Proposals Due 15 April 2013
Awards: ~$200-500; $2000 total grant call
The Executive Council of the Association for Computers and the Humanities is delighted to announce its second round of Microgrants.
We invite proposals that will advance the goals and mission of the ACH, to support computer-assisted research, teaching, and software and content development in humanistic disciplines.
Projects should be modest and designed to be accomplished within roughly six months. Examples of possible projects, meant to inspire rather than limit:
- a mobile app for the DH conference
- a framework for sharing DH syllabi
- enhancements to DH Questions & Answers
- initiatives that enhance the redesigned ACH Website
- activities that add functionality/features to the online journal Digital Humanities Quarterly
- an approach for aggregating or curating videos related to the digital humanities, such as conference talks, project-related videos and oral histories
- new content, such as podcasts
- making old content, such as DHQ content or ACH-related history, accessible in new forms or amenable to visualization or analytics.
Proposals may be for projects in a range of forms including, but not limited to, apps, plugins, and tools. ACH is particularly interested in proposals that focus on enhanced communications with ACH members and our mentoring and advocacy initiatives. Proposals should seek to draw in the community, expand the existing community, or link to other initiatives. Graduate students and early stage researchers are encouraged to apply.
Applications will be evaluated according to the following criteria:
- excellence and innovation of the proposal;
- contribution of the activity to development and promotion of the ACH mission;
- deliverables can be accomplished within the proposed budget and time period.
For further technical information about the ACH/DHQ websites please see further details below.
Applicants must be members of the ACH
It is expected that grants will be in the range of $US 200-500. These are intended to be small grants that enable innovative activities by community members, such as graduate students, alt-ac faculty and staff, and junior faculty, who don’t have access to the resources of senior researchers. Projects should begin no later than three months after receipt of notification of acceptance and should conclude by 31 December 2013.
Applicants will be expected to report back to the ACH three months after the conclusion of the project. Applicants will also be expected to provide the ACH or DHQ with an appropriate Creative Commons license to any content to be posted, and open source software license for any code.
Proposals should be no longer than three pages (ca. 750 words) and should contain the following information:
- Name, background and full contact details of proposer (institutional affiliation, email address, etc).
- Name of organization (if the proposal is being submitted on behalf of an organization).
- Narrative addressing the criteria above, both conceptual and technical with clear statement of deliverables.
- If support will be needed from ACH or DHQ technical staff, please state the type of support needed.
- Budget justification that explains what is needed and why (no longer than ½ page).
- Date for project start date, date of conclusion, and for final report.
Further technical details:
The DHQ publication platform includes a RESTful API that exposes both the TEI/XML source and the generated HTML data, as well as several generated indexes (e.g. to authors and article titles; others are also feasible); the data exposed through the API is TEI/XML and includes structured text, an abstract, a teaser, publication metadata, and a bibliography. The ACH website is Drupal-based. DH Answers runs a modified version of bbPress.
For inquiries about the website please contact webmaster@ach.org, or for DHAnswers, write to DHanswers[AT]digitalhumanities.org. For additional details on the DHQ platform, please email John Walsh (jawalsh[AT]indiana.edu) and Julia Flanders (julia_flanders[AT]brown.edu).
Last year’s microgrant projects can be found here: http://ach.org/ach-announces-microgrants-winners. Quinn Dombrowski’s project is on hold pending changes DH Questions and Answers. Amanda Visconti’s visualizations of DHQ content can be found here: http://digitalliterature.net/viewDHQ/. The DH jobs list created by Matt Burton and Dave Lester is here: http://jobs.lofhm.org/about/.
Please send proposals or queries to microgrants[AT]ach.org by 15 April 2013.
Susan Brown, for the Microgrants group: Jarom McDonald, Lisa Spiro, and Vika Zafrin