DFG/NEH: New Awards / New Funding Opportunities

We are pleased to announce two exciting bits of news: the awardees from the DFG/NEH Joint Digitization Projects program and the future of DFG/NEH grant programs.

Announcement of DFG/NEH Joint Digitization Project Awardees

This program offered support for digital humanities projects funded by NEH in collaboration with the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft or DFG) in Germany. These grants provided combined funding of up to $350,000 for up to three years of development in for new digitization projects, the addition of important materials to existing digitization projects, or the development of infrastructure to support U.S.-German digitization work

These awards are part of a larger group of 154 awards recently announced by the NEH. For a full state-by-state list of all the awards, please see this press release.

The grants were awarded to the following projects (click on each for more details):

Eastern Michigan University -- Ypsilanti, MI
RELISH: Rendering Endangered Languages Lexicons Interoperable Through Standards Harmonization
Helen Aristar-Dry, Project Director
Outright: $160,793
To support: In collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and The Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, an effort to unify two digital collections of endangered languages with special attention given to harmonizing the European and American standards for language documentation and lexicon building.

University of California, Los Angeles -- Los Angeles, CA AEGARON-Ancient EGyptian ARchitecture ONline: A Repository for Standardized Architectural Information & Drawings
Willemina Wendrich, Project Director
Outright: $174,296
To support: The development, in collaboration with the German Archaeological Institute Cairo (DAIK), of a digital library of three-dimensional renderings of ancient Egyptian structures based on a variety of existing sources using CAD technology, rendered as image files, and contextualized by metadata.

University of Illinois, Urbana -- Urbana, IL Emblematica Online: Emblem Digitization, The German Emblem Database, and The OpenEmblem Portal
Mara Wade, Project Director
Outright: $175,033
To support: The digitization of emblem book collections at University of Illinois (UI) and the Herzog August Bibliothek (HAB); the development of a central OpenEmblem Portal; and the creation of an extensive database of interoperable metadata.

Future of DFG/NEH Grant Programs
NEH and DFG will again offer two grant programs with deadlines in 2009.  The Enriching Digital Collections program will replace and build from the success of the Joint Digitization Program, offering similar opportunities for digitization work, but also allowing teams to pursue additional research and development activities in support of humanities digital collections.  Proposals for Enriching Digital Collections projects may include;

• developing tools and infrastructure to enhance the use of digitized resources by humanities scholars;
• digitizing humanities collections that are relevant to the American or German scholarly community (or to both of them) for use in research and higher education;
• developing a detailed plan for the digitization of humanities collections that could benefit humanities research and performing a limited pilot
• digitization program to test shared infrastructure and procedures;
• connecting existing split digitized collections and detailing suitable transatlantic standards and communication strategies; and
• creating a virtual archive or resource that would join complementary materials (analog or digital) internationally.

The deadline for this grant program is October 8, 2009.

NEH and DFG will also, once again, offer DFG/NEH Bilateral Symposia and Workshops.  News on those guidelines and submission dates will be forthcoming.  In the meantime, you can review last year's awardees.