Mellon Foundation Supports New Software Tools for Humanities Researchers

Lev Manovich and a visiting researcher exploring a visualization of one million manga pages on HIPerSpace visualization system constructed by Gravity Lab at Calit2. Computers have changed the landscape of humanities research. Innovations continue to make it cheaper and easier to digitize and analyze ever larger volumes of data. But most e-humanities tools focus on manuscripts and other textual records. Now researchers at the University of California, San Diego are working to enable widespread exploration of big image and video collections, too. With support from a $477,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the researchers will develop new software for analyzing large visual data sets and integrate it into SEASR/Meandre, a technology platform designed for humanities research. "The digital humanities have been developing very rapidly in the last few years, with many new centers, projects and jobs," said Lev Manovich, professor of visual arts at UC San Diego and principal investigator on the Mellon Foundation grant.