By Brett Bobley on 5/30/2008 9:51 AM

The NEH's Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) recently launched a Humanities High Performance Computing (HHPC) initiative. As part of this initiative we're offering several grant programs and other opportunities to provide time on the U.S. Department of Energy’s high performance computers, as well as grant money and training. NEH established this program to encourage humanities scholars to think about how high performance computers might help them in their research, and to take advantage of existing high performance computer resources. However, we recognize that simply providing access to the resources isn't enough to spark new ideas. We don't expect that there are legions of humanists out there with software and datasets sitting idle and ready to use on high performance machines. Still, we want to stimulate and encourage promising ideas you may have for HHPC experiments and test projects. As...

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By Brett Bobley on 5/9/2008 12:53 PM

In the May 8th edition of HPCwire, John West wrote a piece called “High Performance Humanities” that discusses the NEH’s new HHPC initiative.  It was great to see coverage of the new initiative in a leading HPC publication.  One of our stated goals here in the Office of Digital Humanities is to inspire collaborations across disciplines.  My hope is that the computing specialists who are regular readers of HPCwire will take an interest in the many computing challenges we have here in the humanities.  In a similar vein, I also note that the Text Analysis Developers Alliance has just announced a new competition...

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By Brett Bobley on 4/30/2008 9:14 AM

As many of you know, on April 22, the NEH announced our HHPC (Humanities High Performance Computing) initiative.  So imagine my surprise when I was reading Geoffrey Rockwell's blog post later that same day.  It turns out that on the very day the NEH announced our HHPC initiative, a group of Canadian scholars and scientists were having a two-day workshop on that very subject.  The workshop was called "Digital Humanities and High Performance Computing" and was sponsored by SHARCNET, a high-performance computing network in Canada.  Geoffrey, if you don't know him, is an Associate Professor of Humanities Computing and Multimedia at McMaster University in Canada and one of the people behind the TAPOR text analysis portal.  I sent Geoffrey a note remarking on the coincidence and he said: "It is great timing. I got the e-mail announcement of your initiative on my Blackberry at the final lunch meeting just in time to tell my dean and associate vp research that NEH was doing HHPC."

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By Jason Rhody on 4/28/2008 12:35 PM

By Beth Stewart on 4/28/2008 12:04 PM

On Wednesday, April 23, NEH had the pleasure of welcoming Mike Toth and Doug Emery from the Archimedes Palimpsest project, who shared their gained wisdom after years of overseeing the conservation, preservation, digitization, and transcription of a fragile and very valuable manuscript.

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By Brett Bobley on 4/22/2008 8:41 AM

As you may have seen in today's Chronicle of Higher Education, the NEH has just announced our new Humanities High Performance Computing initiative -- HHPC for short.  Our goal is to start a conversation about how high performance computers -- supercomputers -- can be used for humanities research.  We are working with colleagues at the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to provide you with information on how high performance/grid computing and data storage might be used for work in the humanities.  We are also announcing a new grant competition with DOE to award time and training on their machines. ...

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By Brett Bobley on 4/14/2008 4:18 PM

I'm very happy to say that the NEH's Division of Research has just posted the guidelines for our new "NEH Fellowships at Digital Humanities Centers" program ("FDHC" for short).  The NEH first announced this program back at the CNI conference in December of 2007, but now the full guidelines are available.  I would encourage all humanities centers to check out this new program and consider applying.  The deadline is September 15th, 2008.  In a nutshell, FDHC allows centers to apply for funding to bring in a visiting fellow to work on one or more humanities projects.

 

As a bit of background, this new grant program was inspired in part by the ACLS Cyberinfrastructure report,...

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By Jason Rhody on 4/4/2008 3:12 PM

Last week I flew out to Indiana—my first trip to the state—to give two grant workshops, one at Indiana University in Bloomington (home to one of the largest student unions in the country), and another at IUPUI in Indianapolis (home to one of the newest student unions in the country).  Grant workshops are truly a give-and-take affair.  We might come to showcase grant offerings at NEH and give tips about the application process, but we also benefit enormously from the communities we visit, learning about potential and existing projects, the needs of faculty and staff, and even ways that we can improve our communication and outreach. 

Part of my tour of the Bloomington campus included a visit to the relatively new Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IDAH), including a chance to sit in on their brown-bag lunch series.  David Shorter, one of four IDAH fellows,...

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