The next Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant deadline is October 6, 2009.  If you are considering applying, I want to pass on some important advice.  Applicants often ask:  "To what audience should I address my proposal?"  The answer is: a general one.  Your application will be read by a variety of people including peer reviewers, NEH staff, and members of the NEH’s National Council on the Humanities.    Hence,  I wish to strongly emphasize the importance of writing your application in a clear fashion that can be understood by a non-technical audience.  We realize that your project may be technical in nature and that part of the application will have to address complex technology issues.  But particularly in your abstract and in the first portion of your narrative, it is very important that you write to a general audience that is familiar with the humanities, but may have no specific knowledge of technology or...

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I want to bring to your attention an excellent grant opportunity from the NEH's Division of Research.  The Fellowships at Digital Humanities Centers (FDHC) program supports collaborations between digital centers and individual scholars.  The program's four goals are to 1) support innovative collaboration on outstanding digital research projects; 2) expand digital literacy and expertise;  3) promote the work of digital humanities centers; and 4) encourage broad and open access to the humanities.   Each fellow must be "sponsored" by a center.  The center sends in the grant application.  The award provides funds for both a stipend for the fellow and a portion of the center's costs for hosting the fellow.   The intellectual cooperation between the scholar and the center may take many different forms and may involve humanities scholars of any level of digital expertise.  Fellows may work exclusively on their own projects in consultation with center staff; collaborate on projects with other scholars affiliated with...

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I'm happy to announce that Ithaka has just released Case Studies in Sustainability.  This study was funded in cooperation with the NEH along with the National Science Foundation and the JISC Strategic Content Alliance in the UK.   This study seeks to answer the question "how does a digital project continue once the grant has run out?"  Or, as Ithaka puts it, "Tens of millions of dollars, pounds, and euros are invested each year by government agencies and private foundations to develop and support digital resources in the not-for-profit sector. As budgets tighten, will these digital resources be able to survive and thrive?"   I believe that the case studies will be of great use to both applicants and to funders.  For each case study, Ithaka staff conducted extensive research, including interviews with project directors, funders, and users.  Each case study includes candid and in-depth discussions of how the project was able to obtain sustained revenue to ensure the project could continue to provide an important educational resource.  ...

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This is Part II of a series of posts highlighting recent white papers (Part I also available). Numerous ODH programs (and some programs in other NEH divisions and offices) require the grantee to submit a "white paper" at the conclusion of the grant. In ODH, we publish these white papers in our Library of Funded Projects. In the white paper, the grantee provides a summary of the grant activities, what they learned, recommended best practices, and even what they might have done differently. By making these white papers freely available, members of the public -- including other prospective applicants -- can learn from what has already been done and build upon it.

The NEH’s Division of Preservation and Access has recently released the guidelines for the program “Humanities Collections and Reference Resources.”  This program supports projects that preserve and create intellectual access to such collections as books, journals, newspapers, manuscript and archival materials, maps, still and moving images, sound recordings, art, and objects of material culture.  The grant can cover activities such as digitizing materials, cataloging collections, implementing preservation measures, developing databases, and many others.  Please consult the guidelines for more details. The deadline for this program is July 15, 2009. 

Please note that "Humanities Collections and Reference Resources" is a separate program from "Research and Development."  The R&D program has a deadline of July 30, 2009 and you can read more about it in this earlier ODH Update...

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I'm pleased to announce that Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital Scholarship is now available for download via the CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) website.   Working Together is the final report from a symposium sponsored by the NEH and CLIR.  The symposium was held on September 15th, 2008, and brought together 30 leading scholars to discuss research challenges in the humanities, social sciences, and computation.  The report includes a terrific overview of the symposium written by Amy Friedlander of CLIR as well as a series of original papers commissioned for the meeting.  The papers cover a wide range of topics that should be of great interest to the...

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The NEH’s Division of Preservation and Access has just released the guidelines for the program “Preservation and Access Research and Development.”  Folks working on digital humanities projects should definitely give this program a close look.  The R&D program supports projects that address major challenges in preserving or providing access to humanities collections and resources.  This includes funding R&D efforts to develop tools, standards, and methodologies for accessing digitized collections.  In addition, you’ll see that this year the R&D program is particularly encouraging applications in the areas of digital preservation, preventive conservation, and preservation of and access to recorded sound and moving image collections. Here at the NEH, we see the R&D program as a natural next step for some graduates of the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program.  Many of the Start-Up grant projects are conducting basic research, building early prototypes, and investigating new methodologies for scholarship in areas related to digital collections.  So the R&D program may very well be a logical next step to move from the planning to implementation phase....

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