The Digging into Data Challenge is an international grant competition sponsored by four leading research agencies from the UK, US and Canada. The challenge that this funding call wishes to confront is what do we do with a million books, images or articles? How does the huge volume of digitised material effect humanities and social science research? And what innovative approaches might be developed to help address these questions.
More details of this challenge are included below:
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada invites institutions to submit proposals for the Digging into Data Challenge .
The goals of the initiative are:
- To promote the development and deployment of innovative research techniques in large-scale data analysis.
- To foster interdisciplinary collaboration among scholars in the humanities, social sciences, computer sciences, information sciences, and other fields, around questions of text and data analysis.
- To promote international collaboration.
- To work with data repositories that hold large digital collections to ensure efficient access to these materials for research.
The JISC is making a total of £200,000 available for this initiative. Lead institutions from England and Wales may apply for up to £100,000 of funding. Funding is available for projects starting from January 2010 for up to 15 months. All projects must be completed by March 2011.The proposal process will be in two stages and interested potential applicants must first send a letter of intent by 15 March 2009. The deadline for receipt of the final proposal in response to this call will be Wednesday 15 July 2009. Late proposals will NOT be accepted. Details of how to submit are in the main request for proposal. Each funder has also produced an addendum with information specific to that funder and this should be read in conjunction with the main proposal. A full version of the call can be found at: Funding Opportunities