Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants
The Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants program supports innovative projects that represent the next generation of advances in humanities research, education, preservation, access, and public programming. By awarding relatively small grants to support planning, NEH encourages the development of innovative projects that promise to benefit the humanities. All applicants to the program must propose an innovative approach, method, tool, or idea. These grants are modeled, in part, on the “high risk/high reward” paradigm often used by funding agencies in the sciences.
Guidelines URL:
www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/digitalhumanitiesstartup.html

HD-50466, Connecticut Humanities Council:
Connecticut's Heritage ECHOsystem: Resolving the Challenges to Interoperability Across Disparate Digital Repositories.
The Connecticut Humanities Council received a 2008 grant to develop a digital platform that is designed to magnify the resources of local historical societies and cultural organizations. The platform will do so by uniting digitized records, images, and documents; Connecticut-focused curricula; media discussions of Connecticut history; indexes of museum exhibitions and events related to Connecticut; and essays and short entries written by scholars. The ECHOsystem (Encyclopedia of Connecticut History Online) project may serve as a model to other states that wish to bring together disparate humanities resources for the use of scholars, students, and the general public.
Project URL: www.ctculture.org/

HD-50203, Indiana University, Bloomington:
InPhO: The Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project.
A 2007 grant to Indiana University, Bloomington, supported the creation of software that will automate searching for and navigating the connections between philosophical ideas, scholars, and works within the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), an online reference work. The InPhO project is a fascinating collaboration linking the fields of philosophy, computer science, and computational linguistics. The InPhO software will analyze the content of the SEP and help readers find thematic links among articles. The project also has a social networking element, allowing graduate students of philosophy to evaluate the appropriateness of the thematic links suggested by the computer. By identifying poor links, these students help “train” the software, enabling it to offer more useful choices to the encyclopedia’s users over time.

The InPhO project has completed its Start-Up Grant and was recently awarded a larger implementation grant in another NEH program: Preservation and Access Research and Development. InPhO is an excellent example of how a Start-Up Grant can help an innovative project get off the ground and prove itself, enabling it to later move on to further funding. Receipt of a Digital Humanities Start-up Grant does not, however, imply let alone guarantee continued support for a project from another NEH program.
Project URL: inpho.cogs.indiana.edu/index.php