Looks like another great series of talks at the home of our friends on the other side of the beltway, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. I’m going to try to catch at least a couple of these “digital dialogues.”

The 2008 Digital Media and Learning Competition proposals are due October 15. Run by HASTAC and funded by the MacArthur Foundation, this year’s theme is “Participatory Learning.” From the announcement:

Participatory Learning includes the many ways that learners (of any age) use new technologies to participate in virtual communities where they share ideas, comment upon one another’s projects, and plan, design, advance, implement, or simply discuss their goals and ideas together.

Applications for the fourth competition for the ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship Program are due on October 2. Run by the American Council of Learned Societies and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,

this program supports digitally based research projects in all disciplines of the humanities and humanities-related social sciences. It is hoped that projects of successful applicants will help advance digital humanistic scholarship by broadening understanding of its nature and exemplifying the robust infrastructure necessary for creating further such works.

I was lucky enough to get one of these ACLS fellowships in the first year of the program, and it was invaluable for my work on the project that became Zotero.

Last March I was lucky enought to go to, and give a talk at, the 2008 WebWise Conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital World in sunny Miami Beach, Florida. Speakers from the conference were asked to write up their talks for a special edition of First Monday, which is now out. If you want to get a sense of how Web 2.0 is starting to affect libraries, museums, and scholars, it’s worth reading. My contribution, “Creating Scholarly Tools and Resources for the Digital Ecosystem: Building Connections in the Zotero Project,” focuses on the importance of the unglamorous but critical work of connecting digital tools and repositories together via APIs, standards, and openness.

Not only is Jim Safley one of our crack programmers at the Center for History and New Media, he’s also an ace pumpkin carver, able to etch our logo into a massive Halloween specimen.

The National Endowment for the Humanities announced the winners of the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants (co-funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services), from the slate of April 2007 applicants. Some common emphases are frameworks, mark up, tagging, best practices, and several kinds of visualization. You can read about the lucky winners and their projects in this PDF.

I’ve been exploring the potential of Metaweb’s Freebase, a Creative Commons-licensed structured semantic web database for the past couple of months, and Metaweb has now given me some invites to the alpha of their system. If anyone would like to try it out, send me an email.