Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities

The Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program supports national or regional (multistate) training programs for scholars, humanities professionals, and advanced 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. The projects may be a single opportunity or offered multiple times to different audiences. Institutes may be as short as a few days and held at multiple locations or as long as six weeks at a single site. For example, training opportunities could be offered before or after regularly occurring scholarly meetings, during the summer months, or during appropriate times of the academic year. The duration of a program should allow for full and thorough treatment of the topic. These professional development programs may focus on a particular computational method, such as network or spatial analysis. They may also target the needs of a particular humanities discipline or audience. Today, digital resources and other complex data—their form, manipulation, and interpretation—are as important to humanities study as more traditional research materials. Datasets, for example, may represent digitized historical records, high-quality image data, or even multimedia collections, all of which are increasing in number due to the availability and affordability of mass data storage devices and international initiatives to create digital content. Moreover, extensive networking capabilities, sophisticated analytical tools, and new collaboration platforms are simultaneously providing and improving interactive access to and analysis of these data as well as a multitude of other resources. The Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program seeks to enable humanities scholars in the United States to incorporate advances like these into their scholarship and teaching.