spring 2008
GMAP is one of three humanities research projects chosen by SEASR, Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research, to demonstrate experimental software that advances scholarly research by facilitating the data mining of electronic scholarly materials in various formats.
In March 2008, GMAP was part of a SEASR planning workshop at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), to begin the process of data identification and collection. SEASR, which is supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, now holds a GMAP database of scholarship on medieval Africa and Asia compiled by the University of Minnesota that can be queried through keywords that identify a scholar’s principal research questions, issues, and themes—a database that can be used to generate new research directions and possibilities.
A demonstration workshop by SEASR and the three participating humanities groups to showcase the results produced by SEASR’s software is scheduled for spring 2009.
fall 2007
The first planning workshop of the Global Middle Ages was held by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Medieval Studies and the University of Texas Medieval Studies Program at the Twin Cities campus in November 2007.
Literary scholars, archeologists, geographers, art historians, religious studies scholars, historians of science, musicologists, and digital specialists and computer technologists, along with graduate students, met to discuss themes, trajectories, methods, and ideas for studying an interconnected medieval world.
The participants—who teach and research Europe, Islamic civilizations, Africa, India, China, and Eurasia—met in large- and small-group formats to outline and suggest future initiatives, including the creation of globally-themed conferences and symposia, panels of speakers, and an international advisory board to guide GMAP, SCGMA, and Mappamundi. Pictures from the workshop are featured on the Mappamundi and SCGMA sites.
news
Mappamundi shares a new $250,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grant.
The 2008-9 NEH grant for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities is the successful outcome of a multi-institutional effort that is the brainchild of Kevin Franklin of the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (iCHASS) in Illinois.
The grant provides seed funding for Mappamundi and two other digital projects, to see how supercomputing—which has thus far mainly served the sciences and engineering—can meet the needs of complex, multi-faceted humanities projects.
The funds support needs analysis, mini-residencies, and first-step collaborations involving three supercomputing centers, to understand how to design Mappamundi as a cybernetic learning community that functions as an online classroom, virtual museum, discussion group, archive, knowledge-creation center, and dynamic tour across the world over a timeline of 1,000 years.
