NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants

Brett Bobley, the CIO at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the chair of the new (and very exciting) Digital Humanities Initiative, wrote to me to ask for some publicity for their programs, especially for the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants. Happy to do so. (Undoubtedly I’ll apply for this at some point in the future and could use less competition, so I probably should keep quiet…but duty and dedication to this blog’s audience calls.) The Start-Up Grants seem like a great way to initiate a project like Zotero. From Brett:

Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants

Deadline: November 15, 2006 & April 3, 2007

Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants is the first new program under the NEH’s new Digital Humanities Initiative. The name “Start-Up Grant” is deliberately evocative of the technology start-up—a company like an Apple Computer or a Google that took a brilliant idea and, with a small amount of seed money, was able to grow it into a new way of doing business. NEH’s Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants will encourage scholars with bright new ideas and provide the funds to get their projects off the ground. Some projects will be practical, others completely blue sky. Some will fail while others will succeed wildly and develop into important projects. But all will incorporate new ways of studying the humanities.

The cross-divisional nature of the Start-Up Grants is a key. Applicants don’t need to be concerned with determining exactly which NEH division or program is best suited for their projects. Their job is to be innovative and the NEH’s job is to provide the funding they need to be successful. NEH staff will work with potential applicants in the pre-application stages to help them craft their submissions.

NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants are offered for the planning or initial stages of digital humanities initiatives in all areas of NEH concern: research, publication, preservation, access, teacher training, and dissemination in informal or formal educational settings. Applications should describe the concept or problem that is being addressed, the plan of work, the experience of the project team as it relates to the plan, and the intended outcomes of both the grant and the larger project that the grant will initiate.

Application guidelines for this program are available at:

http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/digitalhumanitiesstartup.html

General information about the NEH’s Digital Humanities Initiative is available at:

http://www.neh.gov/grants/digitalhumanities.html

Questions? Please contact: dhi@neh.gov