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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The Office of Digital Humanities and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) are happy to announce five new awards from the DFG/NEH Bi-Lateral Digital Humanities program from our November, 2010 deadline. These awards are part of a larger slate of 249 grants just announced by the NEH.

The Office of Digital Humanities is happy to announce five six new awards from our Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program from our February, 2011 deadline. These awards are part of a larger slate of 249 grants announced today by the NEH.

The Office of Digital Humanities is happy to announce thirty-two new awards from our Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program from our February, 2011 deadline. These awards are part of a larger slate of 249 grants just announced by the NEH.

I’m pleased to announce some major improvements to the NEH’s Funded Projects Query Form. The Query Form is a simple search interface that allows you to search for any NEH grant going back to around 1980 (pre-1980 records are paper-based, alas). In brief, here are some of the current and upcoming features:

On Wednesday, June 22, at the Digital Humanities 2011 conference at Stanford University, the ODH officially announced our new grant program, Digital Humanities Implementation Grants (or DHIG, for short).

This program is designed to be a follow-on to our popular Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program (SUG). As you know, the SUG program awards small grants and is designed to fund early, cutting-edge, experimental work that shows great potential. SUGs can also be used for small planning meetings, studies, or workshops.

But now that we've funded nearly 200 SUGs, we've heard a lot of feedback from the field that the timing is right to offer a larger implementation program aimed at helping projects move beyond the start-up phase and into full implementation. Enter: DHIG!

The DHIGs offer a much larger maximum grant (from $100K to $325K). Projects applying for a DHIG grant should be able to demonstrate that they've already successfully completed an earlier start-up phase and are now ready to build on it with a larger grant.

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