Transatlantic Program for Collaborative Work in the Field of Digital Humanities

The FMSH is pleased to publish the third call of its grant program in digital humanities. Thanks to a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, FMSH will co-finance transatlantic collaborative projects in the field of the digital humanities.

To strengthen its activity in the broad sphere of Digital Humanities, the FMSH seeks at present to implement a new international program of “digital philology”. To date, funded interactions in this area have been limited to exchanges within Europe. The purpose of this proposal is to create a formal organizational and funding structure for collaboration between the US and Europe in “digital literary studies”. For too long, Europe's major projects in the digital humanities have been on a different track, as it were, from American projects. The present initiative is intended to help US and European researchers work together in an entirely new way in the field of digital literary studies, to share knowledge and methods, disseminate common practices and tools, and publicize their works.

The Program will support only research projects whose goal is to set up or to strengthen collaborations between US and European universities. It will co-finance up to 80% of the total cost of the research project per year.

Core research topics

Proposals should address the general problematics delineated by the following list of topics. This list is not exclusive, and other original topics in the fields of digital philology will be considered. Research in the new field will initially be developed along the following axes:

• The analysis of corpora
• The critical electronic edition of a book
• Studies of networked contemporary literary life
• E-learning

Eligibility

Grants are available to European and US universities willing to set up transatlantic collaborations. The competition is open to senior and junior researchers. The European groups will be asked to co-fund 20% of the total cost (total cost of the project can be up to 50,000 €). Universities from all Europe and North America are eligible, however for this call, priority will be given to applications originating from the US, Italy, Spain, Greece and France.

Expenses for which grant funds may be requested include the following:

• Visiting lectureships
• Doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships
• International seminars, symposia
• Honoraria, travel and meeting expenses
• Publications

Coverage of other expenses will be subject to negotiation with the FMSH.

Intellectual property

All tools will be documented and made available in open source formats and texts will be made available through a Creative Commons License.

By sharing knowledge and tools, as well as developing common grounds for methodological and epistemological thinking, the Program aims at creating synergies between research programs in the field of digital analysis of literary corpora and digital publishing. The semantic context of the web involves a thorough reflection on the ontologies of digital texts.