Speech by NEH Chairman Bruce Cole

Welcoming Remarks by Chairman Bruce Cole
Digital Humanities Centers Summit Meeting
Washington, DC
April 12, 2007
(As Prepared for Delivery)

Good afternoon. Thank you, Dean Harris, for that kind introduction. It's a pleasure to welcome all of you to this summit meeting. We're glad to see everyone here at the Old Post Office, home of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

I must confess that before I became NEH Chairman in 2001, I was a Luddite when it came to digital technology. Now I'm addicted to my Blackberry, I have a new MP3 player, and I'm hosting a summit meeting of digital humanities centers! Life never fails to surprise.

Let me take a moment to acknowledge some important people. I'm very grateful to Brett Bobley, the Endowment's chief information officer and "digital czar." Brett is providing outstanding leadership for our digital efforts, and he has done a great job putting this summit together. I also want to thank our co-hosts from the University of Maryland — especially Neil Fraistat, Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. I'm also pleased to welcome one of my former colleagues from Indiana University, Michael McRobbie, who was recently named the next President of IU.

NEH has a proud history of funding digital-based projects — everything from Stanford's Dynamic Encyclopedia of Philosophy, to Ed Ayres's groundbreaking "Valley of the Shadow," and of course, our National Digital Newspaper Program.

Yet over the past few years, it has become increasingly clear to us that we are entering a whole new era — one in which rapid advances in digital technology will make a profound impact on the humanities. We realized that the Endowment had a duty to take a leadership role in the exploration of this new frontier. So last spring, we brought together some of the best minds in the humanities and technology and sought their advice and ideas. Based on these conversations, we created an agency-wide initiative to focus our digital efforts and ensure their effectiveness. We call it our Digital Humanities Initiative.

NEH has three overarching goals under DHI. First, as a federal agency, the Endowment's mission is to bring the humanities to every America citizen — so we seek to harness the power of digital technology to preserve humanities resources and scholarship, and make the humanities more accessible to everyone.

Second, we want to use digital technology to foster increased collaboration in the humanities. This will lead to much new knowledge.

Finally, we want to help determine how digital technology will change humanities scholarship and teaching — and how it will transform the ways in which we read, write, think, and learn. We also want to help build the digital tools that will allow humanists to transform today's profusion of new information into real wisdom

To reach these goals, the Endowment is committing a great deal of time, energy, and resources. We have already begun a number of exciting programs under DHI:

  • Digital Start-Up Grants: These will provide the "seed money" to help promising digital humanities projects get off the ground.
  • Digital Humanities Fellowships: These will support scholars pursuing projects in the humanities that use digital technology.
  • Digital Humanities Workshops: These will help K-12 educators learn how to use digital resources to strengthen the teaching of the humanities in our schools.
  • Digital Humanities Challenge Grants: These will help endow digital humanities centers and other large-scale projects.

All of these new programs were put in place in just the last year — which should indicate how important we feel the digital humanities are to the nation. But we are not stopping there. The Endowment is committed to taking a leadership position in funding the digital humanities. This isn't something that can be done overnight. It will take time, it will take money, and it will take innovative thinking. We see this meeting as an important next step for our Digital Humanities Initiative. We look forward to continuing to talk with all of you, and we encourage your feedback to help us expand our digital humanities programs in the future.

Another of our goals under DHI is to collaborate with other funders of the digital humanities. We are proud that the Institute of Museum and Library Services is already partnering with our Digital Humanities Initiative. They are contributing both funds and their great expertise to our new "Advancing Knowledge" partnership, as well as to our Start-Up Grant program. Today's summit meeting brings together nearly all the funders of the digital humanities, so we hope it will be a step towards future collaborations as well.

A few moments ago I mentioned how our Digital Humanities Challenge Grants will support digital humanities centers. We believe that digital humanities centers will play a crucial role in building the "cyber-infrastructure" of the humanities — and that's why we invited all of you to this meeting. We want to help you discover how you can best work together, and how to make the most effective use of your resources. And we want to help digital humanities funders learn how they can apply their funding to have the most beneficial impact.

If someone had told me when I arrived at NEH that I would eventually spend much of my time as Chairman thinking about things like "metadata" and "wikis," I wouldn't have believed it — in fact, I probably wouldn't even have known what they were talking about. Yet here we are. So in closing, let me just say how fortunate I feel to be leading NEH at a time of such exciting developments. We have only begun to scratch the surface of what will be possible when the digital revolution makes its full impact on the humanities. And through this period of hopeful change, the Endowment's mission and priorities will remain unchanged: We will promote excellence in humanities scholarship — and we will strengthen our democracy, by spreading the benefits of the humanities to all Americans.

I look forward to working with all of you in this great endeavor, and I trust this will be a stimulating and productive meeting.