Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities

Overview

The Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program supports national or regional (multistate) training programs for scholars, humanities professionals, and graduate students to broaden and extend their knowledge of digital humanities.  Through this program, NEH seeks to increase the number of humanities scholars and practitioners using digital technology in their research and to broadly disseminate knowledge about advanced technology tools and methodologies relevant to the humanities.

Today, digital resources and other complex data—their form, manipulation, and interpretation— are as important to the humanities as more traditional research materials. With advances like these in mind, the IATDH program aims to:

• share ideas and methods that advance humanities research and teaching through the use of digital technologies by bringing together humanities scholars and digital technology specialists from different disciplines
• introduce digital humanities topics to scholars who lack digital expertise, resources, or capacity in their home institutions
• encourage reflection on, and the interpretation and analysis of, new digital media, multimedia, and text-based computing technologies, as well as the integration of these into humanities scholarship and teaching
• build inclusive communities of inquiry and contribute to the intellectual vitality and professional development of participants
• teach current and future generations of humanities scholars to design, develop, and use digital tools and environments for scholarship
• devise new and creative uses for technology that offer valuable models that can be applied specifically to research in the humanities and to allow those methodologies and approaches to be shared with humanities scholars and teachers
• consider ways that digital scholarship and tools can enhance access and create more equitable and inclusive approaches to community engagement, including for people of color and others who have been historically underserved and marginalized

This program aims to bring together humanities scholars, advanced graduate students, librarians, archivists, museum staff, computer scientists, information specialists, and others to learn about new tools, approaches, and technologies, and to foster relationships for future collaborations in the humanities.

NEH encourages applicants to develop proposals for multidisciplinary teams of collaborators that will offer the necessary range of intellectual, technical, and practical expertise. Partners and collaborators may be drawn from the private and public sectors and may include appropriate specialists from within and outside the United States. Proposed IATDH projects should consider not only the practical applications of the institute topic, but also address ethical implications of its subject for humanities research, teaching, or public programming.

Institutes may address a wide range of topics, such as, but not limited to:

• digital scholarly communication and publishing
• advanced geospatial applications
• artificial intelligence and its use in text, sound, or image analysis
• physical computing, such as three-dimensional printing and wearable computing, and its implications for humanities research and public engagement
• immersive and virtual environment design for humanities research, or for computer gaming or simulations as applied to the humanities
• data design and visualization of humanities topics and research
• creative approaches to implementing digital humanities methods at institutions with specific needs, such as community colleges, liberal arts colleges, or minority-serving institutions
• innovative approaches for engaging public audiences with digital humanities
• high-performance computing or supercomputing applicable for humanities research and teaching
• critical algorithm studies
• analysis of and research on the impact of digital media and culture on society, including the intersection of digital methodologies and race, gender, class, and ability

2024 deadline projects must start between September 1, 2024, and September 1, 2025.