Digital Humanities Advancement Grants

Overview

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Office of Digital Humanities is accepting applications for the Digital Humanities Advancement Grants program. The program supports innovative, experimental, and/or computationally challenging digital projects leading to work that can scale to enhance scholarly research, teaching, and public programming in the humanities. 

The DHAG program supports projects at different phases of their lifecycles that respond to one
or more of these programmatic priorities:

• research and refinement of innovative, experimental, or computationally challenging methods and techniques
• enhancement or design of digital infrastructure that contributes to and supports the humanities, such as open-source code, tools, or platforms
• evaluative studies that investigate the practices and the impact of digital scholarship on research, pedagogy, scholarly communication, and public engagement

The DHAG program values experimentation, reuse, and extensibility, leading to work that can
scale to enhance scholarly research, teaching, and public programs in the humanities. DHAG
recipients contribute to humanities scholarship by serving carefully identified audiences,
addressing issues of accessibility and usability, and designing equitable, open, replicable, and
sustainable projects. If your project is funded, you must analyze your workflow and publish your
results in a white paper that NEH will share widely. This body of work contributes to the digital
humanities’ research base.

Awards are available at three funding levels. You should choose the level appropriate to the
scope and maturity of your proposed project. You are not required to obtain a Level I award to
apply for a Level II project, nor are you required to receive a Level I or II award to apply for a Level III project. 

Level I: supports small research projects or early stages of larger projects, including activities such as:

• developing a research agenda or strategy identifying appropriate methods or technologies for new and existing digital humanities projects
• convening planning sessions with stakeholders or conducting audience research to determine user needs and priorities
• designing experimental alpha-level prototypes
• facilitating convenings to address field-wide question

Level II: supports projects that have completed an initial planning phase and are poised to scale up based on prior research and development with a well-defined work plan, including activities such as:

• technical development and/or user experience design for beta-stage prototypes of opensource tools or software
• data curation
• meetings with advisory board members or collaborators
• evaluation and refinement of the project’s methods, workflows, or tools to teach humanities concepts or to support humanities research
• development of virtual/in-person workshops or tutorials to disseminate project results

Level III: support the expansion of mature projects with an established user base and strong dissemination plans beyond the applicant institution. To apply for a Level III award, you must have completed a planning or prototyping phase. In addition, your application must demonstrate prior success, including documenting how many users or visitors your current project has or a summary of prior internal or external evaluations of your current project. Earlier phases of the project’s development may or may not have been supported by NEH or other funders.
Level III awards support activities such as:

• implementation of technical plans and user experience design, including transformation of a prototype into a usable resource
• testing with targeted user communities
• code review and bug fixing
• development of training materials and documentation to promote wide use of the project
• preparation of presentations and publications to disseminate project results
• preparation of data, software, or websites for future preservation
• accessibility compliance review

Award Amounts
Level I: up to $75,000
Level II: $75,001 to $150,000
Level III: $150,001 to $350,000
Level III applicants may request an additional $100,000 per project in federal matching funds (for a total award of up to $450,000).

Period of Performance 
Level I and II: up to 24 months
Level III: up to 36 months
January deadline: projects must start between September 1, and November 1, 2024.
June deadline projects must start between January 1, and March 1, 2025.