NEH Grant Programs DigitalHumanitites Initiative

Transcripts of presentations
now available for October 2007 conference in Washington, D.C.

NEH and Italy’s Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) held the first of two planned conferences to bring together U.S. and Italian humanities scholars. The first conference, “Using New Technologies to Explore Cultural Heritage,” focused on the use of digital tools to preserve and study cultural heritage and took place Oct. 5, 2007, in Washington, D.C.

This conference was part of NEH’s participation in the President's Global Cultural Initiative, a major public-private initiative launched in 2006 to coordinate, enhance, and expand America’s cultural diplomacy efforts worldwide.

For links to brief biographies of the partipants and transcripts of their presentations, please see the conference’s agenda.

The NEH and CNR gratefully acknowledge the generous support provided by the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities.

Digital Humanities and
NEH Grant Programs

NEH supports a wide variety of digital humanities projects through its core programs. Click on the activity that you're interested in for application guidelines.

I want to . . .

join the "DHI Update" listserve to receive periodic announcements from NEH about digital humanities grants, programs, issues, and events.

create digital humanities tools for analyzing and manipulating humanities data (with Humanities Collections and Resources Grants, as well as Research and Development Grants)

develop standards and best practices for digital humanities (Research and Development Grants)

create, search, and maintain digital archives (Humanities Collections and Resources Grants)
Note: This grant program combines Preserving and Creating Access to Humanities Collections and Reference Materials categories.

create a digital or online version of a scholarly edition (Scholarly Editions Grants)

work with a colleague on a digital humanities project (Colloraborative Research Grants)

enhance my institution's ability to use new technologies in research, education, preservation, and public programming in the humanities
(Challenge Grant)

study the history and impact of digital technology (Fellowships, Faculty Research Awards, Summer Stipends)

develop digitized resources for teaching the humanities (Grants for Teaching and Learning Resources)

develop a Web site or other digital project for a general public audience (America's Historical and Cultural Oranizations Planning and Implementation Grants)

develop a Web site or other digital project to accompany a museum exhibition (America's Historical and Cultural Oranizations Planning and Implementation Grants)

develop a Web site or other digital project to accompany a television program (Television Grants)

produce a Web site or other digital project to accompany a television program (Television Grants)

Contact the Digital Humanities Initiative staff at dhi@neh.gov.

Applications for digital humanities projects are welcomed in all NEH grant programs. See a list of NEH grant programs organized alphabetically or by activity area.

NEH has launched a new digital humanities initiative aimed at supporting projects that utilize or study the impact of digital technology. Digital technologies offer humanists new methods of conducting research, conceptualizing relationships, and presenting scholarship. NEH is interested in fostering the growth of digital humanities and lending support to a wide variety of projects, including those that deploy digital technologies and methods to enhance our understanding of a topic or issue; those that study the impact of digital technology on the humanities--exploring the ways in which it changes how we read, write, think, and learn; and those that digitize important materials thereby increasing the public's ability to search and access humanities information.

Latest News

December 19, 2007—The NEH's Digital Humanities Initiative announces a brand-new grant program called “Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities.” The deadline is April 9, 2008.

Learn More about NEH’s DHI Programs

Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants—NEH invites proposals for the planning or initial stages of innovative digital initiatives in all areas of the humanities.

Advancing Knowledge: The IMLS/NEH Digital Partnership—Through its new partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the NEH hopes to fund innovative collaborations among libraries, museums, archives, and universities.

Digital Humanities Challenge Grants—These special Challenge Grants can help endow digital humanities centers and other large projects.

Digital Humanities Workshops for K-12 Educators—This program is accepting proposals for workshops that offer academically rigorous professional development programs for K-12 educators seeking to use digital resources to strengthen the teaching of the humanities.

Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities—This program supports major training institutes or workshops to teach advanced topics in the digital humanities.

JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants—This program supports collaborations between U.S. and English institutions who are working to digitize or enable scholarly access to important humanities collections.

NEH-funded Digital Projects

NEH has been at the forefront of providing support for digital humanities projects. Notable and cutting-edge projects include:

The Walt Whitman Archive, is an electronic research and teaching tool that makes Whitman’s vast corpus of work accessible to scholars, students, and general readers. (Collaborative Research Grant and a Challenge Grant)

The Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University and the Archive of World Music at Harvard University are developing best practices and testing emerging national standards in the digital preservation of analog sound recordings. (Preservation and Access Research and Development Grant)

The Valley of the Shadow is a hypermedia digital archive, created with the support of the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, that weaves together thousands of sources about two communities—one southern, one northern—before, during, and after the Civil War. (Grants for Teaching and Learning Resources)

Explore Art explores Himalayan art through the use of images, sounds, timelines, essays, and stories. The Web site serves as a model for the use of interactive technologies to present a museum collection and scholarship about it.

The University of Maryland constructed the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), a center devoted to digital humanities, electronic literature, and cyberculture. MITH is a collaboration among the University of Maryland's College of Arts and Humanities, Libraries, and Office of Information Technology. (Challenge Grant)

The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Web site features the full searchable text of the journals, along with related texts, images, and recorded readings.

The Perseus Digital Library is an evolving digital library that makes accessible and creates links between primary and secondary sources. The library began with a focus on textual and visual materials documenting ancient Greece and Rome and has expanded to include materials on the English Renaissance, the history of London, and the history of science. (Grants for Teaching and Learning Resources.)

The Do You Speak American? Web site and Web-enhanced DVD serves as a companion to Do You Speak American?, a documentary that aired on PBS. The Web site explores differences in and evolution of American English across the country through the use of maps, sound clips, video, essays, and other interactive features.