By Brett Bobley on 2/2/2009 3:48 PM

I recently finished reading the the Interim Report of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access entitled "Sustaining the Digital Investment: Issues and Challenges of Economically Sustainable Digital Preservation."  [PDF]. 

The report is very readable and engaging and really focuses on the key topic of sustainability.  The authors make the point that while we all agree that digitized materials are important for scholarship, we don't yet have a coherent plan for how to preserve these digital resources.  I like the fact that the report doesn't shy away from the economic realities of this issue -- to preserve digital resources, someone has to pay for them.  But who?  And how?  The report is a good take on helping to answer these questions.  My thanks go to Fran Berman and the rest of the Blue Ribbon Task Force who wrote this report and to NSF, Mellon, and the other organizations...

Read More »

By Brett Bobley on 1/16/2009 11:08 AM

 

Read More »

By Brett Bobley on 12/23/2008 4:51 PM

On December 18, the NEH announced $15.7 million in new grant funding. Among the 248 new grants that were announced there are several that will be of great interest to the digital humanities community. Two of the grants were from our Digital Humanities Challenge Grants program.  Challenge Grants are designed to fund infrastructure and long-term institutional support.  These grants require the institution to raise matching funds (usually in a ratio of 3 to 1).  I’m happy to say that two leading digital humanities centers were recipients of Challenge Grants. They are: I-CHASS (Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, received a $750,000 Challenge Grant to establish an endowment that will help fund three positions at I-CHASS: an Associate Director for Data Analytics and Pattern Recognition, an Associate Director for Human-Computer Interaction, and an Assistant Director in Modeling. ...

Read More »

By Brett Bobley on 12/15/2008 11:52 AM

In the past few weeks, I’ve been following two big news stories involving NEH grantees.  On November 12, there were articles in both the NY Times and the London Times Online about the Rome Reborn project, which was created by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia.  The articles included interviews with project director Bernie Frischer who noted that Rome Reborn is now available to the general public via the popular Google Earth platform.  In related news, Google announced the Ancient Rome 3D Curriculum Competition, which will...

Read More »

By Brett Bobley on 12/3/2008 2:31 PM

On September 15th, the NEH and CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) co-hosted a symposium entitled "Promoting Digital Scholarship: Formulating Research Challenges in the Humanities, Social Sciences and Computation."  At the symposium, we invited a group of some thirty leading scholars to brainstorm about research challenges for the digital humanities.

 

I'm very pleased to say that CLIR has

Read More »

By Brett Bobley on 12/2/2008 10:54 AM

The guidelines for the Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program are now available!  The application deadline is February 18th.  The new early deadline was put in place to allow funded projects to conduct their training institute as early as the summer of 2009.

These NEH grants support national or regional training programs for scholars and advanced graduate students to broaden and extend their knowledge of digital humanities. Through these programs, NEH seeks to increase the number of humanities scholars using digital technology in their research and broadly disseminate knowledge about advanced technology tools and methodologies relevant to the humanities.

If your institution has a particular expertise in how to apply digital technology to humanities scholarship, please consider hosting a training institute to share your methodologies and best practices with others.

If you have any questions or wish to...

Read More »

By Brett Bobley on 12/1/2008 12:03 PM

On November 18, I gave a presentation at the Supercomputing 2008 conference in Austin, Texas and announced the winners of the NEH/Department of Energy Humanities High Performance Computing program.  These grants provide computer time on DOE machines at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as well as training and support to enable scholars to take full advantage of those resources in accordance with the DOE High-End Computing Revitalization Act of 2004 (P.L. 108–423) which authorized the Department to “provide for sustained access by the research community in the United States to high-end computing systems and to Leadership Systems, including provision of technical support for users of such systems.”  The grants announced were: 

The Perseus...

Read More »

By Brett Bobley on 9/29/2008 3:18 PM

When the NEH first launched our Digital Humanities Initiative (now known as the Office of Digital Humanities) nearly three years ago, one of our goals was to help spur more work in the wide range of scholarly activities that might fall under the banner of "digital humanities."  It is great to see [...]

Read More »