ACH Incubator Grants 2015 Call for Proposals: Knowing Our Past

Proposals due 30 April 2015  22 May 2015 (deadline extended)

Awards: up to $1000; $3000 total grant call

The Executive Council of the Association for Computers and the Humanities is delighted to announce its fourth round of Incubator Grants (formerly known as Microgrants).

This year, we particularly invite proposals on Knowing Our Past, although applications will still be considered in other areas that 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:

  • digital genealogies of DH
  • interactive timeline
  • citation or scholarly network analysis
  • making DH conference abstracts accessible
  • DH self-archiving app
  • producing a self-reflexive tool to work with the online journal Digital Humanities Quarterly <digitalhumanities.org/dhq/>

Proposals may be for projects in a range of forms including, but not limited to, apps, plugins, and tools. All Incubator Grant recipients will be required to write some kind of reflective output, typically a blog post, for the ACH website.

Graduate students and early stage researchers are encouraged to apply. Mentorship is available, either at the development stage of applications or during the projects themselves. Those interested in mentorship during the application stage should submit a draft submission in advance of the deadline in order to receive feedback. Those interested in being paired with a mentor for the duration of the project should note in their application the area of skill or expertise in which they would benefit from mentoring. Incubator Grants may involve mentorship only without a cash component.

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 <http://ach.org/> at the time of application **

Grants will be up to $US 1000. 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. They are not intended to support corporate, long-term, or large-budget projects. Projects should begin no later than three months after receipt of notification of acceptance and should conclude by 31 December 2015.

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:

  1.     Name, background and full contact details of proposer (institutional affiliation, email address, etc).
  2.     Name of organization (if the proposal is being submitted on behalf of an organization).
  3.     Narrative addressing the criteria above, both conceptual and technical, with clear statement of deliverables, including the nature of the reflective output.
  4.     Describe support needed from ACH or DHQ technical staff, if needed.
  5.     Budget justification that indicates clearly how the funds will be spent (no longer than ½ page). Projects must be feasible upon receipt of the Incubator Grant. Any other resources needed to accomplish the project must be obtained in advance (though they may be contingent upon receipt of the ACH Incubator Grant) and specified in the application. If the Incubator Grant is related to a larger project, explain the relationship.
  6.     Date for project start date, date of conclusion, and for reflective output.

Should an early career scholar be barred, due to institutional policies, from holding a grant directly, that grant may be held by another member of the institution on their behalf, provided that the individual guarantees in writing that the entire grant will be dedicated to the project for which it is awarded and that the individual(s) responsible for that project can be listed publicly as having won the award, with the official PI mentioned parenthetically.

No indirect costs may be deducted from the value of the grant, which must go entirely to support the project for which it is awarded.

Please send proposals or queries to microgrants{AT}ach{DOT}org by 30 April 2015.

Susan Brown, for the Incubator Grants Committee: Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Bethany Nowviskie, Roopika Risam, Lisa Spiro

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 <j.flanders[AT]neu.edu>.

Previous grant winners can be found here:

By Susan Brown

39 comments on “ACH Incubator Grants 2015 Call for Proposals: Knowing Our Past”