ODH Update

Announcing 14 Winners of the Digging into Data Challenge

Brett Bobley — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:23:00 GMT

Today, fourteen teams representing Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States were named the winners of the second Digging Into Data Challenge, a competition to promote innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis. Each team represents collaborations among scholars, scientists, and librarians from leading universities worldwide.

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2012 Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Guidelines Now Available

Jennifer Serventi — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:12:00 GMT

The guidelines for the fifth round of the Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities (IATDH) program are now available! We’re looking for organizations and institutions interested in leading next year’s crop of institutes. This year's application deadline is March 6, 2012.

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Getting Started in the Digital Humanities

Jason Rhody — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:53:00 GMT

If you're interested in ways to get involved with the digital humanities, Lisa Spiro posted a comprehensive list of options, opportunities, and outlets that can help you do so. Check out her very informative "Getting Started in the Digital Humanities" at her blog, Digital Scholarship. If you're looking for additional tools or resources, the Digital Research Tools wiki (also edited by Lisa) provides links to many of the available tools that can facilitate your work, including several funded by NEH's grant programs.

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NEH Sponsors Berlin 9 Conference on Open Access

Brett Bobley — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 02:00:00 GMT

I'm very proud to announce that the NEH has just awarded a small grant to the Association of Research Libraries, the local sponsors of the 2011 Berlin 9 Conference on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. The grant will support humanities sessions at the conference.

In its ninth year, this is the first time that the landmark Berlin Open Access conference has taken place in North America. During those nine years, the open access landscape has changed immensely, with more scholarly and scientific works being published in an open format where they can be read by a wide audience. This year's conference takes place in Washington, DC and will involve many of our nation's leading research funders.

The open access discussion involves a lot of different actors, including scholars, scientists, librarians, archivists, funders, and publishers. Some of the issues to be solved -- often revolving around business models and long-term sustainability -- are thorny and resist simple answers. My hope is that we can engage the humanities community in these discussions and work towards publishing paradigms that allow peer-reviewed scholarly works to reach a broad public audience.

NEH Digital Humanities Project Directors Meeting – Open to Public

Jason Rhody — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 18:27:00 GMT

Come learn about developing mobile app platforms for history, capturing dance notation using an iPad, using gaming technology to teach the history of medicine, or applying crowdsourcing to culinary history … all in just two minutes.

From 10:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. on September 27th at the National Endowment for the Humanities, the recipients of the 2011 NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants will give the public a sneak preview of 54 ground-breaking projects that apply cutting-edge technology to high quality research in the humanities. Recipients of Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Grants will also present.

On September 27th, Start-Up and Institute grant recipients from around the country will assemble at NEH headquarters in Washington D.C. in room M-09 to present their projects in “lightning-round” format. Project directors will have just two minutes and three PowerPoint slides to introduce and explain their projects to the public.

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Roberto Busa (November 13, 1913 - August 9, 2011)

Brett Bobley — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 13:50:00 GMT

I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge the passing of Father Roberto Busa, one of the most influential figures in the digital humanities. Busa's doctoral thesis and much of his later scholarship focused on studying the works of Thomas Aquinas. Famously, in 1949, Busa approached IBM founder Thomas J. Watson and convinced him that computers could be used to study the vast corpus of text written by Aquinas. Computers in the 1940's weren't used for searching or studying text -- but Busa spent several decades demonstrating how they could.

For more on Busa, do check out this terrific Time magazine article from 1956 (thanks to Bethany Nowviskie for passing this on). Also, see these tributes to Busa from Stephen Ramsay and Geoffrey Rockwell. Also see the Busa Prize, awarded to pioneers in digital humanities by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, named in his honor.

(Photo courtesy of Alberto Cavicchiolo)

NEH and DFG Announce 5 New Awards in their Bi-Lateral Digital Humanities Program (July 2011)

Brett Bobley — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 20:19:00 GMT

The Office of Digital Humanities and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) are happy to announce five new awards from the DFG/NEH Bi-Lateral Digital Humanities program from our November, 2010 deadline. These awards are part of a larger slate of 249 grants just announced by the NEH.

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Announcing 6 New Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities (July 2011)

Brett Bobley — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 19:55:00 GMT

The Office of Digital Humanities is happy to announce ~~five~~ six new awards from our Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program from our February, 2011 deadline. These awards are part of a larger slate of 249 grants announced today by the NEH.

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Announcing 32 New Start-Up Grant Awards (July 2011)

Brett Bobley — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 19:12:00 GMT

The Office of Digital Humanities is happy to announce thirty-two new awards from our Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program from our February, 2011 deadline. These awards are part of a larger slate of 249 grants just announced by the NEH.

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Improvements to NEH’s Funded Projects Query Form (Time to Update Links!)

Brett Bobley — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 20:19:00 GMT

I’m pleased to announce some major improvements to the NEH’s Funded Projects Query Form. The Query Form is a simple search interface that allows you to search for any NEH grant going back to around 1980 (pre-1980 records are paper-based, alas). In brief, here are some of the current and upcoming features:

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