focused on

specific corpora of e-lit, while others attempt to encompass the entire field. All the partners are

committed to open access resources. By standardizing, aggregating, and making searchable

data across the partner projects, we will allow researchers to build on, implement, and extendour inter-site searching. Our goal is to go beyond merely creating an e-lit Google. We will

provide the first shared tool for curated, international research in the field. Our site will be the

go-to point for new scholars, as well as students and the general public. Designing the

interface is not a purely technical taskit requires careful critical and scholarly attention. For

example, the shared server foregrounds multi-linguistic challenges of born-digital writing in

global collaborations. A guiding question is how to represent and handle cross-linguistic

search results. Our decisions in designing the search will allow scholars to pose research

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questions at the intersection of ubiquitous and networked born-digital objects, on the one

hand, and the specificity of individual languages and cultures, on the other.

CELL Taxonomies and Metadata.

During the 2012-13 academic year, the consortium

established a metadata standard for creative works of e-lit, the first of its kind. (See Appendix:

CELL Metadata Element Set.) The document emerged from discussion of the existingstandards of member projects, identifying a canonical minimum metadata description for a

creative work of e-lit. All CELL members signed agreements to re-configure their databases

and to make records available in accordance with the standard and subsequently agreed to

create a shared server to harvest records from across the partner databases. Searches using

the CELL search engine retrieve records formatted by this historic standard. The results are

deepened and faceted by the implementation of taxonomies, providing the first global

representation of the semantic features of works of e-lit. The project team implemented the

initial CELL taxonomy with the first version of the search interface. The Implementation grant

will fund research and technical development to build in the start-up phase taxonomy to allow

users to more efficiently and accurately use CELL. During the start-up phase of the project,

the team created Drupal modules whichonce installedallowed partners to tag records with

the CELL-specific taxonomies. The index harvests records from these sites with the addedsemantic layer however, the startup phase limited this to Drupal-only modules. This choice

was dictated by budget constraints, but also by the pragmatic need to test the taxonomies and

indexing. The longer term implementation of the project will create open frameworks for

non-Drupal sites to integrate with CELL. Rather than develop modules for every possible

CMS, our goal is to allow any future partner to adapt their project to CELL. The semantic

structuring provided by CELL is the definitive representation of the semantics of works of e-lit.

The Implementation grant will also make the CELL taxonomies publicly available in a

canonical form, providing standardized lists for future projects and descriptions of works.

Reverse Tagging and Visualization

. One of the more difficult challenges for the project is the

semantization of the works of e-lit, as they relate to categories and taxonomies. No commonvocabulary exists for e-lit. Our goal is to create a research tool that consolidates the literary

analyses with affordances of the digital methods and tools at hand. The varied

understandings of literariness in the CELL partners pose challenges for defined categories.

Instead, the project employs two solutions. The first, the CELL taxonomies described above,

emerged from the analysis of records in the partner databases, all of which used varying

definitions for terms and systems to create tags. As noted, the taxonomies are being

implemented by the partners and provide a powerful semantic overlay for the CELL project.

The second strategy is complementary and works from the opposite direction: we will create

an emergent taxonomy directly on the CELL website using reverse tagging. Instead of

defining the works at the point of entry with set terms, we will freely categorize works by how

they might be searched and used for academic research. Semantically, the entries will belinked together like regular taxonomies, but the tagging will be done manually. This second

stage will be supported through the Implementation grant. Additionally, our innovation will be

to mine the resulting datacombining fixed taxonomies and manually tagged free

categoriesand create visualizations of the results, built using existing modules available

through the Drupal community. These visualizations will show the network of concepts

surrounding the literary works in the field of e-lit. Implementation funds will enable to develop

the necessary programming and tools for data mining and visualization.

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CELL Name Authority

.No name authority system exists for the e-lit field, a state of affairs thatcauses confusion and redundancy in the scholarship. While e-lit author names obviously

intersect with existing name authorities, such as VIAF, there is a clear need for a name

authority serving the needs of e-lit. The field uses terms and names in a vague and contested

manner, with no clear agreement. For example, Marjorie C. Luesebrink is the author of many

well-known works of e-lit. Some are published under her own name, but many are publishedunder the pen name M. D. Coverley. As a result, e-lit databases include entries for both

names. The matter is even more complex: there may be a separate entry for Marjorie

Luesebrink (without the middle initial) or for MD Coverley (without the periods and spaces

around the initials), often as a result of different catalogers. A name authority provides a

thesaurus, mapping all the instances of authors names, and allows catalogers to ensure a

reliable and agreed-upon name. It also allows the server to provide a complex and faceted

search, taking users from records listing M. D. Coverley as author to other records listing

Marjorie C. Luesebrink as author. Many authors in the field do not publish in the modes

familiar from the codex and printed book, and thus do not appear in existing name authorities.

Additional challenges arise from the born-digital nature of the work, in which project authors

may be crowd sourced and works exist in multiple variants by many authors, though built on

common code, as in the case of Nick Montforts Taroko Gorge

, where dozens of authors havebuilt on Montforts original javascript poem to create new iterations. Our project will address

these gaps and limitations. We will create a shared interpretive framework that will be vital to

the proliferation of research. Scholars and students of e-lit will be able to ask previously

unanswerable research questions about history, context, and reception. Initial work on the

name authority began in the startup stage and the Implementation grant will allow us to

complete this task.

Sustaining and Maintaining the ELD.

We will put in place a new plan to sustain and maintain

the Electronic Literature Directory, the ELOs contribution to the partner databases. The ELD

is central to the ELOs mission and sets the agenda for the overall CELL editorial direction.

Originally supported by an earlier NEH Start Up Grant in 2010, the ELD is ready for a newstage of development, including: 1) upgrading to Drupal 7 for integration with the existing

CELL site 2) adding members to the ELDs working group 3) streamlining editorial workflow

to distribute creating, vetting, and approving submissions equally among membership and 4)

incentivizing ongoing participation in ELD editing and curating, to draw a larger and growing

team of editors and curators. The ambition is to provide a resource that is as open as possible

and yielding rigorous and scholarly resources. Joseph Tabbi currently provides editorial

oversight of CELL initiatives with other partners rotating leadership throughout the grant

period. Editorial leaders will focus on making sure that works that have been written about in

one database are recognized, translated, and elaborated, in other databases, creating a

robust conversation and reference point for further scholarship. The current grant will also

pave the way for longer term conceptualization of peer review and editorial best practicesacross CELL. In this way the Directory achieves what the Gale Research Series TCLC

attempted before the advent of the Internet: a concise anthology of critical work about works

of literature, but one that takes advantage of computational technology to become fluid,

vibrant, and unbound.

History of the project and start-up phase resultsCELL is an initiative of the ELO to develop partnerships among organizations, universities,

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and publishers to share research on e-lit. CELL members represent the major players in the3

field. CELL began in 2011 has been meeting regularly through Skype and international

conferences. In 2012, representatives from each group signed a letter of commitment to work

on the CELL project. This agreement sets unified goals for the major international e-lit

research teams, including: 1) to foster critical practice around e-lit through scholarly materials

for research and reference and 2) to advocate for the importance of online e-lit resources forscholarly research, including the development of such resources as a legitimate component of

academic credentialing.The following teams, all with research projects involving databases of

e-lit, committed to the consortium and its objectives with signed letters of agreement:

The ELOs Electronic Literature Directory (ELD)

electronic book review

(ebr)

Digital Language Arts Collection, Brown University Digital Repository

ADELTA (Australian Directory for Electronic Literature and Text-based Art), University of

Western Sydney (Australia)

Hypermedia, Art, and Literature Directory, Laboratoire NT2, Universit du Qubec

Montral (Canada)

The ELMCIP Electronic Literature Knowledge Base, University of Bergen (Norway)

ADEL - Archive of German Electronic Literature, University of Siegen (Germany)

PO.EX - Digital Archive of Portuguese Experimental Poetry, University Fernando Pessoa

(Portugal)

Hermeneia, Literary Studies and Digital Technologies Research Group, Universitat de

Barcelona (Spain)

I E-Poetry, University of Puerto Rico: Mayagez (Puerto Rico).

Agreements are in progress with the Laboratoire Paragraphe at the University of Paris VIII

and Ciberia: Biblioteca de Literatura Digital en Espaol at the Complutense University of

Madrid. A signed agreement is also in place with Archiveit.org, and through this the US

Library of Congress (LOC), for an ongoing initiative to archive electronic literature in the LOC.

This collaboration is a major indicator of the leading role played by the ELO in the institutionalreception and understanding of born-digital literary works. These projects represent multiple

languages and national traditions. CELL is not based solely in the context of American

academia and not all the partner projects are exclusively concerned with e-lit. For example,

PO.EX concerns post-1960 Portuguese experimental poetry, some but not all of which is e-lit.

The consortium brings these disparate projects together for the first time. Ours is the first true

cross-disciplinary attempt at formalizing the metadata and database practices in the field.

The first stage of the CELL project was enabled by the NEH Level II Digital Humanities Start

Up grant for A Vocabulary for Electronic Literature. CELL also builds on a previous NEH

Level II Digital Humanities Start-Up grant to the ELO, completed at the end of 2011, with the

goal of improving and expanding the ELD along semantic web models. The projects team4

reported a number of discoveries, including: deeper understanding of the tools and platforms

used in e-lit insights into uses of taxonomies representing the field and insights into fostering

critical analysis skills through educational applications of the ELD. The preliminary data from

that

project provided a starting point for the CELL initiative. However, our project is radically

3See: http://eliterature.org/cell/and http://cellproject.net/.

4see http://directory.eliterature.org

5
http://www.aegirproject.org/http://cellproject.net/http://eliterature.org/cell/


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different and is much larger in scope, bringing together significant international e-lit research

projects. The ELO also recently received an NEH grant for studying early works of e-lit: the

Pathfinders project, directed by ELO President Dene Grigar and board member Stuart

Moulthrop, which built an archive of readings in which authors and volunteer readers explore

the textual possibilities of early digital texts.

Each project in the consortium already has a large database, an established team, and a

robust, multi-year initiative. CELL representatives met at the ELO conference in Paris,

September 2013, to discuss current achievements and to plan forward progress. Following

the creation of CELL Metadata Element Set and the Paris meeting, the consortium agreed to

the work plan for the project through the end of August 2014, and subsequently through the

period covered by the grant running from September 2015 through August 2018, as described

below. More recently, representatives from the partner projects and outside SMEs met at

West Virginia University in Morgantown in November 2014 to discuss the progress of CELL,

including taxonomical fields and project outcomes, such as certain visualization tools and a

more defined name authority.

Environmental ScanThe major scholarly publications in the e-lit field, such as N. Katherine Hayles Electronic

Literature: New Horizons for the Literary

(Notre Dame 2008) and Christopher T. Funkhousers

Prehistoric Digital Poetry

(Alabama 2007) deal with authors, works, and thematics. They do

not deal with the metadata and information architecture involved in works of e-lit. Looking

beyond scholarly publications and toward existing research, one finds advanced consideration

of digital records and archiving, as one would expect of a field of born-digital works. The ELO

was a pioneer in discussion of born-digital records. Projects developed by the ELO5

communitysuch as "The Agrippa Files"are among the paradigmatic digital humanities

explorations of complex textual artifacts. The e-lit field is developed enough to international

research teams, which form the consortium at the center of our project. (See Project History.)

There are other projects that overlap with CELLs goals, though none deal specifically with

works of e-lit or work across such an array of projects in multiple countries. These projects

include 1) resources on e-lit 2) projects in other disciplines focused on data discovery and

finally 3) projects focused on annotation and peer review.

1) Resources on e-lit.

The ten partner organizations that are a part of the CELL project

represent the primary e-lit research resources. The largest of these, the ELMCIP Electronic

Literature Knowledge Base from the University of Bergen, Norway, is the most robust but still

covers only a fraction of all published works. A possible future partner is a project at Cornells

Rose Goldsen Archive developing scalable preservation strategies for born-digital media

artworks. Our project brings collections such as these together to maximize research in the

field of e-lit.

2) Data discovery. The NEH-funded DM Environment: From Annotation to Dissemination,based on the Shared Canvas model, is testing the publishing capabilities of an online tool,

Digital Mappaemundi, that would allow users to gather texts and visuals for humanities

research. Our project can benefit from DMs lessons in data gathering. CELL differs, however,

by focusing on taxonomies and name authority rather than on the gathering of texts and

visuals, features that will provide a deeper semantic organization of our projects content.

The

5See "Acid Free Bits" and Towards a Semantic Literary Web http://eliterature.org/projects/.

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name authority for e-litone of the major deliverables of our projectlooks to established

projects such as Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), an international service providing

convenient access to the worlds name authority files. Name authorities organize, match,6

and merge names and other bibliographic data to provide a single reference source. VIAF

provides a super record, allowing reference across multiple organizations. Our project will

create a similar authority across the CELL databases.3) Annotation and Peer Review. A previously funded NEH Digital Implementation grant,

Annotation Studio: Multimedia Annotation for Students,dealt with searching across7

humanities research on diverse resources. We hope to adopt a similar type of editorial work in

the later stages of the CELL project: peer-reviewed annotations for each bibliographic entry.

This process will be one of the projects goals after the completion of the work of the NEH

Implementation Grant.

Work PlanOur project is well underway, as noted above. The goal is application-independence, both for

long-term preservation and compatibility with new consortium partners. The CLC at West

Virginia University leads project management, communication, and coordination of the

partners. The NT2 Lab in Montreal is the development site. The working sub-groups include:a Technical Committee, an Editorial Committee, and the ELD Team, drawn from all partners.

The timeline below outlines the tasks.

Through August 2015 The first phase of the CELL site (

http://cellproject.net

) is complete. All technical

configurations for the Apache SOLR server are in place at NT2, including hardware, virtual

machines, backups, installed software, and support staff.

Partner databases are updating their systems to be indexed into the search engine.

Drupal-based sites are implementing the modules designed during the prototype period

and tagging records with the CELL taxonomies. Non-Drupal sites are making

modifications to implement the CELL taxonomies. Database records from each partner will

be made available for OAI-PMH harvesting using RDF.

The Editorial committee will begin developing FAQs for implementing the CELL tools and

vocabularies, including detailed examples of taxonomy tagging. The goal is to promote

seamless integration of new partners into the consortium.

The ELD will complete the upgrade to Drupal 7 and integrate with the current CELL site.

September 2015-February 2016 NT2 will develop code and documentation to allow new partners to easily implement the

CELL taxonomies and integrate into the project.

The committees will engage in a preliminary analysis of usability and prepare proposals

for improvement and expansions. It will analyse the CELL taxonomies and free tagging,

with the goal of proposing effective visualizations of this data. It will analyze name

authority listings for all the partners. The server creates an aggregated file in the processof indexing, collecting all the names from the partner databases. The committees will

compare, collate, and map names, using both manual and automated approaches (e.g.

Google Refine/Open Refine). They will compare and recommend the adoption of a shared

identifier scheme. Possible schemes include those already adopted by individual partners

6http://viaf.org7http://blog.historians.org/2013/07/digital-history-abounds-a-roundup-of-recent-neh-grant-projects/

7
http://blog.historians.org/2013/07/digital-history-abounds-a-roundup-of-recent-neh-grant-projects/http://blog.historians.org/2013/07/digital-history-abounds-a-roundup-of-recent-neh-grant-projects/http://viaf.org/http://viaf.org/http://cellproject.net/


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(e.g. ELMCIP) and widely used international schemes (e.g. VIAF). The recommendations

will be completed by the end of August 2015.

The ELD will continue with the activities above. We will also designate editorial assistants

at each partner to contribute to and curate new content in the ELOs ELD project.

February 2016 (Three-day meeting at NT2, Montreal)

The grant will fund a working meeting at NT2 with representatives from all the partners.The team will review the technical developments to date, discussing obstacles and

challenges, and determining resolutions to create a detailed work planoutcomes only

possible by gathering in one place. The team will discuss the name authorities and

visualizations. The team will also discuss the proposals for code and documentation to

allow new partners to easily implement the CELL taxonomies and integrate into the

project. The team will leave the meeting with a detailed to-do list.

March 2016-June 2016 The Technical committee will: begin the programming and design for the visualization

feature implement the refinements to the search taxonomies and oversee the process of

harvesting records and providing search results.

The Editorial committee will continue to develop the aggregated name authority.

The ELD team will continue curating new content and develop a plan for streamlining itsworkflow.

June 2016 (Meeting at University of Victoria) The next meeting will be scheduled around the 2016 (date TBD) Electronic Literature

Organization Conference at the University of Victoria, Canada. It will provide a public

venue for disseminating outcomes from the project, and this timing brings together many

participants in the field. The meeting provides a benchmark for progress and an

opportunity to report achievements to date.

July 2016-April 2017 The Technical committee will revise the website and search interface based on ongoing

feedback and critique. The committee will implement the name authority proposal and

continue work on the visualization project. The Editorial committee will work closely with the Technical Committee to oversee

revisions and ensure the changes follow scholarly and artistic priorities set out in the

critiques. The committee will evaluate the scholarly value of the name authority

implementation.

At this point, the CELL tools will have been live for over a year. All the partners will commit

to promoting, advertising, and announcing CELL, making other projects aware of it, and

inviting inquiries about joining the initiative.

The ELD will implement its revised workflow plan and create a plan for incentivizing

participation.

May 2017 (Meeting at WVU)

The second major team meeting will take place at West Virginia University. With the bulk ofthe set-up of CELL complete, the meeting will focus on 1) drawing up plans for maintenance

of the project 2) setting out protocols for updates and changes as it evolves and 3) outlining

requirements for potential new members. For the latter task:

Members of the entire consortium will complete the framework for projects to join the

consortium. We assume that more research projects will emergewe know of developing

databases in Russia and South Americaand we want those projects to easily adapt to

our protocols and be compatible. After the meeting we will release freely-available

documentation and training materials directed toward new researchers and projects in the

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field. These will allow new projects to answer basic questions: How did we create the

initiative? Does your project fit? How can you make your project a part of the initiative? In

particular: What do you need to do to your database to make it interoperable?

The ELD team will present its plan for incentivizing ELD participation and solicit buy-in and

collaboration from the partners.

May 2017-June 2017 All participants will continue to maintain and improve the search engine. The committeeswill complete implementation of the name authority in CELL and in partner sites. We will

promote the project taxonomies and name authority system to the field as canonical

definitions of works of e-lit.

July 2017 (Meeting in Porto) The next meeting will be scheduled around the 2017 Electronic Literature Organization

Conference in Porto, Portugal (date TBD). It will provide a public venue for disseminating

outcomes from the project. This timing brings together many participants in the field and

provides a benchmark for progress and an opportunity to report achievements to date.

August 2017-August 2018 All participants will continue to maintain and improve the search engine. The name

authority will be implemented. We will promote the project taxonomies and name authoritysystem to the field as canonical definitions of works of e-lit.

The ELD team will implement its incentivization plan, as well as continuing to curate and

add content.

January 2018-August 2018 The project team will co-author a final white paper, covering all aspects of the project and

focusing on lessons learned. The white paper will be submitted to the NEH and released

publicly on the project website.

StaffProject Leader.Charles Baldwin (Sandy) is the director of the Center for Literary Computing

(CLC) at West Virginia University. Under Baldwins direction the CLC has participated in overa million dollars in externally funded research. He is a Vice President of the ELO and author

of many works on electronic literature and digital humanities. Baldwin will be paid a stipend for

his efforts during the summer of 2016, 2017, and 2018. Baldwin will devote 5% of his overall

effort to the project his WVU salary will be cost-shared to cover his efforts during the

academic year. During the course of this grant, Baldwin will be responsible for: managing the

projects development and workflow facilitating meetings and communication between

project partners overseeing the day-to-day budget of the project and submitting the

appropriate reports to the NEH.

Project Leader Assistant. Celeste Lantz is an intern in the CLC and primary assistant to

Professor Baldwin on the project. She will be paid a stipend for her efforts during the summer

of 2016, 2017, and 2018. Her efforts during the academic year will be covered by her WVU

salary. During the course of this grant, Lantz will be responsible for:developing and

maintaining content for the projects website coordinating project meetings and

communication maintaining an archive of project communication and assisting the Project

Director in his responsibilities.

Technical Development. NT2 is the site for all technical development and implementation,

including validation tool equipment, authorities implementation, testing platform development,

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and programming. Grant funds pay for staff time and effort. NT2 is contributing/cost sharing

server support and a part of the labor during the first year. The team is led by Professor

Bertrand Gervais (director of Laboratoire NT2), with assistance from NT2 staff members.

During the course of the grant, the team will be responsible for:

developing the website,

including interface/user design features programming and hosting the server implementing

name authorities and taxonomies developing a test platform for upgrades and changes andproviding backup and disaster recovery for project data.

Technical Committee Coordinators (2). This role will be shared between Robin Varenas, the

technical coordinator of operations at NT2, and secondarily Elli Mylonas, Senior Digital

Humanities Librarian at Brown (Mylonas will primarily act in a consulting role). During the

course of the grant, the coordinators will be responsible for:overseeing the reconfiguration of

partner databases and websites to conform to the requirements of the server managing

configuration and development of the Apache SOLR server managing implementation of the

protocols used in the project, including RDF (Dublin Core and MADS) and OAI-PMH

coordinating configuration of the projects Drupal 7 web interface and overseeing archiving

and backup.

Editorial Committee Coordinator. Joseph Tabbi is a professor of American Literature and

Electronic Literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a leading authority on the

effects of new technologies on contemporary fiction. He is the author or editor of more than

five books and a former President of the ELO. During the course of this grant, Tabbi will be

responsible for:

overseeing elaboration and refinement of the projects taxonomies

overseeing development of a standard e-lit name authority and, in anticipation of the

post-implementation stage of the project, planning a framework for consistent, open source

peer-to-peer review across partner databases.

Editorial Committee Assistants.Each partner will dedicate an editorial assistant, for a total of

ten, to expand and sustain the activities within the ELD. The assistants will work underProfessor Tabbi and be responsible for:coordinating communication and project development

across the Editorial Committeetracking needs of the Editorial Committee members from

each of the projects

and working with Professor Tabbi to develop for peer review framework.

Project Administrator and Liaison at ELO

. The ELO employs an Office Manager at MIT.

During the course of this grant, the Office Manager will be responsible for:preparing reports

and other documents for the NEH

collaborating with Celeste Lantz on maintaining and

developing the CELL website collaborating with Lantz on coordinating agreements and

relations between partners and exploring and developing new partnerships to expand the

consortium.

Final product and dissemination

Final products include the publicly-released research tools and the final white paper. The

white paper will be posted on the NEH website, and circulated to major online venues in the

field, including DHQ, HASTAC, and EBR. Versions of the white paper will be presented at the

2019 ELO conference, location to be determined, and at the Modern Language Association

conference in January 2019.

10

neh digital implementation grant

Documents