Not only is Jim Safley one of our crack programmers at the Center for History and New Media, he’s also an ace pumpkin carver, able to etch our logo into a massive Halloween specimen.

The National Endowment for the Humanities announced the winners of the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants (co-funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services), from the slate of April 2007 applicants. Some common emphases are frameworks, mark up, tagging, best practices, and several kinds of visualization. You can read about the lucky winners and their projects in this PDF.

I’ve been exploring the potential of Metaweb’s Freebase, a Creative Commons-licensed structured semantic web database for the past couple of months, and Metaweb has now given me some invites to the alpha of their system. If anyone would like to try it out, send me an email.