I wanted to share the announcement that came out earlier this week for the second round of the Digging into Data Challenge. This is a very important initiative that facilitates both international and interdisciplinary collaboration to advance the use of computational technologies for large cultural corpora. It also represents a substantial collaboration among a range of funding bodies that support work in this area.

CNI has featured work from this initiative (and related efforts) at our recent membership meetings, and we look foward to continue to track developments on behalf of our member community.

Clifford Lynch

Director, CNI

----------------------------

 

Washington, DC-Today, eight international research funders are jointly announcing their participation in round two of the Digging into Data Challenge, a grant competition designed to spur cutting edge research in the humanities and social sciences.

 

The Digging into Data Challenge asks researchers these questions: How can we use advanced computation to change the nature of our research methods? That is, now that the objects of study for researchers in the humanities and social sciences, including books, survey data, economic data, newspapers, music, and other scholarly and scientific resources are being digitized at a huge scale, how does this change the very nature of our research? How might advanced computation and data analysis techniques help researchers use these materials to ask new questions about and gain new insights into our world?

 

The first round of the Digging into Data Challenge sparked enormous interest from the international research community and led to eight cutting-edge projects being funded. There has also been increased media attention to the question of so-called "big data" techniques being used for humanities and social sciences research, including a recent cover article in the journal Science.

 

Due to the overwhelming popularity of round one, the Digging into Data Challenge is pleased to announce that four additional funders have joined for round two, enabling this competition to have a world-wide reach into many different scholarly and scientific domains.

 

The eight sponsoring funding bodies include the Arts & Humanities Research Council (United Kingdom), the Economic & Social Research Council (United Kingdom), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (United States), the Joint Information Systems Committee (United Kingdom), the National Endowment for the Humanities (United States), the National Science Foundation (United States), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (Netherlands), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada).

 

Final applications will be due June 16, 2011. Further information about the competition and the application process can be found at www.diggingintodata.org.