Digitized News

Over the past two years, the American Council of Learned Societies has conducted a study of the cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences. That report is now available on their website. The report is intended to clarify the definition of cyberinfrastructure as the collective of information, expertise, standards, policies, tools, and services that are shared broadly across communities of inquiry. It is not just the hardware that is available, but the totality of technology that changes the way we work, think, and create new knowledge. It is hoped that this report will be foundational in developing the rest of the protocols necessary for continued humanistic and social science work.

Anticipating, or developed in concert, is a new program from the National Endowment for the Humanities. NEH has just released its Digital Humanities Initiative. Chairman Bruce Cole, in introducing the program to a group of us, used the example of the change in scientific work because of digital technologies by referencing the mapping of the human genome. This is possible only with digitization. He said that we need to explore and demonstrate the same in the humanities—what digitization allows us to do that we would not otherwise be able to do. With that, NEH is introducing two new grant programs, the digital humanities fellowships and the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants. These two programs would be reviewed within the Digital Humanities Initiative, but all the other traditional programs in NEH also welcome digitally emphasized work.

So there you have it. A framework for how we will be working, and some grant opportunities to explore it. Gee, I make it sound so easy!