NEH Grant for Institutes in Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities

Program Description

These NEH grants support national or regional (multistate) training programs for scholars and advanced graduate students to broaden and extend their knowledge of digital humanities. Through these programs, NEH seeks to increase the number of humanities scholars using digital technology in their research and to broadly disseminate knowledge about advanced technology tools and methodologies relevant to the humanities.

The projects may be a single opportunity or offered multiple times to different audiences. Institutes may be as short as a few days and held at multiple locations or as long as six weeks at a single site. For example, training opportunities could be offered before or after regularly occurring scholarly meetings, during the summer months, or during appropriate times of the academic year. The duration of a program should allow for full and thorough treatment of the topic.

Today, complex data—its form, manipulation, and interpretation—are as important to humanities study as more traditional research materials. Datasets, for example, may represent digitized historical records, high-quality image data, or even multimedia collections, all of which are increasing in number due to the availability and affordability of mass data storage devices and international initiatives to create digital content. Moreover, extensive networking capabilities, sophisticated middleware applications, and new collaboration platforms are simultaneously providing and improving interactive access to and analysis of these data as well as a multitude of other resources. The Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program seeks to enable humanities scholars in the United States to incorporate advances like these into their scholarship and teaching.

The goals of the Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program are

• to bring together humanities scholars and digital technology specialists from different disciplines to share ideas and methods that advance humanities research and teaching through the use of digital technologies;
• to reflect on, interpret, and analyze new digital media, multimedia, and text-based computing technologies and integrate these into humanities scholarship and teaching;
• to teach current and future generations of humanities scholars to design, develop, and use digital tools and environments for scholarship; and
• to devise new and creative uses for technology that offer valuable models that can be applied specifically to research in the humanities and to allow those methodologies and approaches to be shared with humanities scholars and teachers.

NEH strongly encourages applicants to develop proposals for multidisciplinary teams of collaborators that will offer the necessary range of intellectual, technical, and practical expertise. This program is designed to bring together humanities scholars, advanced graduate students, librarians, archivists, museum staff, computer scientists, information specialists, and others to learn new tools, approaches, and technologies and to foster relationships for future collaborations in the humanities. Partners and collaborators may be drawn from the private and public sectors and may include appropriate specialists from within and outside the United States. NEH particularly encourages projects that seek to introduce digital humanities topics to scholars who lack digital expertise.

Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities may be hosted by colleges, universities, learned societies, centers for advanced study, libraries or other repositories, and cultural or professional organizations. The host site(s) must be appropriate for the project, providing facilities for scholarship and collegial interaction. Projects that will be held more than once and at different locations are permissible.

Possible topics and areas to be addressed might include but are not limited to

• applications of the Text Encoding Initiative, electronic editing, and publishing;
• scholarly communication and publishing;
• e-literature;
• textual analysis and text mining;
• immersive and virtual environments in multimedia research, including those for mobile platforms;
• 3-D imaging technology;
• digital image and sound analysis;
• information aesthetics and approaches to visualizations of humanities topics and research;
• computer gaming and simulations as applied to the humanities;
• high performance or supercomputing and the humanities; and
• advanced Geographic Information Systems applications.

Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities grants may not be used for

• digitization of collections;
• support for workshops on routine computer applications (e.g., training in HTML mark-up) from which little new knowledge about techniques or approaches in the digital humanities will emerge;
• the development and presentation of courses or programs that focus on the skills and knowledge required to preserve, digitize, or catalog humanities collections, such as training in digital scanning;
• graduate programs in the digital humanities; or
• programs that are not regional (multistate) or national in scope.

Applications seeking support for training programs on the care and management of—and the creation of intellectual access to—library, archival, and material culture collections, including digital preservation programs, should apply to the Education and Training Grants program of the NEH Division of Preservation and Access.

Applicants seeking support for conferences on topics of major importance in the humanities that will benefit ongoing research should apply to the Collaborative Research program of the NEH Division of Research Programs.

Providing access to grant products

As a taxpayer-supported federal agency, NEH endeavors to make the products of its awards available to the broadest possible audience. Our goal is for scholars, educators, students, and the American public to have ready and easy access to the wide range of NEH award products. For the Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program, such products may include digital curricula, websites, and the like. For projects that lead to the development of websites, all other considerations being equal, NEH gives preference to those that provide free access to the public. Detailed guidance on access and dissemination matters can be found in the discussion of Impact and evaluation in the instructions for preparing the narrative.

Award Information

Awards normally range from one to three years and from $50,000 to a maximum of $250,000 in outright funds.

Cost sharing

Cost sharing is not required in this program.

Eligibility

Any U.S. nonprofit organization with 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status is eligible, as are state and local governmental agencies and federally recognized Indian tribal governments. Individuals are not eligible to apply.

NEH generally does not award grants to other federal entities or to applicants whose projects are so closely intertwined with a federal entity that the project takes on characteristics of the federal entity’s own authorized activities. This does not preclude applicants from using grant funds from, or sites and materials controlled by, other federal entities in their projects.

Late, incomplete, or ineligible applications will not be reviewed.

Application & Submission Information

Prior to submitting a proposal, applicants are encouraged to contact program officers who can offer advice about preparing the proposal, provide samples of recently funded projects, and review draft proposals. These comments are not part of the formal review process and have no bearing on the final outcome of the proposal. Program staff recommends that draft proposals be submitted at least six weeks before the deadline. Time constraints may prevent staff from reviewing draft proposals submitted after that date. Draft proposals should be submitted by e-mail attachment to odh@neh.gov.

Prepare your application for submission via Grants.gov just as you would a paper application. Your application should consist of the following parts [see website for additional details].