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Thursday, May 17, 2012

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Press Releases about the Winners of Round Two (January 2012)

AHRC, ESRC, IMLS, JISC, NEH, NSF, NWO, SSHRC

Press Releases About the Launch of Round Two (March 2011)

AHRC, ESRC, IMLS, JISC, NEH, NSF, NWO, SSHRC

Digging into Data Challenge in the News

Drexel University, January 24,2012, "iSchool Assistant Professor Michael Khoo Receives Digging into Data Challenge Grant"

Virginia Tech, January 17, 2012, "Virginia Tech researchers win Digging into Data Challenge"

University of North Carolina, January 9, 2012, "Digging Into Data challenge grant winners include SILS Professor, Dr. Richard Marciano"

McGill University, January 6, 2012, "Schulich School of Music scholars among winners of Digging into Data Challenge"

University of Oxford, January 6, 2012, "New Digging Into Data Challenge projects announced"

Kansas City Business Journal, January 5, 2012, "Saint Luke’s researchers will study Egyptian mummies"

Saint Luke's Health System, January 4, 2012, "Saint Luke's receives funding to further research into ancient Egyptian mummies"

Indiana University, School of Library and Information Science, January 4, 2012, "Digging into Data Challenge"

The London Free Press, January 3, 2012, "UWO ground zero for mummies"

University of Guelph, January 3, 2012, "U of G Prof Wins Grant to Dig Up Data"

The New York Times, August 17, 2011, "As the Gavels Fell: 240 Years at Old Bailey"

ScienceNews, July 30, 2011, "Crime’s digital past"

Nature, June 23, 2011, "Word Play" [PDF]

The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 12, 2011, "Digging Into Data, Day 2: Making Tools and Using Them"

The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 10, 2011, "Digging Into Data in the Humanities, Day 1"

Times Higher Education, April 28, 2011, "Research intelligence - Let's dig a little deeper"

The New York Times, November 16, 2010, "Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches"

The Globe and Mail, June 18, 2010, "Supercomputers seek to ‘model humanity’"

The Lincoln Journal Star, February 6, 2010, "UNL team aims to digitize railroad history"

NetRadio, January 9, 2010, "Digging into the data: UNL leads international research in railroad history"

McGill Reporter, December 17, 2009, "Two McGill researchers among winners of new international competition"

The Mason Gazette, December 15, 2009, "Digging through the History of Crime Wins Center a Federal Grant"

The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 13, 2009 "How to Prepare Your College for an Uncertain Digital Future"

HPCWire, December 11, 2009, "Grant Supports Computational Analysis Of Manuscripts, Maps and Quilts"

Inside HPC, December 7, 2009, "What would you do with one million books?"

PhysOrg.com, December 4, 2009, "'Digging into Data Challenge' grant awarded"

The Tufts Daily, December 4, 2009, "Classics department researchers earn grant"

The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 4, 2009, "A 'New Digital Class' Digs Into Data"

2011 Application Materials

Below is the Request for Proposals (RFP) and supplementary materials. All files are in PDF format except where noted.

Main RFP:

RFP Addenda:

Budget Forms:

How to Apply

The 2011 deadline has now passed. Thanks to all the international teams that applied. Winning teams to be announced January 3, 2012.

Digging Panel at JCDL 2012

On June 12, 2012, please join us for "The Digging into Data Challenge: A Roundtable Discussion" at the 2012 JCDL Conference in Washington, DC. Staff from NEH, NSF, IMLS, JISC, and CLIR will be participating in the panel, along with PIs from three Digging projects.

Awardees for Round Two

January 3, 2012. Today, fourteen teams representing Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States were named the winners of the second Digging Into Data Challenge, a competition to promote innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis. Each team represents collaborations among scholars, scientists, and librarians from leading universities worldwide.

Thank you to the 67 international teams that competed in the challenge as well as the many libraries, archives, and data repositories that made materials available to the researchers. The competition was very keen and, in the end, fourteen teams were awarded grants after an international peer-review process.

Congratulations to all fourteen winning projects. Please see the complete list of Round Two (2011) winners.

Welcome to the Challenge

Welcome to the second round of the Digging into Data Challenge. During the first round, in 2009, nearly 90 international research teams competed in the challenge. Ultimately, eight remarkable projects were awarded grants.

In 2011, the Digging into Data Challenge has returned for a second round, this time much larger, with sponsorship from eight international research funders, representing Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

What is the "challenge" we speak of? The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to address how "big data" changes the research landscape for the humanities and social sciences. Now that we have massive databases of materials used by scholars in the humanities and social sciences -- ranging from digitized books, newspapers, and music to transactional data like web searches, sensor data or cell phone records -- what new, computationally-based research methods might we apply? As the world becomes increasingly digital, new techniques will be needed to search, analyze, and understand these everyday materials. Digging into Data challenges the research community to help create the new research infrastructure for 21st century scholarship.

Applicants will form international teams from at least two of the participating countries. Winning teams will receive grants from two or more of the funding agencies and, two years later, will be invited to show off their work at a special conference sponsored by the eight funders.

Let's get digging.