ODH Resource Library: Workshops, Reports, and Initiatives

Intern reports

The Office of Digital Humanities hosts interns through the NEH’s Pathways Internship Program. View some of their work:

Inactive Programs run by the ODH

Past Notices of Funding Opportunity

Follow these links to view pdfs of previous NOFOs for ODH grant programs. Current guidelines can be found on the ODH website. 

Digital Humanities Advancement Grants 

Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities 

NEH/AHRC New Directions for Digital Scholarship 

Fellowships Open Book Program 

Digging Into Data 

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft/NEH Bilateral Digital Humanities Program 

Dangers and Opportunities of Technology: Perspectives from the Humanities

Reports and Activities

Understanding the Impact on Print Revenue When University Press Books are Open Access

The Association of University Presses (AUPresses) and Ithaka S+R received Level I Digital Humanities Advancement Grant funding (HAA-284855-22) to investigate the effect of open digital editions on the sales of print monographs in 2022. Their study resulted in a dataset as well as a report, “Print Revenue and Open Access Monographs: A University Press Study.”

"Are We Speaking in Code?" (Voicing the Craft & Tacit Understandings of Digital Humanities Software)

In November 2013, The Scholars’ Lab at UVa Library convened a summit and planning meeting for intermediate-to-experienced digital humanities software developers for critical discussion and hands-on activities to further articulate and theorize the intellectual work behind the technical development of digital projects. The workshop was supported by a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (HD-51674-13).

Berlin 9 Conference on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences & Humanities

The Berlin 9 Conference on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, held November 2011 in Washington, D.C., examined the impact that Open Access can have in advancing the conduct and communication of research and scholarship, with a particular focus on the impact this can have on the public. The conference brought together key stakeholders from the library, academic, and museum communities to explore the opportunity the digital environment presents to ensure permanent, sustainable, and equitable access to our nation’s educational and cultural resources. The conference was funded by a Digital Humanities Cooperative Agreement with the Association of Research Libraries (HC-50009-11).

Bringing Digital Humanities to the Community College and Vice Versa

This project, funded by a Digital Humanities Start-Up grant (HD-51671-13), conducted a survey of community college faculty and administrations and hosted a series of workshops at the Community College Humanities Association annual meeting to consider how community colleges can better participate in and contribute to the multiple ongoing conversations about digital humanities teaching and research.  

Campus Services to Support Historians

“Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians”, is the culmination of the Campus Services to Support Historians study conducted by Ithaka S+R and funded by a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (HD-31320-11), which investigated how scholars in the field of history rely on existing information services and identified concrete opportunities for new support services that would address unmet needs.

Encouraging Digital Scholarly Publishing in the Humanities

This project, led by University Press of North Georgia, brought together directors of university presses and experts in publishing and peer review to explore the process for publishing born-digital book length scholarly monographs in the humanities in order to encourage their support, acceptance, and use in academia and work toward developing a sustainable model to increase both institutional and technical support for digital monographs. The project was supported by a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (HD-51539-12).

Read the project’s white paper.

LOD-LAM: International Linked Open Data in Libraries Archives and Museums Summit

The LOD-LAM summit took place on June 2-3 in San Francisco. It convened leaders in their respective areas of expertise from the humanities and sciences to catalyze practical, actionable approaches to publishing Linked Open Data. The event was hosted by the Internet Archive with funding from the Alfred Sloan Foundation as well as a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (HD-51262-11).

For more information, see the LOD-LAM website.

Media Systems: Envisioning the Future of Computational Media

The Media Systems project identifies key opportunities, challenges, and recommendations for the future of creating and understanding media — a future in which computation will play an increasingly important role. The project began with the Media Systems convening (held at UC Santa Cruz in 2012), which brought together field-leading participants from media-focused computer science, digital art, and the digital humanities — located in and across universities, industry, federal agencies, publishers, and other stakeholders in the future of media. Different participants focused on diverse aspects of how new media forms are impacting culture, education, the economy, and other areas of national importance, using examples ranging from the World Wide Web to computer animation, and from video games to social media. Participants engaged in deep conversation focused on a coherent set of shared activities, which comprise computational media.  A Digital Humanities Cooperative Agreement (HC-50011-12) provided funds to support the travel and participation in the convening of eight humanities and humanities-related interdisciplinary scholars. The workshop was co-funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Microsoft Research.

Watch videos from the 2012 Media Systems convening and read the Media Systems project Final Report.

MITH API Workshop

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities hosted a two-day workshop on February 25th & 26th, 2011, on developing APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) for the digital humanities. The workshop gathered 50 digital humanities scholars and developers, who along with industry leaders demonstrated their APIs during this “working weekend.” We discussed ways that existing and future APIs could be leveraged for digital humanities projects.The workshop was funded by a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (HD-51151-10).

See videos of presentations from the workshop.

NEH Workshop on Military History: Doing the History of the Military & Foreign Policy in the Digital Age

Through a Cooperative Agreement between the NEH and the NuLab at Northeastern University (HC-50021-14), with further participation from the Society for Military History, a two-day professional development workshop was held October 10-11, 2014 in Boston, on the application of digital humanities methodologies to military history. Workshop lecturers provided hands-on instruction in topics like GIS, deep mapping, and network analysis. Participants, drawn from the military history community, learned new ways to conduct their research using the latest in digital tools and techniques.

One Culture: Computationally Intensive Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences A Report on the Experiences of First Respondents to the Digging Into Data Challenge

This report, released by the Council on Library and Information Resources in June 2012, culminates two years of work by CLIR staff involving extensive interviews and site visits with scholars engaged in international research collaborations involving computational analysis of large data corpora. The report, co-authored by Charles Henry, President of CLIR, and Christa Williford, CLIR program officer, produced recommendations that the authors describe as “urgent, pointed, and even disruptive” for researchers, funders, libraries, and universities who are embarking on collaborative research projects that take advantage of large-scale “big data” in the humanities and social sciences. The study was funded by a Digital Humanities Cooperative Agreement (HC-50007-10)

Regeneration in Digital Contexts: Early Black Film

Organized by the Black Film Center/Archive, this conference and workshop in November 2013 brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, moving image archivists, and technology specialists in digital humanities to consider how digitization of early motion picture film might be improved to better capture the physical attributes of the film print.  The conference and workshop were funded by a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (HD-51642-13).

Watch videos from the conference and the workshop. 

Report on the first year of the JISC / NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grants

Report (PDF) on the grants jointly awarded by the NEH and JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) of the United Kingom in March 2008.

Shared Horizons: Data, Biomedicine, and the Digital Humanities

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), working in cooperation with the Office of Digital Humanities at the NEH and the National Library of Medicine at the NIH, hosted the Shared Horizons symposium in April 2013.  The symposium explored collaboration, research methodologies, and the interpretation of evidence arising from the interdisciplinary opportunities in this burgeoning area of biomedical-driven humanities scholarship.  There were opportunities for disciplinary cross-fertilization through a mix of formal and informal presentations, which promoted a rich exchange of ideas about how large-scale quantitative methods can lead to new understandings of human culture. Bringing together researchers from the digital humanities and bioinformatics communities, the symposium explored ways in which these two communities might fruitfully collaborate on projects that bridge the humanities and medicine.  The symposium was supported by a Digital Humanities Cooperative Agreement with additional support from Research Councils UK (HC-50015-12).

Summary Findings of NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants (2007 – 2010)

This report includes a brief history of the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant program, some charts and statistics about applicants and awards, and the results of a survey conducted with project directors about the first two years of the program (2007 - 2008).

View Summary Report of ODH Start-Up Grants (2007 – 2010)

Sustainability of Online Educational Resources

Ithaka, in cooperation with the the JISC Strategic Content Alliance, the NEH's Office of Digital Humanities, and the National Science Foundation, conducted a study on the sustainability of Online Educational Resources (HC-50005-09). This study sought to answer the question, "How does a digital resource continue to thrive once the grant has run out?" The 2009 report "Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today" is available online along with the original case studies.

Building on the 2009 research, the report "Sustaining the Digital Humanities: Host Institution Support Beyond the Start Up Phase" was funded through a Digital Humanities Implementation Grant (HK-50022-12). This report examines institutional support framewoarks and administrative attidtudes toward sustaining digital humanities projects in higher eduction. It also provide guidance for on-campus sustainibility workshops and a research toolkit to facilitate the continuation of this research.

Additional reports from these studies include:

Tools for Data-Driven Scholarship

A conference co-sponsored by NEH, NSF, and IMLS and jointly run by two leading digital humanities centers, the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland. The conference took place on October 22-24, 2008, on the topic of tools and methodologies for scholarship. The final conference reportis now available.

Topic Modeling for Humanities Research

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) will host the Topic Modeling for Humanities Research workshop on November 3, 2012. The workshop will facilitate a unique opportunity for cross-fertilization, information exchange, and collaboration between and among humanities scholars and researchers in natural language processing on the subject of topic modeling applications and methods. The workshop will be organized into three primary areas: 1) an overview of how topic modeling is currently being used in the humanities; 2) an inventory of extensions of the LDA model that have particular relevance for humanities research questions; and 3) a discussion of software implementations, toolkits, and interfaces. The workshop was funded by a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant (HD-51627-12).

Visualizing the Past Workshop

Visualizing the Past: Tools and Techniques for Understanding Historical Processes (HD-50042-08) brought together leading scholars and practitioners from multiple disciplines (geography, history, geographic information science, computer science, graphic arts, among others) at a workshop that was held on February 20-21, 2009 at the University of Richmond that explored the potential of visualization work for humanities research.

Read the conference white papers.

Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital Scholarship

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 was funded via a Digital Humanities Cooperative Agreement (HC-50004-08). The report is now available for download via the CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) website.

More

  • Visit our HHPC Resource Page to learn about the NEH's initiative to promote Humanities High Performance Computing.
  • The Digital Needs of Scholarly Editors was a conference co-hosted by the NEH and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities (VFH). The conference was held on January 14, 2008 and included many leading scholarly editors and university presses. The meeting was facilitated by Ithaka.
  • Summit Meeting of Digital Humanities Centers was a 2007 workshop sponsored by the NEH and the University of Maryland's MITH. The conference brought together the directors of 17 major digital humanities centers for two days of discussion about the role of centers for scholarship.
  • Using New Technologies to Explore Cultural Heritage was a conference between the NEH and Italy's CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche). It included leading digital humanities scholars from the US and Italy. Transcripts and presentations are now available.
  • NEH's Support for Humanities, Science, and Technology: Accomplishments and Future Prospects was an April, 2000 report issued by the NEH. The report describes the history of NEH’s support for collaborative work between the humanities, sciences, and technology and suggests future avenues for the agency to consider. It may be of particular interest to the digital humanities community, as it lays some of the groundwork for the later creation of the Office of Digital Humanities.
  • Why the Digital Humanities? was a presentation from July, 2008 given by ODH Director Brett Bobley to the National Council on the Humanities about the creation of the NEH’s then-new Office of Digital Humanities.