The National Endowment for the Humanities’ (NEH) newly created Office of Digital Humanities announced the first Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grant award recipients on behalf of the NEH and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
The announcement was made by NEH Chairman Bruce Cole during an event at the Folger Shakespeare Library. The Folger Shakespeare Library is one of five JISC/NEH grant recipients—it received funding for its project, “Shakespeare Quartos Archive,” in collaboration with the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. A total of five projects received over $600,000 in funding.
“The JISC/NEH grant program encourages international collaboration on humanities projects of value to scholars worldwide,” said NEH Chairman Cole. “Award recipients in the U.S. and U.K. are working together to create digital archives, centralize holdings, and develop tools to improve humanities research online. These projects embody the best of the digital humanities and advance the mission of the Endowment.”
Inaugurated last year as part of the Endowment’s Digital Humanities Initiative, the JISC/NEH Transatlantic Digitization Collaboration Grant program is supported by both the NEH and the Higher Education Funding Council for England acting through the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). These grants provide combined funding of up to $240,000 for one year of development in the following areas: new digitization projects and pilot projects, the addition of important materials to existing digitization projects, or the development of infrastructure (either technical “middleware,” tools, or knowledge-sharing) to support U.S.-England digitization work. Each project is sponsored by both an American and an English institution, whose activities will be funded by NEH and JISC respectively.
The formation of the Endowment’s Office of Digital Humanities (ODH) also was announced during the event. In 2006, the NEH launched the Digital Humanities Initiative, a program encouraging and supporting projects that utilize or study the impact of digital technology on research, education, preservation, and public programming in the humanities. With the creation of ODH, the initiative is being made permanent as an office within the NEH. ODH will continue the work of the initiative and will help to coordinate the Endowment’s efforts in the area of digital scholarship.