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