NEH Office of Digital Humanities

Announcing the Digging into Data Challenge

By Brett Bobley on 1/16/2009 11:08 AM

Break out those shovels and pickaxes! We've got some data to dig! I'm very pleased to say that today we are announcing a new, international grant competition sponsored by four leading research agencies, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada.

Why are these four international funders co-sponsoring this new program? The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to answer the question "what do you do with a million books?" Or a million pages of newspaper? Or a million photographs of artwork? That is, how does the notion of scale affect humanities and social science research? Now that scholars have access to huge repositories of digitized data -- far more than they could read in a lifetime -- what does that mean for research?

This program will bring together researchers from numerous disciplines, including the humanities, computer science, library and information science, and the social sciences. For more information, please check out the press release and the competition website.

ODH Update

Brett Bobley

JISC/NEH Guidelines Available

By Jason Rhody on 1/12/2009 5:26 PM

The guidelines for the JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants are now available on the NEH website (the JISC version of the guidelines can be found here).

The application deadline is March 26, 2009. As always, feel free to contact us with questions, requests to read drafts (six weeks prior to deadline, please), or if you just want to chat about a project idea.

A detailed description of the previous (and first) version of this grant program can be found in this handy PDF summary (738kb PDF).

Also note: the Start-Up Grant (SUG) guidelines have been updated, and the next deadline is April 8, 2009.

ODH Update

Jason Rhody

NEH Announces Digital Humanities Challenge Grants and Others

By Brett Bobley on 12/23/2008 4:51 PM

On December 18, the NEH announced $15.7 million in new grant funding. Among the 248 new grants that were announced there are several that will be of great interest to the digital humanities community. Two of the grants were from our Digital Humanities Challenge Grants program. Challenge Grants are designed to fund infrastructure and long-term institutional support. These grants require the institution to raise matching funds (usually in a ratio of 3 to 1). I’m happy to say that two leading digital humanities centers were recipients of Challenge Grants. They are: I-CHASS (Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, received a $750,000 Challenge Grant to establish an endowment that will help fund three positions at I-CHASS: an Associate Director for Data Analytics and Pattern Recognition, an Associate Director for Human-Computer Interaction, and an Assistant Director in Modeling. ...

ODH Update

Brett Bobley