Category: Digital Humanities

NEH Preservation and Access Research and Development Grants

The National Endowment for the Humanities is soliciting applications for Preservation and Access Research and Development grants, with an 7/30/09 deadline.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Preservation and Access Research and Development grants support projects that address major challenges in preserving or providing access to humanities collections and resources. These challenges include the need to find better ways to preserve materials of critical importance to the nation's cultural heritage—from fragile artifacts and manuscripts to analog recordings and digital assets subject to technological obsolescence—and to develop advanced modes of searching, discovering, and using such materials. . . .

NEH especially encourages applications that address the following areas:

  • Digital Preservation: how to preserve digital humanities materials, including those for which no analog counterparts exist;
  • Recorded Sound and Moving Image Collections: how to preserve and increase access to the record of the twentieth century contained in these formats; and
  • Preventive Conservation: how to protect and slow the deterioration of humanities collections through the use of sustainable preservation strategies.

Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital Scholarship

The Council on Library and Information Resources has released Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital Scholarship: Report of a Workshop Cosponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources and The National Endowment for the Humanities

Here's an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

On September 15, 2008, CLIR, in cooperation with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), held a symposium to explore research topics arising at the intersection of humanities, social sciences, and computer science. The meeting addressed two fundamental questions: (1) how do the new media advance and transform the interpretation and analysis of text, image, and other sources of interest to the humanities and social sciences and enable new expression and pedagogy?, and (2) how do those processes of inquiry pose questions and challenges for research in computer science as well as in the humanities and social sciences?

Working Together or Apart considers these two questions. The volume opens with an essay by CLIR Director of Programs Amy Friedlander, which contextualizes and synthesizes the day's discussion. It is followed by six papers prepared for the meeting, and a summary of a report on digital humanities centers commissioned by CLIR and written by Diane Zorich.

March 18th: It’s a Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities

Today, digital humanists will document their activities as part of a Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities .

Here's an excerpt from the wiki:

A Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities (Day of DH) is a community publication project that will bring together digital humanists from around the world to document what they do on one day, March 18th. The goal of the project is to create a web site that weaves together the journals of the participants into a picture that answers the question, "Just what do computing humanists really do?" Participants will document their day through photographs and commentary in a blog-like journal. The collection of these journals with links, tags, and comments will make up the final work which will be published online.

NEH Funds 197 Humanities Projects

The National Endowment for the Humanities has made $20 million in grant awards/offers to 197 humanities projects.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The funding announced today will support a variety of projects in diverse fields of the humanities. Projects receiving support will, for example, provide college faculty the opportunity to deepen their knowledge in the humanities to enhance undergraduate instruction; support high-quality media projects for public audiences that explore significant ideas and events in the humanities; enable researchers to record and archive languages facing extinction; and encourage the development of innovations in the digital humanities.

This award cycle, institutions and individuals in 36 states and the District of Columbia will receive NEH support. Projects undertaken by American scholars working outside the United States are also receiving support. A complete state-by-state listing of grants and offers of matching funds is available below:

Interview with Brett Bobley, Director of the Office of the Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities

HASTAC has published an interview with Brett Bobley, Director of the Office of the Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Here's an excerpt:

If I had to predict some interesting things for the future in the area of access, I'd sum it up in one word: scale. Big, massive, scale. That's what digitization brings—access to far, far more cultural heritage materials than you could ever access before. If you're a scholar of, say, 19th century British literature, how does your work change when, for the first time, you have every book from your era at your fingertips? Far more books than you could ever read in your lifetime. How does this scale change things? How might quantitative tech-based methodologies like data mining help you to better understand a giant corpus? Help you zero in on issues?

Grants: Digging into Data Challenge from JISC, NEH, NSF, and SSHRC

The Joint Information Systems Committee, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council have announced The Digging into Data Challenge.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Digging into Data Challenge encourages humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis, challenging scholars to develop international partnerships and explore vast digital resources, including electronic repositories of books, newspapers, and photographs to identify new opportunities for scholarship.

Applicants will form international teams from at least two of the participating countries. Winning teams will receive grants from two or more of the funding agencies and, one year later, will be invited to present their work at a special conference. These teams, which may be composed of scholars and scientists, will be asked to demonstrate how data mining and data analysis tools currently used in the sciences can improve humanities and social science scholarship. The hope of this competition is that these projects will serve as exemplars to the field and encourage new, international partnerships among scholars, computer scientists, information scientists, librarians, and others. . . .

In order to apply, interested applicants must first submit a letter of intent by March 15, 2009. Final applications will be due July 15, 2009.

Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research Version 1.4.0

The Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research version 1.4.0 has been released.

Here's an excerpt from the home page:

Developed in partnership with humanities scholars, SEASR enhances the use of digital materials by helping scholars uncover hidden information and connections. SEASR supports the study of assets from small patterns drawn from a single text or chunk of text to broader entity categories and relations across a million words or a million books. SEASR will support numerical, categorical, text, and audio-based analysis and will continue to evolve to include processing of images and other multimedia data formats.

Interview Podcasts from the Coalition for Networked Information's Fall 2008 Task Force Meeting

Gerry Bayne has made available podcast interviews with selected participants at the Coalition for Networked Information's Fall 2008 Task Force Meeting.

Here are three of podcasts of special interest:

Winnemore Digital Humanities Dissertation Fellowships Available

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities has announced the availability of 2009 Winnemore Digital Humanities Dissertation Fellowships. The fellowship is:

Intended for students whose dissertations engage the intersections between new media and the traditional concerns of the Arts and Humanities, the Winnemore Fellowship will provide a stipend of $9,570, plus full benefits and tuition remission up to five credits.

Presentations from eResearch Australasia 2008

Presentations from the eResearch Australasia 2008 conference are available.

Here's a brief selection:

Scholarly Communication Institute 6: Humanities Research Centers, University of Virginia, July 13-15, 2008

The Scholarly Communication Institute has released Scholarly Communication Institute 6: Humanities Research Centers, University of Virginia, July 13-15, 2008.

Here's an excerpt:

In SCI 6, participants undertook an exploration of humanities research centers and their potential to advance technology-enabled scholarship. . . .

SCI 6 was designed to determine what collaborative actions a group of humanities centers might undertake that would promote technology-enabled scholarly communication. Though we are particularly interested in how new technologies can advance scholarship, the goal of this meeting was to engage centers organized in a variety of models and with differing orientations towards technology. . . .

A wide spectrum of research centers were represented at this institute: local, campus-based centers that serve all humanities and social science faculty; discipline-specific centers; a national center of excellence that formed around a rich collection of rare primary-source materials; a digital humanities center housed within an academic department; a digital humanities center that constitutes an academic department; a campus-based center that supports experimental work in digital humanities; and an international institute that relies on digital technologies to share multilingual resources and maintain an international network of collaborators. Also represented were several centers still in the development phase with explicit plans to focus on new technologies.

History 2.0: The History Engine Relaunches

Noted digital historian Edward L. Ayers, whose The Valley of the Shadow project has been very influential, became the President of the University of Richmond last July, and now the innovative History Engine project has moved with him from the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia to Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab.

Here's an excerpt from the "What is the History Engine?" page:

The History Engine project aims to enhance historical education and research for teachers, students, and scholars alike. The Engine allows undergraduate professors to introduce a more collaborative and creative approach to history into their classrooms, while maintaining rigorous academic standards. The core of the HE project is student-written episodes—individual snippets of daily life throughout American history from the broadest national event to the simplest local occurrence. Students construct these episodes from one or more primary sources found in university and local archives, using historical context gleaned from secondary sources to round out their analysis. Students then post their entries in our cumulative database, giving their classmates and fellow participants around the country the opportunity to read and engage with their work.

Read more about it at "The Little Engine That Can."

Dartmouth Appoints Its First Digital Humanities Chair

Dartmouth University has appointed Mary Flanagan as the first endowed chair holder of the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professorship in Digital Humanities.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Before joining Dartmouth's faculty, Flanagan was a professor of contemporary digital arts, culture and technology at Hunter College in New York City. . . .

Flanagan has published two co-edited books with MIT Press, Reload: rethinking women + cyberculture (2002) and Re:skin (2007) and is the author of the forthcoming book Critical Play. She is also the founder and director of the Tiltfactor Laboratory, which researches and develops computer games and software systems focused on science, math, applied computer programming, literacy and social values.

Flanagan received an MFA in Film and Video Production from the University of Iowa in 1994 and a PhD in Computational Media and Game Design from the University of the Arts, London in 2006. She was named a MacDowell Colony Fellow in 2007, a Fulbright Scholar in 2000 and twice received the City University of New York's Outstanding Scholar award in 2004 and 2007.

NEH Office of Digital Humanities Announces Grant Awards and New Grant Opportunities

The National Endowment for the Humanities' Office of Digital Humanities has announced 22 Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants awards and 3 Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities awards.

Applications are being accepted for a new round of Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants with a 10/8/08 deadline.

Presentations/Reports from the JISC/CNI Meeting on Transforming the User Experience

Presentations are available from the JISC/CNI meeting on Transforming the User Experience.

Here's a selection:

Helen Aguera, Senior Program Officer at the National Endowment for the Humanities, has also reported on the conference in a series of Weblog postings:

The Impact of Digitizing Special Collections on Teaching and Scholarship: Reflections on a Symposium about Digitization and the Humanities

OCLC Programs & Research has released The Impact of Digitizing Special Collections on Teaching and Scholarship: Reflections on a Symposium about Digitization and the Humanities.

Here's an excerpt:

University faculty and scholars demonstrated their uses of rare books and archives—in both digital and physical forms—to an audience of RLG Programs partners at a symposium in Philadelphia on June 4, 2008. Tony Grafton's recent article in The New Yorker provoked the theme of the symposium: we'll be travelling both the wide smooth road through the screen and the narrow difficult road of books and archives for a long time to come.

The audience of librarians, archivists, museum professionals and senior managers discussed administrative issues and opportunities for the use of digitized special collections. The academic speakers, however, spoke to us directly about their expectations of special collections and proposals for collaboration with scholars. These scholars emphasized the critical roles rare books, archives and other materials play in both teaching and research, and called for specific directions for libraries and archives to take in the near future. The primary users of primary resources presented clear imperatives for collections and custodians: work with faculty to understand current research methods and materials; go outside the library or archive to build collections and work with faculty; and continue to build digital and material collections for both teaching and research.

Text Analysis: TAPoR Version 1.1 Released

The TAPoR (Text Analysis Portal for Research) text analysis tool has been upgraded to version 1.1.

Here's a description of TAPoR from the project's home page:

TAPoR will build a unique human and computing infrastructure for text analysis across the country by establishing six regional centers to form one national text analysis research portal. This portal will be a gateway to tools for sophisticated analysis and retrieval, along with representative texts for experimentation. The local centers will include text research laboratories with best-of-breed software and full-text servers that are coordinated into a vertical portal for the study of electronic texts. Each center will be integrated into its local research culture and, thus, some variation will exist from center to center.

NEH/DFG Bilateral US/German Humanities Digitization Grants

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) have issued a call for bilateral US/German humanities digitization grant proposals.

Here's an excerpt from the call:

These grants provide funding for up to three years of development in any of the following areas:

  • new digitization projects and pilot projects;
  • the addition of important materials to existing digitization projects; and
  • the development of related infrastructure to support international digitization work and the use of those digitized resources.

Collaboration between U.S. and German partners is a key requirement for this grant category.

A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States Released

A report prepared for the Council on Library and Information Resources titled A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States has been released.

Here's an excerpt from the "Executive Summary":

The immediate goals of the survey were to identify the extent of these [digital humanities] centers, and explore their financing, organizational structure, products, services and sustainability. The longer-term goal is to provide participants of SCI 6 [Scholarly Communication Institute 6] with a greater understanding of existing centers to inform their discussions about regional and national centers. The year-long study took place in two phases: an initial planning phase to develop selection criteria, identify candidates, and plan methodology, and an implementation phase to conduct the survey and analysis of the centers. . . .

The findings of this survey suggest that new models are needed for large-scale cyberinfrastructure projects, for cross-disciplinary research that cuts a wide swathe across the humanities, and for integrating the huge amounts of digital production already available. Current DHCs will continue to have an important role to play, but that role needs to be clarified in the context of the broader models that emerge.

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