Pitt Professor Receives National Endowment for the Humanities Grant

PITTSBURGH—The National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities has awarded one of four Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grants to David J. Birnbaum. Birnbaum is a professor in and the chair of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures within the University of Pittsburgh’s Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.

His grant was part of a total of $79 million in grants covering nearly 300 humanities projects and programs announced Tuesday by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The $156,251 grant will support “Make your edition: models and methods for digital textual scholarship,” a three-week program in which participants, ranging from graduate students to professors, will learn how to develop systems to analyze manuscript material for research. Similar training is common in Europe but not in the United States. Birnbaum aims to host the program in summer 2017.

“I am excited about receiving this grant because digital scholarly editing (that is, the creation of digital critical editions) is an area of rapid change and development,” said Birnbaum. “Editions are made for many different reasons, and the appropriate way to make an edition is therefore not a one-size-fits-all matter. What we propose to do is to teach the attendees to ‘fish,’ as it were, so that they’ll be able to conceptualize their editions according to their own research questions and venture forth without fear to build what they need to realize it.”

Birnbaum is the principal investigator of the project. The other team members include Tara L. Andrews, assistant professor of digital humanities, University of Bern, Switzerland; Ronald Haentjens Dekker, head of research and development, Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; Leif-Jöran Olsson, systems developer, Språkbanken, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; Joris J. van Zundert, program leader, Methodology Research Program, Huygens Institute; and Mike Kestemont, assistant research professor, Department of Literature, University of Antwerp, Belgium.

“David is a world leader in the use of digital technologies to make texts that are foundational to cultures accessible for scholarly research, and this project will make his expertise—and that of his collaborators—available to scholars throughout the United States,” said N. John Cooper, Bettye J. and Ralph E. Bailey Dean of the Dietrich School.

Birnbaum has taught at Pitt since 1990 and has chaired the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures since 1996. Since 2011, he has taught Computational Methods in the Humanities, a coding-intensive course in Pitt’s University Honors College.

At Harvard University, Birnbaum earned a master’s degree and PhD in Slavic languages and literatures in 1980 and 1988, respectively. He received a master’s degree in Slavic languages and literatures from The Ohio State University in 1978. Birnbaum earned a bachelor’s degree in Russian at Brown University in 1976. He was recognized last year by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences with the Marin Drinov Medal, the academy’s highest honor for foreign scholars.

About the National Endowment for the Humanities
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at www.neh.gov.

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