The National Endowment for the Humanities is interested in supporting new digital projects through its NEH Digital Humanities Initiative. http://www.neh.gov/grants/digitalhumanities.html
According to the site, the initiative is aimed at "supporting projects that utilize or study the impact of digital technology. Digital technologies offer humanists new methods of conducting research, conceptualizing relationships, and presenting scholarship."
The Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant is the first new program under the NEH's new Digital Humanities Initiative:
http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/digitalhumanitiesstartup.html
Deadlines for the grant are November 15, 2006 and April 3, 2007
Among the "notable and cutting-edge projects" included in a list at the NEH Digital Humanities site is The Perseus Digital Library http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ at Tufts.
Last September 2005, the University of Virginia, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and the National Science Foundation sponsored a Summit on Digital Tools for the Humanities http://www.iath.virginia.edu/dtsummit/. This June the final report was released: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/dtsummit/SummitText.pdf
The four processes of humanistic scholarship "where innovative change was already occurring" were identified as:
• Visualization of Time, Space, & Uncertainty
• Collaboration
• Exploration of Resources
• Interpretation
This report emphasizes the need for the creation of digital tools that will help support humanities scholarly research in various ways including:
- "structured annotations in digital form that should be able to incorporate any medium (text, audio and video) and the provenance of the annotation should be recorded with it."
- new information technologies to represent both "human habitation of time and space."
- "the interpretation of digital evidence itself"
