NSF Fellowship Funding Avaliable

August 12, 2008 at 12:01 pm · Filed under digital humanities, e-science, education

The United States National Science Foundation (NSF) announced on July 29, 2008, that it is now accepting applications for its Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). The purpose of this program is to ensure the vitality of the scientific and technological workforce in the United States and to reinforce its diversity. The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in the relevant science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees.

GRFPs are intended for individuals in the early stages of their graduate study. All applicants are expected to have adequate preparation to begin graduate level study and research by Summer or Fall of 2009. In most cases, this will be demonstrated by a bachelor’s degree earned prior to Fall 2009. Applicants may pursue graduate study at an institution in the United States or affiliate with a foreign institution that grants a graduate degree. Prospective Fellows are responsible for all logistical arrangements required for affiliation with the foreign institution including living arrangements and securing any necessary passports or visas.

NSF expects to award 900-1,600 Graduate Research Fellowships under this program solicitation pending availability of funds. All awards will be for a maximum of three years usable over a 5-year period. The anticipated award date is late March 2009.

To learn more about NSF’s fellowships, including eligibility and how to register, please visit our website, www.oup.org, and select the “NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program” article from our “What’s New” section.

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New MA in Digital Assett Management at King’s College; London

April 4, 2008 at 3:11 pm · Filed under digital humanities, e-science, education, eresearch, humanities computing

This is the new MA offered by the Centre of eResearch and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities here at King’s.

The Centre for e-Research (CeRch) in collaboration with the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH) is proposing to establish an MA in Digital Asset Management (MADAM). The goal of MADAM is to address what is seen as a major gap in education and training at postgraduate level in an increasingly important area of library, archival and curatorial activity, namely the management of digital resources.

Within the cultural heritage sector, there has been an increasing amount of activity over several years in the creation of digital resources, either by creating digital facsimiles of existing cultural artifacts, or by creating new (‘born digital’) resources. In government, both local and central, and in commerce and industry, more and more of the information created in the normal course of activity is in electronic form, whether as web publications, email, or documents in word-processed, spreadsheet or PDF formats.

There are important considerations of curatorial and technical standards that arise throughout the ‘digital resource life-cycle’, from creation through management and dissemination to long-term preservation. These considerations and this life-cycle are the core subject matter of the proposed new MA programme in Digital Asset Management.

The new programme will be able to take advantage of activities and areas of expertise in which King’s College London has international standing, and will offer imaginative intellectual and practical training in areas that are of major and growing importance in contemporary society. The intention is to develop a programme that is strongly inter-disciplinary. At the outset, the focus will be on resources across the humanities disciplines but over time the course will be expanded to cover the social sciences, medicine and the biomedical sciences.

Further details about the programme and how to register will be available shortly. To express an interest in the course and for an outline of the core module, please email Lydia.horstman@kcl.ac.uk

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Developing the UK’s e-infrastructure for science and innovation

October 12, 2007 at 1:01 am · Filed under collaboration, creative commons, digital humanities, e-science, education, humanities computing, internet, open source, technology, tools, web2.0

Produced by the Office of Science and Innovation (OSI) e-Infrastructure Working Group, the report - Developing the UK’s e-infrastructure for science and innovation - sets out the requirements for a national e-infrastructure to help ensure the UK maintains and indeed enhances its global standing in science and innovation in an increasingly competitive world (link)

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Report: After the AHDS: the end of national support?

September 18, 2007 at 12:48 am · Filed under digital humanities, e-science, education, humanities computing, web2.0

A panel discussion at the opening of the recent Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts conference at Dartington College of the Arts posed the question what happens after the end of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS); is this the end of national support?

The Arts and Humanities Data Service is a national service with the primary role to preserve, curate, and provide access to the digital output of the humanities in the UK. The Service is also active in the enhancement and promotion of digital scholarship in the UK as well as internationally. After eleven years of service, the AHDS recently lost its funding from the JISC (Joint Information Services Committee) and the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council). The Service will cease to exist in its present form in March of 2008.

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eIUS: e-Infrastructure Use Cases and Service Usage Models

August 29, 2007 at 8:52 pm · Filed under collaboration, digital humanities, e-science, education, humanities computing, web2.0

The UK is entering a period in which online collaborative environments, distributed computing and data resources, advanced analytical tools, together with support and training, are becoming readily available for researchers in all disciplines. Within some subject areas, for example, high-energy physics and bioinformatics, e-infrastructure already underpins everyday work; whilst other subject areas are still investigating the applicability of existing resources for their research and making recommendations for future development. The deployment of e-infrastructure, whether within institutions, nationally or internationally, has the potential to increase the pace, impact, and efficiency of research both within and across disciplines (link).

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What is e-Framework?

August 29, 2007 at 8:27 pm · Filed under collaboration, digital humanities, e-science, education, governance, humanities computing, web2.0

The e-Framework for Education and Research is an initiative by the UK�s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and Australia�s Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST). The primary goal of the e-Framework is to facilitate technical interoperability within and across education and research through improved strategic planning and implementation processes (link)

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FEDORA COMMONS AWARDED $4.9M GRANT TO DEVELOP OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE FOR BUILDING COLLABORATIVE INFORMATION COMMUNITIES

August 15, 2007 at 7:50 pm · Filed under collaboration, communuity informatics, creative commons, deliberation, digital humanities, e-science, education, humanities computing, social media, web2.0

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:
Fedora Commons: Sandy Payette
(607) 255-9222, payette@cs.cornell.edu
http://www.fedora-commons.org
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation: Greg Nelson
(415) 561-7427, greg.nelson@moore.org

FEDORA COMMONS AWARDED $4.9M GRANT TO DEVELOP OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE FOR BUILDING COLLABORATIVE INFORMATION COMMUNITIES
(Ithaca, New York, August 10, 2007) - Fedora Commons today announced the award of a four year, $4.9M grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to develop the organizational and technical frameworks necessary to effect revolutionary change in how scientists, scholars, museums, libraries, and educators collaborate to produce, share, and preserve their digital intellectual creations. Fedora Commons is a new non-profit organization that will continue the mission of the Fedora Project, the successful open-source software collaboration between Cornell University and the University of Virginia. The Fedora Project evolved from the Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture (Fedora) developed by researchers at Cornell Computing and Information Science.

With this funding, Fedora Commons will foster an open community to support the development and deployment of open source software, which facilitates open collaboration and open access to scholarly, scientific, cultural, and educational materials in digital form. The software platform developed by Fedora Commons with Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation funding will support a networked model of intellectual activity, whereby scientists, scholars, teachers, and students will use the Internet to collaboratively create new ideas, and build on, annotate, and refine the ideas of their colleagues worldwide. With its roots in the Fedora open-source repository system, developed since 2001 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the new software will continue to focus on the integrity and longevity of the intellectual products that underlie this new form of knowledge work. The result will be an open source software platform that both enables collaborative models of information creation and sharing, and provides sustainable repositories to secure the digital materials that constitute our intellectual, scientific, and cultural history.

Recognizing the importance of multiple participants in the development of new technologies to support this vision, the Moore Foundation funding will also support the growth and diversification of the Fedora Community, a global set of partners who will cooperate in software development, application deployment, and community outreach for Fedora Commons. This network of partners will be instrumental for making Fedora Commons a self-sustainable non-profit organization that will support and incubate open-source software projects that focus on new mechanisms for information formation, access, collaboration, and preservation.

According to Sandy Payette, Executive Director of Fedora Commons, “the new Fedora Commons can foster technologies and partnerships that make it possible for academic and scientific communities to publish, share, and archive the results of their own work in a free, open fashion, and make it possible to analyze and use content in novel ways.”

“Establishing a sustainable open-source software system that provides the basic infrastructure for on-line communities of scholars will have enduring impact. The unanticipated cross- disciplinary uses of this open platform are the hallmark of this revolutionary infrastructure,” said Jim Omura, technology strategist with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
Payette also noted, “The open-source software that is developed and distributed by Fedora Commons can impact the entire lifecycle of what is often referred to as “e-Research” and “e-Science,” including storage of experimental data, analysis of experimental results, peer review, publication of findings, and the reuse of published material for the next generation of scholarly works. We will also continue our work with libraries and museums to facilitate the sharing of digitized collections, making previously locked away material available to wide audiences. Also, building on our attention to digital preservation in the Fedora open-source repository system, Fedora Commons will continue to stress the importance of the sustainability of digital information in applications of our work.”

About Fedora Commons
Fedora Commons is a non-profit organization whose purpose is to provide sustainable open-source technologies to help individuals and organizations create, manage, publish, share, and preserve digital content upon which we form our intellectual, scientific, and cultural heritage. Since 2001, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Cornell University and the University of Virginia have collaborated on the Fedora Project which has developed, distributed, and supported innovative open-source repository software that combines content management, web services, and semantic technologies. The Fedora software has been adopted worldwide to support an array of applications including open-access publishing, scholarly communication, digital libraries, e-science, archives, and education.

Fedora Commons will initially be located in the Information Science Building at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. The Executive Director of Fedora Commons is Sandy Payette, who co-invented the Fedora architecture and led the Cornell arm of the open-source Fedora Project. The Board of Directors of Fedora Commons provides leadership from multiple communities, including open-access publishing, digital libraries, sciences, and humanities. For more information, visit http://www.fedora-commons.org.

About the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, established in 2000, seeks to advance environmental conservation and cutting-edge scientific research around the world and improve the quality of life in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Foundation’s Science Program seeks to make a significant impact on the development of provocative, transformative scientific research, and increase knowledge in emerging fields. For more information, visit http://www.moore.org.

–
Carol Minton Morris
Communications Director
National Science Digital Library (NSDL)
http://NSDL.org

Communications and Media Director
Fedora Commons
http://www.fedora-commons.org

Cornell Information Science
301 College Ave.
Ithaca, NY 14850
607 255-2702
clt6@cornell.edu

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The NINCH Guide to Good Practice in the Digital Representation and Management of Cultural Heritage Materials

June 20, 2007 at 10:59 pm · Filed under digital humanities, education, humanities computing

I bet that you have been waiting for a link to this one (link)

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Seven major research grants in Arts and Humanities e-Science

June 12, 2007 at 1:46 am · Filed under digital humanities, e-science, education, humanities computing, web2.0

Seven major research grants in Arts and Humanities e-Science, to a total value of over �2m, have just been awarded to UK academic teams as a result of the recent AHRC-EPSRC-JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Initiative.

The projects cover a wide range of subjects in both the arts and the humanities, from dance and music to museum studies, archaeology, classics and Byzantine history, and a wide range of e-Science technologies. A central feature of this work will be the development of advanced technologies to aid research collaboration and resource-sharing across the internet.

In addition, four of the projects have also received a four-year postgraduate studentship to train young researchers in this field of work.

By developing new and advanced methods in areas such as the image-processing of ancient manuscripts, choreography in virtual space, the computer simulation of a famous medieval battle, and the use of 3-D scanning to analyze the surfaces of museum objects, the scheme will not only open up new avenues in arts and humanities research, but will also test and extend the present range of e-Science technologies, and thus ultimately enhance their use in other domains as well. The awards are as follows (link).

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What is InscriptiFact?

June 3, 2007 at 1:35 am · Filed under digital humanities, e-science, education, history, humanities computing, internet

I am at the e-science earlier adopters forum for Arts and Humanities researchers at NCSA (the National Centre for Supercomputer Applications)� where this project is being presented. It is possible to search the photographs in this project by inscription. Pretty nifty huh?

The InscriptiFact Project is a database designed to allow access via the Internet to high-resolution images of ancient inscriptions from the Near Eastern and Mediterranean Worlds. The target inscriptions are some of the earliest written records in the world from an array of international museums and libraries and field projects where inscriptions still remain in situ. Included are, for example, Dead Sea Scrolls; cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia and Canaan; papyri from Egypt; inscriptions on stone from Jordan, Lebanon and Cyprus; Hebrew, Aramaic, Ammonite and Edomite inscriptions on a variety of hard media (e.g., clay sherds, copper, semi-precious stones, jar handles); and Egyptian scarabs. These ancient texts represent religious and historical documents that serve as a foundation and historical point of reference for Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the cultures out of which they emerged (link).

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Ten Major Issues in Providing a Repository Service in Australian Universities

May 18, 2007 at 6:51 pm · Filed under digital humanities, e-science, education, governance, humanities computing, social media, web2.0

By mid 2006, all Australian universities had established, or were partway to establishing, institutional repository services. The development of institutional repository services can often be related to the open access movement, which seeks to make valued research outputs openly available by encouraging academics to place their publications into repositories, enhancing their availability and bypassing the high cost of journal subscriptions. However, many universities have extended the functionality of their repository services for other purposes, such as giving scholars the opportunity to develop their own research portfolio, providing a means of improving research reporting, establishing an electronic publishing service, or giving access to collections of images or other research outputs. The potential for development seems endless (link).

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Towards an institutional typology of digital humanities centres

May 11, 2007 at 1:07 am · Filed under communuity informatics, digital humanities, e-science, education, humanities computing, social media, software

Thanks to John Unsworth for the link…

This Wiki presents a structured list of departments, centres, institutes and other institutional forms that variously instantiate humanities computing. For each entry a link is provided to the relevant site on the WWW and a brief description given. This list represents an ongoing attempt to derive a basic typology from a complex variety of activities and so to provide institutional models for the field. Despite the fact that national academic conventions vary quite widely and cultural differences make comparisons difficult if not hazardous, no attempt has been made here to account for them. The intention is not to define what is happening in the field world-wide, rather it is to provoke discussion leading either to consensus or at least to an improved understanding of the conditions under which computing humanists work. Constructive criticisms and clarifications are not merely welcome, they are to the point.

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400 Years of Jamestown and ‘Virtual Jamestown’

May 9, 2007 at 9:06 am · Filed under digital humanities, education, events, history, humanities computing

It is 400 years since the British first landed in North America and none other than the Queen of England is in the United States to celebrate. And here is a site that I worked on some years ago produced by the Virginia Centre for Digital History at the University of Virginia. I did the navigation for the site way back in the year 2000 and it seems to have moved about a little since then (but I had yet to learn about CSS). Sorry about that…hope you can look beyond the design because the site contains some extraordinarily important documents about one of America’s most important events (link).

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Virtual Knowledge Studio, 3-month Postdoctoral Fellowship, KNAW, Amsterdam

April 18, 2007 at 6:20 pm · Filed under digital humanities, education, humanities computing

Applications are invited for three-month fellowships within the
Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences
(VKS), a programme funded by the KNAW (Royal Dutch Academy for Arts
and Sciences). The VKS aims to support researchers in the humanities
and social sciences in the creation of new scholarly practices,
termed here e-research, as well as in their reflection on e-research
in relation to the development of their fields.

A core feature of the VKS is the integration of design and analysis
in a close co-operation between social scientists, humanities
researchers, information technology experts, and information
scientists. This integrated approach aims to provide insight into the
ways in which e-research can contribute to new research questions and
methods in the humanities and social sciences.

The Virtual Knowledge Studio has the following goals:

* to contribute to the design and conceptualisation of novel
scholarly practices in the humanities and social sciences;
* to support scholars in their experimental play with new ways of
doing research and emerging forms of collaboration and communication;
* to facilitate the travel of new methods, practices, resources
and techniques across different disciplines;
* to contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of
knowledge creation.

The fellowship is designed for junior scholars who have recently
received their PhDs in order to provide the following: experience of
working within an interdisciplinary research group, an opportunity to
prepare material for publication and to develop new research ideas.
During the three months of the fellowship, a senior member of the VKS
staff will act as mentor.

Expectations:

* Deliver research seminar within internal VKS research meetings
during first month.
* Prepare at least one publication (in which VKS should be
acknowledged upon publication). A draft of the publication should be
circulated no later than 2 weeks before the end of the fellowship in
order to enable feedback to be given before the end of the fellowship.
* Prepare outline proposal for new research project.
* Attend all research meetings (held every 2-3 weeks) during
period of fellowship and be present at the VKS on a regular basis.

Qualifications:

* PhD in relevant field, from a university in the Netherlands or abroad.
* In most cases, the PhD should have been awarded no more than 12
months prior to the application deadline
Compensation:
* You will receive a total of 10,000 euro to cover your
accommodation and other costs.
* You will be expected to cover most travel as well as insurance
and other costs yourself.
* You will be reimbursed for the costs of one return trip
(economy/2nd class) between your main place of residence and Amsterdam.
* You will be provided with shared office space and a PC.
There is no formal application form. Applications are welcome in any
area of the work of the VKS. Applications are welcome from both Dutch
and non-Dutch candidates. To apply, please send your curriculum
vitae, a 2-page statement outlining what you will work on while at
the VKS and why you want to be based at the VKS, a copy of a
publication or dissertation chapter, and the names and addresses of
two referees.

Two fellowships will be awarded each year. The next two periods, with
deadlines, are:

* Autumn 2007 (deadline: 15 May 2007)
* Spring 2008 (deadline: 1 October 2007)

Exact dates of the fellowship will be negotiated with the successful candidate.

Application materials should be sent to: Jeannette Haagsma, VKS,
Cruquiusweg 31, 1019 AT Amsterdam, The Netherlands, tel: +31 (0)20
850 0282, email: jeannette.haagsma@vks.knaw.nl

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Text and Grid: Research Questions for the Humanities, Sciences and Industry

March 16, 2007 at 10:59 pm · Filed under digital humanities, e-science, education, events, humanities computing

AHeSSC workshop at UK All Hands meeting
10-13th September 2007, East Midlands Conference Centre, Nottingham

MINI-WORKSHOP CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
Text and Grid: Research Questions for the Humanities, Sciences and Industry

http://www.allhands.org.uk/news/textgridws_call.cfm

Textual resources play a pivotal role not only in research, but also in business. In 2003 alone, 300 Terabytes of textual data were produced, without counting more dynamic texts like blogs, wikis, websites, etc. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are all working on creating gigantic digital libraries for textual resources that would both be more accessible and comprehensible than any other digital library in history. Project partners in “Cultural Heritage Language Technologies” like the Perseus Project promote the use of modern computational and storage techniques to integrate tools and data for research on and with texts in different formats. In the UK, the AHRC E-Science Scoping Study expert seminars in textual studies, linguistics and history have discussed the potential of Virtual Organisation and Grid technologies for humanist textual analysis.
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