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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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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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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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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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, which encourages funding agencies like the NEH to support "...national centers of excellence in digital humanities and social science, as crucial seedbeds of further innovation."  (ACLS, p. 35).  The NEH Division of Research had extensive conversations with digital humanities centers to find out the best ways the NEH could support their work.  So I really feel like this new program responds well to specific needs articulated by the field. 

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I just returned from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Research Fair.  It was a great opportunity to give the UNL faculty an update about the NEH.  I also had a nice tour of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. [...]

Andy Guess wrote a nice piece in today's Inside Higher Ed called "Rise of the Digital NEH."  It mentions the new Office of Digital Humanities and discusses some trends in digital scholarship.

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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