Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities

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These NEH grants support national or regional (multi‑state) 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 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, although 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 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; to teach current and future generations of humanities scholars to design, develop, and use cyber-based tools and environments for scholarship; to devise new and creative uses for technology that offer valuable models that can be applied specifically to research in the humanities. 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, computer scientists, 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. 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.

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