HASTAC receives grant from Digital Promise Project

HASTAC is proud to announce a grant from the Digital Promise Project in support of a HASTAC special section of Vectors, the on-line multi-media journal published at the University of Southern California and part of the HASTAC consortium. Vectors will sponsor a call for articles on the ways new media change the ways we think our worlds, with a special emphasis on creative rethinking of the arts and humanities.

The Digital Promise Project seeks to develop a major Federal trust fund that will provide important financing for research and development in applying advanced information technologies to education, skills training, and lifelong learning, to meet the needs of the nation’s knowledge-based economy. The Trust, called the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust, or DO IT, will fund the digitization of collections and other significant holdings in our nation’s libraries, museums, and universities. It will encourage development of innovative learning models and software tools and prototypes to transform learning and information technology for the digital age. In short, it will do for education and learning what NSF does for science and NIH for health.

Bipartisan legislation now before Congress calls for DO IT to be financed by interest from the billions of dollars in revenue the federal government will receive from future auctions of the telecommunications spectrum, the publicly owned radio and television frequencies, just as the land grant universities were originally financed by revenues from publicly owned land.

For more information about how you can become part of the Digital Promise movement, see www.digitalpromise.org.

The Digital Promise Project was originated by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Century Foundation, Knight Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and Open Society Institute. The Project’s co-chairmen are former NBC News and PBS president Lawrence K. Grossman and former FCC Chairman Newton N. Minow. Its Director is Anne G. Murphy, former director of the American Arts Alliance. They urge all who favor DO IT's goals to contact their members of the House and Senate and urge them to support the Digital Opportunity Investment Trust Act.
HASTAC wishes to express its gratitude for this grant and its endorsement of the Digital Promise mission.