Sam and I had an excellent time at the NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant project directors’ meeting in Washington, D.C. The Office of Digital Humanities staff are lovely people — they seem really excited about the work they’re doing and eager to help digital humanities projects succeed. The meeting was a nice mix: informative sessions by NEH staff, presentations by the project directors present, Barcamp-style “birds of a feather” sessions, and one-on-one meetings with other grant program officers. We left with lots of new ideas for collaboration and potential new directions for eComma development.

ODH is also providing a useful new tool: a searchable Library of Funded Projects and Whitepapers. Since the Start-Up Grants are so young, few projects have whitepapers posted yet, but that will change in the next year.

In other news, we will soon complete the beta version of eComma. We’re also scheduling more classroom tests — including a distance learning class — and, with the help of a student from the iSchool, usability tests. And, like the rest of the digital humanities world, we’re hard at work on our application for the DML competition.

Thanks to Travis’s recent update, you can see some visual evidence of the work we’ve been doing this summer to produce the beta version of eComma. We’re planning a number of classroom tests for fall, and are hoping to involve students from the UT School of Information, as well, as we work to improve the application’s usability.

We will also be producing an installation of eComma for the Harry Ransom Center, to accompany their spring exhibition on The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. Our Collaborative Rubáiyát will allow visitors to the Ransom Center’s galleries and long-distance users to interact with the poem and with their fellow readers by posting questions or comments and adding tags to the poem. This interactive version of the Rubáiyát will also allow users to compare variant texts of the poem.

In late September, Sam and I will be traveling to the National Endowment for the Humanities in D.C. to attend a project directors’ meeting for Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant recipients. We’re looking forward to learning more about the other participating projects.

We’re also looking forward to the 2008 Digital Media and Learning Competition. This year’s competition theme is “Participatory Learning,” which we’re obviously pretty excited about, since eComma is designed to promote exactly that. We’re also excited to announce that Travis was recently named a HASTAC Scholar.