Deadline: 18-Aug-2020
The United States’ National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), a component body of U.K. 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 will fund teams in the U.S. and U.K. working collaboratively to deliver transformational impact on digital methods and digital research in cultural institutions.
The U.K. and U.S. contain some of the world’s most prestigious cultural institutions. They are also world-leading in digital scholarship with recognized centers of excellence and have a longstanding history of collaboration. Cultural institutions in both countries have invested heavily in addressing the opportunities and challenges of digitization and digital research. Enhanced collaboration will pave the way to bringing new approaches to the ways in which culture and heritage can be experienced by global audiences, opening new research frontiers and questions, and advancing collections-based research methods for the 21st century.
Many of the challenges facing cultural institutions in the U.K. and U.S. are shared. These include:
- ensuring the ethical use of data and ensuring privacy of sensitive data;
- the role cultural institutions should play in civic life;
- how best to use technology to educate and inform visitors; and
- the relevance of various societal changes for 21st century museums.
This program builds upon two previous calls for proposals to facilitate partnership development activities between cultural institutions and universities in the U.K. and U.S. It also builds upon a workshop held in Washington, DC in September 2019 co-convened by the AHRC and NEH, along with the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of the U.K., the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Library of Congress. The workshop report, entitled UK-US Collaboration for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions, identifies a number of key areas for future study, with an emphasis on four themes:
- Employing machine learning and artificial intelligence in cultural institutions: how can these and other methods be leveraged to help organize, search, and understand digital collections? How can they help improve visitor-facing experiences? What challenges do they raise in terms of privacy, ethics, research integrity, reproducibility, and bias? What value can they add to sharing content, methods, expertise, and practice?
- Fostering digitally-enabled participation: in what ways can digital tools enhance access, create more equitable approaches to community engagement, including participation of marginalized and disenfranchised communities? How can we build upon existing methods such as crowd-sourcing and co-creation?
- Developing enhanced information on cultural institution visitors: how can new and emerging technologies allow a better understanding of visitor needs and interests? How can data be collected ethically to allow for richer visitor experiences?
- Creating and interrogating all document types and unlocking new data: in what ways can digital collections be made richer and more usable through existing methods such as optical character recognition, text extraction and parsing, linked open data, and network analysis? What sorts of new and emerging methods will enable new breakthroughs in working with digital collections?
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 2 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
Outputs or products for Level I projects may include:
- Reports, position papers, outlines for future research or publications
- New software or tools
- Initial prototypes and proof-of-concept studies
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 3 years) can support activities such as:
- Projects developing new or improved research methods, tools, or infrastructure
- Projects linking dispersed collections or resources
- Projects researching and developing digital methods, standards, and workflows for preserving and making accessible humanities collections
- Larger-scale collaborative humanities-oriented research resulting in print or digital publications
- Training and skills development opportunities to provide scholars, cultural institution professionals, and/or advanced graduate students deeper knowledge of new and emerging digital scholarship methods for cultural institutions
- Activities that support innovative new 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
Outputs or products for Level II projects may include:
- Working prototypes or code, sample data sets or models, methodological workflows, and/or documentation to support scaling-up and expansion of established projects
- Co-authored or multi-authored books, peer-reviewed articles, a special issue of a journal, born-digital publications, open-access digital resources, and new best practice toolkits
- Training materials and skills development opportunities in digital scholarship for cultural institution professionals and users
- Digital or virtual collections, resources, databases, and union catalogs
- Exhibitions and other innovative outreach activities
Eligibility Criteria
- Eligible NEH applicants include U.S. nonprofit 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.
- If there are multiple U.K. organizations involved in the project, one organization will submit the application to AHRC on behalf of the team.
For more information, visit https://www.grants.gov/web/grants/view-opportunity.html?oppId=327087
