DFG and NEH to Offer Two Grant Programs in the Digital Humanities

Written by: Jason Rhody
6/13/2008 11:35 AM

We are happy to announce that the NEH and the DFG will be offering two new joint grant programs. The guidelines will be available shortly, but in the meantime, please see the NEH/DFG release below:

DFG and NEH to Offer Two Grant Programs in the Digital Humanities

The German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft e.V., DFG) in Germany and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in the United States recently signed a memorandum of understanding to offer support for digital humanities projects.  Under this agreement, the NEH and DFG hope to encourage American and German researchers to collaborate on innovative digital humanities projects.   DFG and NEH are currently developing two Bilateral Digital Humanities Grant Programs, which will have deadlines in early autumn 2008:

DFG/NEH Bilateral Digital Humanities Program: 2008 Call for Bilateral Symposia and Workshops
These grants provide funding for one bilateral symposium or workshop (or a series of two bilateral symposia or workshops taking place within the duration of one year) in the area of digital humanities.  The goal of this call is to promote stronger bilateral cooperation between the digital humanities communities in the two countries (Germany and the United States) by initiating or intensifying contact between scholars in one particular field.

Proposals for Bilateral Symposia or Workshops can focus on any area of the digital humanities, including:

• capacity building or networking workshops preparing for future more intensified bilateral collaboration based around a single theme, technology, media form or humanities discipline;
• comparing the needs of researchers in both the U.S. and Germany and their uses of digitized resources; and
• exploring possible and existing use of information technology in the humanities in both communities.

DFG/NEH Bilateral Digital Humanities Program: 2008 Call for Joint Digitization Projects
These grants provide funding for up to three years of development in any of the following areas: new digitization projects and pilot projects; the addition of important materials to existing digitization projects; and the development of related infrastructure to support international digitization work and the use of digital resources. 

Proposals for digitization projects might include:

• digitizing humanities collections that are relevant to either or both scholarly communities for use in research and higher education,
• developing a detailed plan for the digitization of humanities collections that could benefit humanities research and performing a limited pilot digitization program to test shared infrastructure and procedures,
• connecting existing split digitized collections and detailing suitable transatlantic standards and interoperability strategies, and
• creating a virtual archive or resource that would join complementary materials (analog or digital) internationally.

Collaboration between U.S. and German partners is a key requirement for each of these grant categories.  Each application must have one German partner, and one U.S. partner, and there must be a project coordinator from each country. The partners will collaborate to write a single application package, which the U.S. partner will submit to the NEH and the German partner will submit to the DFG.

For Additional Information:
Additional information on the call for proposals, the formal proposal requirements, and the review process will be available on the NEH and DFG websites in the near future at the following web addresses:
http://www.neh.gov/grants/grantsbydivision.html#odh
www.dfg.de/lis and http://www.dfg.de/en/international/news/index.html

Contacts at the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft  (DFG):

for Call for Joint Digitization Projects

• Dr. Max Vögler
  Scientific Library Services and Information Systems (Wissenschaftliche Literaturversorgungs- und Informationssysteme LIS) /
  Humanities and Social Sciences Division
  Tel. +49 (228) 885-2182
  e-mail: Max.Voegler@dfg.de

for Call for Bilateral Symposia and Workshops

• Dr. Aglaja Frodl
  International Relations: North America (USA, Canada)
  Tel. +49 (228) 885-2388
  e-mail: Aglaja.Frodl@dfg.de

Contact at the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH):

• Jason Rhody
  Senior Program Officer
  Office of Digital Humanities
  Tel. +1 (202) 606-8364
  e-mail: jrhody@neh.gov