Digital Humanities Seed Grants

Note: The deadline for the 2012 Seed Grant competition has been extended to February 20, 2012.

See Full Guidelines and Application Form for more details.

The IDRH Digital Humanities Seed Grants are intended to encourage KU faculty and academic staff to plan or pilot a collaborative project using digital technologies, which should in turn result in a more competitive subsequent external funding application. The digital humanities use “digital media and technology to advance the full range of thought and practice in the humanities, from the creation of scholarly resources, to research on those resources, to the communication of results to colleagues and students” (Cohen 2011).

Description: Projects should be for the initial stages of digital research in the humanities, and include a commitment to apply within a year for external funding. Seed grants may be used to create pilot projects, develop ideas via a workshop, attend workshops, support project-related travel, hold a substantial planning or brainstorming session, or similar activities. Projects can include, but are not limited to:

• text analysis and data-mining techniques;
• data visualization techniques;
• applying of Geographic Information Systems to humanities research;
• examining the emerging multimedia and multimodal technologies in the humanities
• collaborative work via Internet sites and tools (e.g. commons-based peer production)
• development of new digital tools for analyzing and making available digital resources
• new digital models of publication and dissemination of scholarship
• digital technology for research and teaching

Outcomes: IDRH Seed Grants should result in pilot projects, plans, or prototypes that will be used to pursue subsequent external funding. Successful applicants may be asked to present their project as part of the Hall Center for the Humanities Faculty Seminar in Digital Humanities.

Eligibility: KU full-time humanities and social science faculty.

Anticipated funding levels: Up to $15,000.

Please refer to the 2012 Seed Grant Proposal Guidelines (PDF) for more information.
(Guidelines subject to change for future grant rounds.)

Funded Projects

2011

Project Title: Digital Resources for Second Language Acquisition Research: an Annotated Longitudinal Corpus of Learner German
Description: This project aims to annotate, analyze, and make publicly available a digital longitudinal corpus of writing samples collected from American learners of German at dense time intervals over several semesters. This project will advance the digital humanistic scholarship by applying a new annotation schema developed specifically for learner language, evaluating the output of this annotation, and publishing the corpus and studies afforded by this annotation. This international project will combine the PI’s language acquisition expertise and the collaborator’s computational linguistics expertise.
P.I.: Nina Vyatkina, Assistant Professor, Germanic Languages and Literatures
Award: $15,000
Awarded May 2011