Today, fourteen teams representing Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States were named the winners of the second Digging Into Data Challenge, a competition to promote innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis. Each team represents collaborations among scholars, scientists, and librarians from leading universities worldwide.

I'm very proud to announce that the NEH has just awarded a small grant to the Association of Research Libraries, the local sponsors of the 2011 Berlin 9 Conference on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. The grant will support humanities sessions at the conference.

In its ninth year, this is the first time that the landmark Berlin Open Access conference has taken place in North America. During those nine years, the open access landscape has changed immensely, with more scholarly and scientific works being published in an open format where they can be read by a wide audience. This year's conference takes...

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 I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the passing of Father Roberto Busa, one of the most influential figures in the digital humanities. Busa's doctoral thesis and much of his later scholarship focused on studying the works of Thomas Aquinas. Famously, in 1949, Busa approached IBM founder Thomas J. Watson and convinced him that computers could be used to study the vast corpus of text written by Aquinas. Computers in the 1940's weren't used for searching or studying text -- but Busa spent several decades demonstrating how they could.

For more on Busa, do check out this terrific Time magazine article from 1956 (thanks to Bethany Nowviskie for passing this on). Also, see these tributes to Busa from Stephen Ramsay and Geoffrey Rockwell....

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