JISC has announced that eight projects have been awarded Digging into Data Challenge grants.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"Data mining and analysis are not just for scientists" is the message coming strongly out of an international JISC-funded competition, the "Digging into Data Challenge."

Entrants have been challenged to answer the question "what would you do with a million books? Or a million pages of newspapers? Or a million photographs of artworks?" That is, how can analysis done over immense quantities of digital data be employed in humanities and social science research? What would you do with a million books? Or a million pages of newspapers? Or a million photographs of artworks?

Eight international research teams from the UK, US and Canada will be using a variety of data analysis tools to demonstrate that techniques currently used in the sciences can leverage open, new avenues for scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

The winners of the competition are announced today by the four leading research agencies sponsoring the competition: JISC, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), both of the United States.

Investment from the four agencies together amounts to over a million pounds, allowing new links to be forged across the different countries, as well as breaking down disciplinary boundaries.

Here are the funded projects

• Data Mining with Criminal Intent: George Mason University, University of Alberta, and University of Hertfordshire
• Digging into Image Data to Answer Authorship Related Questions: Michigan State University, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and University of Sheffield
• Digging into the Enlightenment: Mapping the Republic of Letters: University of Oklahoma, University of Oxford, and Stanford University
• Harvesting Speech Datasets for Linguistic Research on the Web: McGill University and Cornell University
• Mining a Year of Speech: University of Oxford and University of Pennsylvania
• Railroads and the Making of Modern America—Tools for Spatio-Temporal Correlation, Analysis, and Visualization: University of Portsmouth and University of Nebraska-Lincoln
• Structural Analysis of Large Amounts of Music Information: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, University of Southampton, and McGill University
• Towards Dynamic Variorum Editions: Mount Allison University, Imperial College, London, and Tufts University

This entry was posted on Friday, December 4th, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under Digital Media, Grants, Mass Digitizaton. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.