ADHO Announces Recipients of the Zampolli and Fortier Prizes

29 Aug 2013 - 00:00

The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) is pleased to announce that Dr. Raymond Siemens of the University of Victoria has won the 2014 Antonio Zampolli Prize and that Courtney Evans and Ben Jasnow of the University of Virginia have received the Paul Fortier prize for the best paper presented by young scholars at the 2013 Digital Humanities Conference.

Recognizing a singular achievement in the digital humanities, the Zampolli Prize is named in honor of Professor Antonio Zampolli (1937-2003), who was a founding member of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC), ALLC President from 1983-2003, and a leader in establishing the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and the TEI Consortium. ADHO awards the prize triennially; Siemens is only the second recipient. Siemens, Canada Research Chair in Humanities Computing and Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria, won the award based on his leadership in establishing and running the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), a week-long educational program that explores the implications of computing technologies for teaching, research, and the creation, dissemination and preservation of knowledge. Launched in 2001,
DHSI brings together faculty, staff, students and independent scholars in arts, libraries, humanities and archives for hands-on work, lectures and seminars in digital humanities (DH) and represents an outstanding achievement in teaching, mentorship, and community building. Neil Fraistat, Chair of ADHO’s Steering Committee, comments: “We are delighted to recognize Ray’s trail-blazing leadership in DH training, which is moving beyond DHSI itself to the formation of a world-wide training network, and we are deeply grateful for his long-term outstanding service to ADHO and the DH community overall.” Siemens will be presented with the award and give the Zampolli Prize lecture at the 2014 Digital Humanities conference, to be held in Lausanne, Switzerland. He will receive a 1000 GBP prize.

In awarding the Fortier Prize, a group of experienced conference participants attended presentations by five finalists and selected Evan and Jasnow’s innovative work applying digital tools to the analysis of Homer. The prize pays tribute to Paul Fortier, who was the University Distinguished Professor of French at the University of Manitoba, Canada, a leader in digital humanities organizations, and an active supporter of young scholars. Evans and Jasnow, graduate students in classics at the University of Virginia, won the Fortier Prize for their paper “Homer’s Catalogue of Ships,” which uses mapping technologies to investigate whether a geographical principle informs Homer’s catalogue of ships in The Iliad. To quote some comments of the reviewers on the winning paper: "It was a lovely presentation, one that, to my mind, represents exactly what we would hope for in digital humanities work from young scholars. This paper was a very nice model of digital discovery in action." And: "The presenters gave
us a lovely, imaginative, graphic, and visually well-designed presentation; a clear narrative arc rather than the standard "bullet-point" style; and tantalizing hypotheses for future work." As Rafael Alvarado noted of their work, which was done in collaboration with Dr. Jenny Strauss Clay and the University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab, “I am sure many humanists outside
of the digital humanities, and not only classicists, will grasp both the method and its results, and will be inspired to ask interesting
questions of both Homer and the researchers on the basis of this understanding.” The winners will share a 500 GBP prize and are invited to publish their work in an ADHO journal.

In addition, fourteen students or young scholars received bursary awards to support their participation in the Digital Humanities 2013 conference.
Recipients of the bursary awards include:

Hamed M. Alhoori, Texas A&M University
Adam Anderson, Harvard University and David Bamman, Carnegie Mellon University
Drayton Callen Benner, University of Chicago
Alberto Campagnolo, University of the Arts, London
Alexandra Chassanoff, UNC Chapel Hill
Constance Crompton, UBC-Okanagan
Courtney Evans and Ben Jasnow, University of Virginia
Paul Matthew Gooding, University College London
Andrew Hankinson, McGill University
Simon Rowberry, University of Winchester
Graham Alexander Sack, Columbia University
Ayush Shrestha, Georgia State University
Dana Ryan Solomon, UC Santa Barbara
Lindsay Thomas, University of California, Santa Barbara

The announcement of the Zampolli and Fortier Prizes was made during the closing ceremonies of the Digital Humanities 2013 conference, hosted in July at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.