The Digging into Data Challenge is an international grant competition launched in January 2009 by four leading research agencies: the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, 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.

What is the “challenge” we speak of?  The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to answer the question “what do you do with a million books?”  Or a million pages of newspapesr? Or a million photographs of artworks?  That is, how does the notion of scale affect humanities and social science research? Now that scholars have access to huge repositories of digitised data — far more than they could read in a lifetime — what does that mean for research?

Digging into Image Data to Answer Authorship Related Questions (Dean Rehberger and Wayne Dyksen, Michigan State University, NEH; Peter Bajcsy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NSF; Peter Ainsworth, University of Sheffield, JISC). This project will take three specific resources (manuscripts, maps and quilts) and develop tools to analyse and identify authorship of visual images.

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Social-Sciences-And-Humanities-Research-Council-Of-Canada-1085655.html

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitisation/diggingintodata.aspx

Attended the Nebraska Digital Workshop.  Excellent work by the CDHR (and Kay Walter and the gang) to show off new work by emerging scholars in digital humanities (http://cdrh.unl.edu/opportunities/neb_digital_workshop/index.php).Nebraska Digital Workshop

Participated in Teagle Workshop at Union College, NY.  The goal of the “High Performance Computing at Liberal Arts Colleges” planning grant is to develop a proposal for the best way to utilize HPC in the liberal arts setting. We plan to hold four workshops: 1) what do we mean by HPC?; 2) applications of HPC in the humanities and social sciences; 3) applications of HCP in the sciences and engineering; 4) what should we do in our liberal arts settings? This project involves Bard, Colgate, Hamilton, Skidmore, Union, and Vassar Colleges.  With Geraldine Heng, University of Texas, Austin; Doug Reside, University of Maryland; Orville Vernon Burton, Coastal Carolina University.  September 29, 2009.

Project Title: ” ”
New technologies offer great potential for advancing the practice of oral history. However, they also introduce new questions and issues. Michigan State University, through the MATRIX Center and the Michigan State University Museum, will partner with the Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center, the American Folklore Society, and the Oral History Association to recommend standards and best practices for digital oral history. Seven multidisciplinary working groups recruited from experts and practitioners from museums, libraries, and scholarly societies will work online, at meetings such as national conferences, and in a symposium at the Library of Congress to produce recommendations around core topics including intellectual property, transcriptions, digital video, technology, scholarship, preservation, and access. Final recommendations from all groups will be published as a guide to conducting digital oral history.  http://www.imls.gov/news/2009/092409b_list.shtm#MI

This semester I will be teaching a new course in of all things, grant writing. It will be a work of ongoing development and will focus a good deal on the process and project management needed for completing a proposal. Information on the course will be kept at http://resources.matrix.msu.edu.

Oral History Association | 2009 Annual Meeting Program is now available online.  It will be a great conference held October 14-18, 2009, at the Galt House Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky.

iSchools and the Digital Humanities.  Three graduate iSchools–the University of Maryland College of Information Studies, the University of Michigan School of Information, and the University of Texas Austin School of Information–have agreed to collaborate deeply with three nationally-recognized digital humanities centers (MITH, CDRH, and MATRIX) to create a model internship program for students interested in careers in digital humanities centers and digital libraries.  The project has a blog at (http://www.ischooldh.org/network) and a twitter (ischooldh).

Attending the Digital Humanities 2009 conference http://www.mith2.umd.edu/dh09/> The conference runs from June 22-25, 1009 at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA.

Participated a part of a roundtable “Oral History in the Digital Age: A Conversation About Best Practices,” Oral History  Association, Pittsburgh, PA, October 15-19, 2008.  Also talked about the launch of the new website for OHA (http://www.oralhistory.org/).

Attending the Open Education 2008, the annual meeting and conference for the OpenCourseWare Consortium.  Doing demonstration of Kora and Connex.  September 24-26, 2008.