This proposal requests support for travel to preliminary planning meetings, and to attend a workshop at the headquarters of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin. The workshop will allow US researchers to coordinate efforts with the strategic initiatives of the German Archaeological Institute, one of the largest and most archaeological organizations in the world. The US researchers will be primarily associated with the large and well-established Perseus Digital Library (with a focus on Greco-Roman Antiquity) and the group associated with the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (with particular strength on Asian culture). Both have considerable international collaborations underway. Preliminary meetings will address the challenges of developing interoperable linguistic and geographic resources that are of great value to scholars studying long-term cultural transformations across broad geographical areas.
Vast and growing datasets and increasingly high performance computing have made it possible for us to identify and track patterns between the linguistic and archaeological data, across thousands of years, within and between languages, and on a global scale. We are in a position to study interacting phenomena as they develop over time (e.g., the spread of Latin and its transformation into modern languages such as Spanish, French, and Italian; the development and circulation of scientific concepts across Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Arabic and every modern language; the circulation of material good and practices across the Eurasian continent and then across the globe). Much research needs to be done on analyzing and processing data of this complexity and at this scale but our ability to analyze and automatically detect significant patterns has already far outstripped our ability to visualize and then interpret these patterns. At the same time, this emerging research domain is global in scope, overwhelms the neat boundaries of print culture, and demands new collaborations across disciplinary, linguistic, cultural and national boundaries. This exploratory project addressed the problem of visualizing data at a global scale within the global context that this task demands. This award brought together researchers from Computer Science, Archaeology, Linguistics from Germany and the United States at a 2011 workshop at the University of Cologne and contributed to a larger three-week Institute, largely funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities that brought together more than twenty-five experts in Computer Science with specialties in Visualization, Data Mining, and Machine Translation, linguists with expertise in Corpus and Historical Linguistics, and students of history, literature, religion and society as a whole. The workshops also substantially contributed to the establishment of a Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Leipzig and the foundation of a transatlantic laboratory, with a hub at Tufts University in the United States.
