NEH Appoints Scott B. Weingart to Lead the Agency’s New Office of Data and Evaluation
WASHINGTON, D.C. —The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is pleased to announce the appointment of Scott B. Weingart as NEH’s first Director of the Office of Data and Evaluation.
Under Weingart’s direction, the new NEH Office of Data and Evaluation will collect and analyze data about NEH’s grant programs, develop metrics for measuring the impact of NEH-funded projects, and work with other organizations and federal agencies to collect and share data about investment in and engagement with the humanities in the United States. The new office is part of the implementation of the NEH Equity Action Plan to expand access to the humanities, and will play a key role in assessing whether and to what extent NEH’s grant programs advance equity and support for underserved communities.
“We are pleased to welcome Scott Weingart to this essential new role at NEH,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo). “Weingart brings with him expertise in data analysis, funding issues relevant to the humanities, and an understanding of humanities research methods. The analysis he will oversee in NEH’s new Office of Data and Evaluation will guide the agency in our outreach to underserved communities and institutions, advance equity within the humanities, and demonstrate the reach and impact of NEH’s grantmaking. We look forward to his leadership at NEH.”
A data scientist and historian of science, Weingart most recently directed the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship at the University of Notre Dame. He has served as treasurer of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, as a member of the Library of Congress’s Copyright Public Modernization Committee, and as an executive council member of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. Weingart previously served on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University as director of its library’s digital humanities program. He is a coauthor of The Network Turn (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Macroscope (Imperial College Press, 2014), and a Fortier Prize winner in digital humanities. Weingart holds a BA in the history of science from the University of Florida and an MS in data science from Indiana University’s School of Informatics and Computing.
National Endowment for the Humanities: Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at neh.gov.