Yesterday, I attended a ceremony over at the Folger Shakespeare Library.  The occasion was NEH Chairman Bruce Cole announcing the winners of the first JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants.  The Director of the Folger, Gail Kern Paster, also spoke, as did the Folger's Richard Kuhta, who is the director of one of the funded projects, the "Shakespeare Quartos Archive."  Also in attendance were representatives from three of the other winning projects, including Greg Crane from Tufts, Linda Frueh from the Internet Archive, and Tom Elliott from the NYU Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.  For a complete description of each grant, please check out the NEH press release.  All told, a very impressive group of projects.  Just before the ceremony, the Folger staff set up a display of three original Shakespeare quartos, including a copy of Titus Andronicus from 1594 of which there is only one copy in the world.  (Yes, they...

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ODH Update Brett Bobley

I'm very happy to say that on Tuesday, March 25, at a special event at the Folger Shakespeare Library here in Washington, DC, Chairman Bruce Cole is announcing that the Digital Humanities Initiative is now a permanent office here at the NEH.  Our new name is the Office of Digital Humanities (ODH).  Time to get those new business cards printed, I suppose! 

To celebrate our new name, we have also created a brand-new web presence. We hope that this new web page will be a great resource for information about the NEH and our support for digital humanities. With the new web page, we have transitioned our DHI Update e-mail newsletter into the new web-based ODH Update you are reading right now. By keeping it on the web, it will be easier for us to update it more frequently with information about digital humanities grants, issues, news, and events. We hope you add ODH Update to your favorite RSS/blog/news...

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ODH Update Brett Bobley

Just two months ago, Brett wrote about an event, hosted by King's College London, where NEH Chairman Bruce Cole  and JISC Executive Secretary Malcolm Read discussed international digitization efforts. 

On March 25, Chairman Cole and NEH staff attended another celebration of international digitization: the announcement of the five recipients of JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants.  Collaboration is rarely easy, but it is certainly worthwhile, as evidenced by the quality of the applications we received for this program (both successful and unsuccessful). 

You can read the official press release for the full list of the recipients and their project descriptions. 

ODH Update Jason Rhody

On Tuesday, March 18, I had an opportunity to observe my ODH colleague, Jason Rhody, give a presentation on digital humanities at the NEH to the 2008 liaisons meeting of The Independent College Office, an organization of liberal arts colleges.   At other meeting sessions, staff members from the Division of Research Programs and the Office of Challenge Grants spoke about their work.

I thought that Jim Boelkins, the Provost at Hope College did a nice job of introducing Jason. Jim reaffirmed that the NEH is not just interested in supporting work on digital humanities that orginate from research universities (although those projects are still welcome).  He reminded the audience that Christian Spielvogel at Hope College received a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant in 2007 for his project to develop a web-based simulation based on the online Valley of the Shadow archive. Among the many issues that Jason discussed, one that I thought was particularly relevant to Start-Up Grants is the importance of collaboration—with...

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ODH Update Jennifer Serventi

NEH and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (VFH) co-hosted a conference on January 14, 2008 to discuss the digital needs of scholarly editors.  The meeting included many leading scholarly editors and university presses.  The meeting was facilitated by Ithaka, who also wrote up the final report which is now available on the VFH website. The conference was very well done -- Meredith Quinn from Ithaka did a great job facilitating.  Joel Schwartz from the NEH's Division of Research and I were both there representing the NEH. 

One of the themes that most struck me from the conference was that of "adding value."  How can technology add value to a scholarly edition?  One obvious way is increased access;  if your edition is only available via print (and...

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ODH Update Brett Bobley

The NEH is proud to announce 13 brand-new awardees in our Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant category.  Please check out the list of winners.

We are also announcing a grand total of 149 awards from across the NEH.  Please check out the press release for a complete, state-by-state list.

ODH Update Brett Bobley