By Brett Bobley on 6/19/2008 1:18 PM

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) has recently released a report entitled "A Survey of Digital Humanities Centers in the United States" .  The report, written by Diane Zorich, was commissioned by the Scholarly Communication Institute and will be one of the focuses of discussion at their July meeting. The report covers a wide number of topics, including a definition of a digital humanities center, governance models, administration and operation of centers, sustainability, and trends.  There is also an appendix to the report written by Lilly Nguyen and Katie Shilton entitled "Tools for Humanists" that focuses on tool development.

Chuck Henry, the President of CLIR, mentioned to me that they are very interested in comments and suggestions...

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By Brett Bobley on 6/18/2008 9:22 AM

I wanted to pass on a grant announcement from our colleagues at the IMLS.  They have recently announced an award for the "Digital Humanities Model Internship Program."  This grant will "create eighteen internships for master’s of library science students interested in careers in digital humanities centers or digital libraries."  The grantees are the University of Maryland, University of Michigan, and University of Texas at Austin, which will be partnering with three digital humanities centers:  MITH (Maryland), CDRH (Nebraska), and MATRIX (Michigan State).

By Jason Rhody on 6/13/2008 11:35 AM

We are happy to announce that the NEH and the DFG will be offering two new joint grant programs. The guidelines will be available shortly [edit: the Digitization Guidelines are now available], but in the meantime, please see the NEH/DFG release below:

DFG and NEH to Offer Two Grant Programs in the Digital Humanities

The German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft e.V., DFG) in Germany and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in the United States recently signed a memorandum of understanding to offer support for digital humanities projects.  Under this agreement, the NEH and DFG hope to encourage American and German researchers to collaborate on innovative digital humanities projects.   DFG and NEH are currently developing two Bilateral Digital Humanities Grant Programs, which will have deadlines in early autumn 2008:

DFG/NEH Bilateral Digital Humanities Program: 2008 Call for Bilateral Symposia...

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By Brett Bobley on 6/5/2008 8:47 PM

On May 8th, I took the train up to New York to attend a workshop on the topic of "Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources."  The workshop was co-sponsored by JISC’s Strategic Content Alliance and Ithaka.  In advance of the workshop, all attendees were asked to read and comment on a recent Ithaka report that lays out many of the sustainability challenges facing online academic projects and explores some possible solutions.  If you haven’t read the report, I urge you to do so and send in your comments, as the Ithaka staff is quite interested in getting feedback from the field. This is certainly an issue of great...

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By Brett Bobley on 6/2/2008 2:29 PM

I want to remind everyone that NEH’s Division of Preservation and Access recently announced the new deadline for our Humanities Collections and Resources program.  This is one of our key, large-grant digital humanities programs.  It can be used for things like

•       digitizing collections; •       cataloging collections of printed works, photographs, recorded sound, moving image, art, and material culture; •       preservation reformatting; •       preserving and improving access to humanities resources in “born digital” form; •       creating/constructing/building/designing databases and electronic archives; and •       developing digital tools specifically designed for use with humanities resources.

The deadline for this program is July 31, 2008.  I urge you to check out the program guidelines for more information...

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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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