Digital Humanities Advancement Grants (United States)

Deadline: 11-Jan-24

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Office of Digital Humanities is accepting applications for the Digital Humanities Advancement Grants program to support innovative, experimental, and/or computationally challenging digital projects leading to work that can scale to enhance scholarly research, teaching, and public programming in the humanities.

The DHAG program values experimentation, reuse, and extensibility, leading to work that can scale to enhance scholarly research, teaching, and public programs in the humanities. DHAG recipients contribute to humanities scholarship by serving carefully identified audiences, addressing issues of accessibility and usability, and designing equitable, open, replicable, and sustainable projects.

Grant Purpose

The DHAG program supports projects, with potential for broad impact, at different phases of their lifecycles that respond to one or more of these programmatic priorities:

• Research and refinement of innovative, experimental, or computationally challenging methods and techniques.
• Enhancement, design, or maintenance of digital infrastructure that contributes to and supports the humanities, such as open-source code, tools, or platforms.
• Evaluative studies that investigate the practices and the impact of digital scholarship on research, pedagogy, scholarly communication, and public engagement.

Areas of Interest

• American Tapestry: Weaving Together Past, Present, and Future
  • It is a wide-ranging special initiative at NEH that leverages the humanities to tackle some of the most pressing challenges of the time: strengthening democracy, advancing equity for all, and addressing changing climate.
• United They Stand: Connecting Through Culture
  • It uses the humanities to combat hate-motivated violence and promote civic engagement, social cohesion, and cross-cultural understanding. As a part of this initiative, NEH encourages humanities projects that further the understanding of the nation’s racial, ethnic, gender, and religious, diversity; examine the sources of hate and intolerance in the United States; and explore progress towards greater inclusiveness.

Funding Information

• Grant Amount:
  • You may request up to $75,000 for Level I.
  • You may request between $75,001 to $150,000 for Level II.
  • You may request between $150,001 to $350,000 for Level III.
  • If you are seeking Level III funding, you may also request up to $100,000 in federal matching funds (for a total award of up to $450,000) to leverage external funding.
• Period of performance:
  • You may request a period of performance up to 24 months for Level I and Level II awards and up to 36 months for Level III.
  • Period of performance start date between September 1, 2024, and November 1, 2024.

Activities and Outcomes

• Level I
  • Activities:
    • developing a research agenda or strategy
    • identifying appropriate methods or technologies for new and existing digital humanities projects
    • convening planning sessions with stakeholders or conducting audience research to determine user needs and priorities
    • designing experimental alpha-level prototypes
    • facilitating convenings to address field-wide questions
  • Outcomes:
    • reports and position papers (especially for projects involving evaluative studies)
    • new consortia or partnerships
    • plans for future research and technical development, design documents, and/or data integration
    • articles, essays, books, edited volumes, or reports
    • testing and assessment reports from alpha-level prototypes
• Level II
  • Activities:
    • technical development and/or user experience design for beta-stage prototypes of opensource tools or software
    • data curation
    • meetings with advisory board members or collaborators
    • evaluation and refinement of the project’s methods, workflows, or tools to teach humanities concepts or to support humanities research
    • development of virtual/in-person workshops or tutorials to disseminate project results
  • Outcomes:
    • release of add-ons, code libraries, or working prototypes of tools
    • implementation of new workflows through humanities-based case studies
    • training data or models
    • workshops, online tutorials, and other forms of documentation
    • publications or conference presentations to share project results
• Level III
  • Activities:
    • implementation of technical plans and user experience design, including transformation of a prototype into a usable resource
    • testing with targeted user communities
    • code review and bug fixing
    • development of training materials and documentation to promote wide use of the project
    • preparation of presentations and publications to disseminate project results
    • preparation of data, software, or websites for future preservation
    • accessibility compliance review
  • Outcomes:
    • launch of the digital project
    • public release of final software, code, or datasets
    • publication and presentation of research and results
    • community engagement and outreach events, including workshops
    • documentation and tutorials in multiple formats
    • implementation of data management and sustainability plans

Eligibility Criteria

• To be eligible to apply, your organization must be established in the United States or its jurisdictions as one of the following:
  • a nonprofit organization recognized as tax-exempt
  • an accredited institution of higher education (public or nonprofit)
  • a state or local government or one of their agencies
  • a federally recognized Native American Tribal government
• Individuals and other organizations, including foreign and for-profit entities, are ineligible.
• The recipient may not function solely as a fiscal agent but should make substantive contributions to the success of the project.

For more information, visit National Endowment for the Humanities.