NEH-AHRC New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions
20200818-HC
Grants.gov   https://www.grants.gov/web/grants/view-opportunity.html?oppId=327087
NEH   https://www.neh.gov/program/new-directions-digital-scholarship-cultural-...

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), a component body of U.K. Research and Innovation (UKRI), are accepting applications for the NEH/AHRC New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions program. Awards made through this program will fund teams of researchers and cultural institution professionals in the U.S. and U.K. working collaboratively to deliver transformational impact on digital methods and digital research in cultural institutions. Applications must be submitted by teams composed of at least one organization from the U.S. and one from the U.K., in which each country is represented by at least one cultural institution. An eligible U.S. organization must submit the application with a U.S.-specific budget under this announcement. The lead U.K. organization must submit the same application with a U.K.-specific budget to AHRC. NEH will fund the participating U.S. organization(s), and AHRC will fund the participating U.K. organization(s).

Applicants are encouraged to address one or more of the themes (below) or to propose new areas of inquiry relevant to digital scholarship and cultural institutions. Applicants might also consider how their proposal connects to the two cross-cutting themes identified at the workshop: 1) contemporary challenges addressed by digital tools and methods and 2) leadership and digital skills development.

1. Employing machine learning and artificial intelligence in cultural institutions: how can these and other methods be leveraged to help organize, search, and understand digital collections? How can they help improve visitor-facing experiences? What challenges do they raise in terms of privacy, ethics, research integrity, reproducibility, and bias? What value can they add to sharing content, methods, expertise, and practice?
2. Fostering digitally-enabled participation: in what ways can digital tools enhance access, create more equitable approaches to community engagement, including participation of marginalized and disenfranchised communities? How can we build upon existing methods such as crowd-sourcing and co-creation?
3. Developing enhanced information on cultural institution visitors: how can new and emerging technologies allow a better understanding of visitor needs and interests? How can data be collected ethically to allow for richer visitor experiences?
4. Creating and interrogating all document types and unlocking new data : in what ways can digital collections be made richer and more usable through existing methods such as optical character recognition, text extraction and parsing, linked open data, and network analysis? What sorts of new and emerging methods will enable new breakthroughs in working with digital collections?