The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Office of Digital Humanities and the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), a component body of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), are accepting applications for the NEH/AHRC New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions program.
The overarching goal of the program is to advance digital scholarship in cultural institutions such as museums, libraries, galleries, and archives. This program funds teams in the U.S. and U.K. working collaboratively to deliver transformational impact on digital methods and digital research in cultural institutions.
Themes
Cultural institutions in the U.K. and U.S. share many of the same challenges. Digital scholarship has a key role to play in responding to these challenges effectively and in equipping cultural institutions for the future. This program seeks to fund projects that address one or more of the following themes:
Organizing, creating, and interrogating all collection types
In what ways can digital collections become richer and more user-friendly through existing methods such as optical character recognition, text extraction and parsing, linked open data, and network analysis?
How can artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning be leveraged to help organize, search, and understand digital collections?
What sorts of new and emerging methods will enable breakthroughs in working with digital collections?
How can digital technologies unlock new data and facilitate discovery research?
Evolving institutions to face the twenty-first century
What innovative training programs can be developed to address leadership and digital skills gaps in cultural institutions and how can these programs build capacity for smaller institutions?
What challenges do AI and machine learning methods present in terms of privacy, ethics, research integrity, copyright, reproducibility, and bias?
How can digital innovation be harnessed to inform and advance the process of decolonization across the sector, such as in collections, acquisitions, storytelling, programming, staffing, visitor participation, and physical spaces?
How can digital tools help to improve visitor-facing experiences, enhance accessibility and inclusion, and better interpret visitor needs and interests?
Fostering digitally-enabled equitable participation
In what ways can digital scholarship and tools enhance access and create more equitable and inclusive approaches to community engagement, including for people of colour and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality?
How can exist methods such as crowd-sourcing and co-creation be used to broaden participation or increase engagement across cultures or borders?
How can digital technology help to interrogate and address issues relating to representation across cultural institution staff and volunteers, for example in terms of diversity and precocity in the sector?
Funding Information
Level I awards (up to $50,000 from NEH for the participating U.S. organization(s) and up to £60,000 from AHRC for the participating U.K. organization(s) with a period of performance of up to two years) can support activities such as:
planning and preliminary work for future, larger-scale projects, including conferences, workshops, and working group meetings to bring together individuals with complementary skill sets to outline future research, plan publications, or develop best practices
small-scale collaborative projects, such as case studies, experiments, and exploratory or developmental research
outreach to disseminate project findings, methods, software, and tools
Level II awards (up to $150,000 from NEH for the participating U.S. organization(s) and up to £250,000 from AHRC for the participating U.K. organization(s) with a period of performance of up to three years) can support activities such as:
developing new or improved research methods, tools, or infrastructure
linking dispersed collections or resources
researching and developing digital methods, standards, and workflows for preserving and making accessible humanities collections
large-scale collaborative humanities-oriented research resulting in print or digital publications
training to provide scholars, cultural institution professionals, and/or advanced graduate students deeper knowledge of new and emerging digital scholarship methods for cultural institutions
developing innovative approaches to outreach and engagement; for example, engaging smaller or less well-resourced cultural institutions in digital methods or the use of digital tools to widen audiences and improve accessibility across communities and user groups
Eligibility Criteria
Eligible NEH applicants include U.S. nonprofits organizations with 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status, public and 501(c)(3) accredited institutions of higher education, state and local governmental agencies, and federally recognized Native American tribal governments.
Applications must be submitted by teams composed of at least one organization from the U.S. and one from the U.K., in which each country is represented by at least one cultural institution.
If there are multiple U.S. organizations involved in the project, one organization will submit the application to NEH on behalf of the team, and if funded, administer the NEH award. This organization must meet the eligibility requirements set forth by NEH. If funded, the recipient must be substantially involved in the programmatic activity and will be programmatically, fiscally, and legally responsible for the NEH award.
If there are multiple U.K. organizations involved in the project, one organization will submit the application to AHRC on behalf of the team. This organization must meet the eligibility requirements set forth by AHRC.
Deadline: Jul 8, 2021
For more information, visit Grants.gov.
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