News: ACH Microgrants for DH Pedagogies

The news below is from the ACH website.


ACH Microgrants 2014: DH Pedagogies

ACH Microgrants 2014: Microsteps to Advance the Digital Humanities

Proposals Due 31 May 2014

Awards: up to $1000; $3000 total grant call

The Executive Council of the Association for Computers and the Humanities is delighted to announce its third round of Microgrants.

This year, we particularly invite proposals on pedagogy, although applications will still be considered in other areas that advance the goals and mission of the ACH, to support computer-assisted research, teaching, and software and content development in humanistic disciplines. Projects should be modest and designed to be accomplished within roughly six months.

Examples of possible projects, meant to inspire rather than limit:

  • a framework for sharing DH syllabi
  • a means of annotating and sharing DH assignments or exercises
  • pedagogical podcasts (microgrants can be used to purchase commercial software for producing screencasts or videos)
  • pedagogical tools or apps
  • enhancements to DH Questions & Answers <http://digitalhumanities.org/answers>
  • activities that add pedagogical features to the online journal Digital Humanities Quarterly <digitalhumanities.org/dhq/>

Proposals may be for projects in a range of forms including, but not limited to, apps, plugins, and tools. All microgrant recipients will be required to write some kind of reflective output, typically a blog post, for the ACH website.

Graduate students and early stage researchers are encouraged to apply. Mentorship is available, either at the development stage of applications or during the projects themselves. Those interested in mentorship during the application stage should submit a draft submission in advance of the deadline in order to receive feedback. Those interested in being paired with a mentor for the duration of the project should note in their application the area of skill or expertise in which they would benefit from mentoring. Microgrants may involve mentorship only without a cash component.

Applications will be evaluated according to the following criteria:

  • excellence and innovation of the proposal;
  • contribution of the activity to development and promotion of the ACH mission;
  • deliverables can be accomplished within the proposed budget and time period.

For further technical information about the ACH/DHQ websites please see further details below.

** Applicants must be members of the ACH <http://ach.org/> at the time of application **

Grants will be up to $1000. These are intended to be small grants that enable innovative activities by community members, such as graduate students, alt-ac faculty and staff, and junior faculty, who don’t have access to the resources of senior researchers. Projects should begin no later than three months after receipt of notification of acceptance and should conclude by 31 December 2014.

Applicants will be expected to report back to the ACH three months after the conclusion of the project. Applicants will also be expected to provide the ACH or DHQ with an appropriate Creative Commons license to any content to be posted, and open source software license for any code.

Proposals should be no longer than three pages (ca. 750 words) and should contain the following information:

1.     Name, background and full contact details of proposer (institutional affiliation, email address, etc).

2.     Name of organization (if the proposal is being submitted on behalf of an organization).

3.     Narrative addressing the criteria above, both conceptual and technical, with clear statement of deliverables, including the nature of the reflective output.

4.     Describe support needed from ACH or DHQ technical staff, if needed.

5.     Budget justification that indicates clearly how the funds will be spent (no longer than ½ page). Projects must be feasible upon receipt of the microgrant. Any other resources needed to accomplish the project must be obtained in advance (though they may be contingent upon receipt of the ACH microgrant) and specified in the application. If the microgrant project is related to a larger project, explain the relationship.

6.     Date for project start date, date of conclusion, and for reflective output.

Should an early career scholar be barred, due to institutional policies, from holding a grant directly, another member of an affiliated institution
may undertake to serve as grantholder, provided that the prospective grantholder guarantees in writing that the entire grant will be dedicated to
the project for which it is awarded and that the individual(s) responsible for that project can be listed publicly by the ACH as having won the award,
with the official grantholder mentioned parenthetically along with the insitution.

No indirect costs may be deducted from the value of the grant, which must go entirely to support the project for which it is awarded.

Please send proposals or queries to microgrants{AT}ach{DOT}org by 31 May 2014.

Susan Brown, for the Microgrants group: Jarom McDonald, Lisa Spiro, and Vika Zafrin

Further technical details:

The DHQ publication platform includes a RESTful API that exposes both the TEI/XML source and the generated HTML data, as well as several generated indexes (e.g. to authors and article titles; others are also feasible); the data exposed through the API is TEI/XML and includes structured text, an abstract, a teaser, publication metadata, and a bibliography. The ACH website is Drupal-based. DH Answers runs a modified version of bbPress.

For inquiries about the website please contact webmaster@ach.org, or for DHAnswers, write to <DHanswers[AT]digitalhumanities.org>. For additional details on the DHQ platform, please email John Walsh <jawalsh[AT]indiana.edu> and Julia Flanders <j.flanders[AT]neu.edu>.

Previous microgrant project winners can be found here: