NEH Office of Digital Humanities

Author:	Brett Bobley	Created:	2/27/2008 1:04 PM
Updates by Brett Bobley

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.

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. ...

NEH Digital Humanities Grantees in the News

By Brett Bobley on 12/15/2008 11:52 AM

In the past few weeks, I’ve been following two big news stories involving NEH grantees. On November 12, there were articles in both the NY Times and the London Times Online about the Rome Reborn project, which was created by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia. The articles included interviews with project director Bernie Frischer who noted that Rome Reborn is now available to the general public via the popular Google Earth platform. In related news, Google announced the Ancient Rome 3D Curriculum Competition, which will...