Two new faculty fellows have joined Indiana University Bloomington's Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities for the 2011-12 academic year.

The 2011 class of faculty fellows and their projects are:

• Elizabeth Shea, kinesiology, "Expanding Artistic Expression: Motion Capture Technology and Choreographic Choices" -- Shea is using her fellowship to produce a new dance work utilizing motion capture technology as a tool to expand possibilities for dance choreography.
• Tarez Graban, English, "Beyond Recovery: Feminist Treatise Locations Project" -- Graban is developing a prototype for an open-source knowledge base that can help to disseminate and visually depict metadata on feminist treatises in rhetoric and composition.

 

"We are pleased to welcome these two outstanding faculty members. Their projects have exciting intersections between the digital world and the arts and humanities," said Ruth Stone, associate vice provost for arts research and director of IDAH.

 

IDAH is supported by the Office of the Vice Provost for Research at IU Bloomington and is in the Research Commons of the Wells Library. IDAH unites faculty from eight IU Bloomington schools with the disciplinary and technical expertise of staff from the Wells Library and University Information Technology Services. IDAH fellows work in an interdisciplinary environment to enhance their understanding of digital tools, prepare prototypes for major research projects, and develop and submit grant proposals for external funding.

 

Sarita Soni, IU Bloomington's vice provost for research, says the interdisciplinary nature of IDAH has spurred the accomplishments of former IDAH fellows.

 

"The first three classes of IDAH fellows have successfully competed for external and internal grant funding to support their work," she said. "The collaborative nature of the institute has contributed to the success of these scholars."

 

During their fellowships, the 2011 fellows are participating in seminars with teams of specialists and other faculty fellows. Following the fellowship period, they are invited to work with the institute and its research projects. IDAH also serves as a center for collaboration among faculty already pursuing existing projects in expressive culture.

 

IDAH also has partnered with the Data to Insight Center, a part of IU's Pervasive Technology Institute, in sponsoring fellowships given to two teams for collaborative projects in which scholars from the arts and humanities join with computer scientists and informatics specialists to advance arts and humanities research. The Data to Insight Center, or D2I, undertakes research to harness the vast stores of digital data being produced by modern computational resources, allowing scientists and companies to make better use of these data and find the important meaning that lies within them.

IDAH and D2I are sponsoring the following fellowship recipients:

• Sandra Kübler (computational linguistics), Ayelet Weiss (Jewish studies) and Markus Dickinson (computational linguistics), "Developing a Model for the Automatic Analysis of Hebrew Learners' Proficiency (MAP-H)." This project will develop a new method to automatically analyze the language of Hebrew learners to determine their proficiency at a very fine-grained level. This novel method, based on computational linguistics technology, will be used for locating errors in learners' productions and for classifying these errors into levels of proficiency.
• Margaret Dolinsky (fine arts), Eric Wernert (UITS) and William Sherman (UITS), "Reordering Virtual Reality: Recording and Recreating Real-Time Experiences for Art and Science." This project seeks to prototype a system and methodology for capturing, annotating and re-experiencing interactive virtual reality artworks. The prototype will have broad applicability to the visual arts and other performing arts as well as to training simulations and scientific visualizations.

About IDAH

The Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities links disciplinary experts, faculty and support staff in interdisciplinary teams that work on collection-building, tool-building and developing appropriate methods for study and analysis of collections. Team participants come from the School of Informatics and Computer Science, School of Library and Information Science, the IU Digital Library Program, University Information Technology Services, and arts and humanities disciplines on the IU Bloomington campus.

 

About the Data to Insight Center

 

The Data to Insight Center creates tools and visualizations for working with very large data sets, develops methods to ensure data quality and authenticity, and builds methods for listing and discovering data sets. D2I is part of the Pervasive Technology Institute at Indiana University, which receives funding from the Lilly Endowment Inc. and is dedicated to the development and delivery of innovative information technology and policy.