Funding and Grants

Harvard

A more extensive list of Harvard funding sources is maintained by Research Administration Services; the highlighted funds below have been pursued successfully for digital scholarship projects.

  • Barajas Dean’s Innovation Fund for Digital Arts and Humanities
    • This fund is intended to encourage innovation in the arts and humanities by supporting small and medium scale projects that will move these fields to the center of the digital revolution. Proposals may include (but are by no means limited to) course development and support, interfaculty collaborations, technology and training, experiential learning opportunities, and undergraduate, graduate, or faculty research.
    • Audience: ladder faculty and senior lecturers in the Arts and Humanities Division
    • Timeline: annual, typically March or April
    • Amount: up to $20,000
  • Dean’s Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship
    • The Dean’s Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship is a targeted program that provides funding in the following categories:
      1. Bridge funding, to allow faculty to continue work on previously funded research, scholarship, or creative activity that does not currently have external funding. Faculty who apply in this category should demonstrate that efforts have been made or will be made to obtain new external funding.
      2. Seed funding, to encourage faculty to launch exciting new scholarship or research directions that might not yet be ready to compete in traditional funding programs.
      3. Enabling subventions, to provide small funds to purchase (or upgrade) critical equipment. Applicants for such funds must have no existing startup funds on which they could draw for this purpose.
    • Audience: FAS and SEAS ladder faculty
    • Timeline: spring and fall
    • Amount: $5,000 – $75,000
  • Data Science Initiative Competitive Research Fund
    • The 2021 DSI Competitive Research Fund will support grants that coalesce and accelerate methodologically-focused research.   We are especially interested in projects that intersect with or are likely to have impact within or across the DSI’s research themes:
      • Data-Driven Scientific Discovery (includes discovery of new materials, drug and gene discovery, environment, astronomy, neuroscience)
      • Markets and Networks (includes networks and influence, innovation and crowds, digital economy, jobs, data-driven decisions, blockchain)
      • Personalized Health (includes precision medicine, precision public health, medical informatics, diagnostics, personal devices)
      • Evidence-Based Policy (includes equality of opportunity, healthcare economics, democracy and governance, climate change — resilience and mitigation)
    • Audience: Harvard faculty with PI rights
    • Timeline: March 1, 2021
    • Amount: $5,000-$100,000 for one year
  • Advancing Open Knowledge Grants
    • Harvard Library’s Advancing Open Knowledge Grants Program seeks to advance open knowledge and foster innovation to further diversity, inclusion, belonging and anti-racism.
    • Audience: Harvard Library staff, with preference to partnerships with faculty, departments, or centers
    • Timeline: Applications are being accepted and evaluated on a rolling basis every six months from January 2021 through December 2022.
    • Amount: up to $10,000, with a preference for smaller projects that can be accomplished in a six-month timeframe
  • Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study: Accelerator Workshop Program
    • Description: The Radcliffe Accelerator Workshop Program provides funding to scholars, practitioners, and artists to propel their original research programs or projects toward a specific outcome: a publication, a grant application, a course curriculum, an exhibition, a performance, or policy recommendations, to name only a few possibilities.
    • Audience: Harvard ladder faculty
    • Timeline: hiatus for 2021, will resume spring 2022
    • Amount: funding to support one- to two-day, by-invitation-only seminars hosted on the campus of the Radcliffe Institute
  • Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study: Exploratory Seminars Program
    • The Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar Program provides funding to scholars, practitioners, and artists for collaboration in an interdisciplinary exploration of early-stage ideas. The program encourages intellectual risk taking as participants gather in an intensive seminar setting to explore new fields of research and inquiry.
    • Audience: Harvard ladder faculty
    • Timeline: the next application cycle will open in fall 2021
    • Amount: funding to support one- to two-day, by-invitation-only seminars hosted on the campus of the Radcliffe Institute
  • Harvard Initiative for Teaching and Learning (currently on hiatus)
    • HILT Grant (2011-2013, also known as the Hauser Fund grants)
      • The first phase (2011-2013) of the HILT Grants Program was designed to catalyze innovative activities and promote effective learning and teaching across the University. Forty-five projects were awarded to faculty, staff, and students at Harvard.
      • Amount: up to $50,000
    • HILT Spark Grant (2014-2016; 2017-2020)
      • From 2014-2016, semesterly Spark Grants were designed to help “spark” promising teaching and learning projects from idea to reality and position innovations for future success and were available to faculty, staff, and students. In 2017, Spark Grants were closed to students and transitioned to an annual award cycle.
      • Amount: up to $15,000
    • HILT Cultivation Grant (2014-2016)
      • Designed to extend promising educational innovations into new intellectual and institutional contexts and to rigorously investigate the potential of their wide-scale adoption across the University
      • Amount: up to $200,000
    • HILT Pilot Funds (2018-2020)
      • Quarterly funds designed to help students who have early-stage ideas for improving education broadly to gain traction on those ideas and lean an innovator’s mindset
    • HILT Advance Grants (2017)
      • Designed to help previous HILT grant recipients extend the scale and success of a prior HILT grant project
    • HILT Targeted Support (2018)
      • Designed to help those who have piloted projects with demonstrated success toward scalability
  • S.T. Lee Innovation Grant (closed)
    • S.T. Lee Innovation Grants fund creative partnerships between Harvard faculty and Harvard Library staff that improve access to information and the experience of using library resources at Harvard University.
    • Audience: Harvard Library staff + Harvard faculty collaborations

External

NEH

The NEH has a number of grants and programs which have funded hundreds of digital humanities and public scholarship projects. The below grants are a selection of those most frequently pursued by DH programs. This NEH blog post can help answer which program is most appropriate for your work.

  • Digital Humanities Advancement Grants
    • The Digital Humanities Advancement Grants program (DHAG) supports innovative, experimental, and/or computationally challenging digital projects at different stages of their lifecycles, from early start-up phases through implementation and sustainability.  Experimentation, reuse, and extensibility are valued in this program, leading to work that can scale to enhance scholarly research, teaching, and public programming in the humanities. The program also supports scholarship that examines the history, criticism, and philosophy of digital culture or technology and its impact on society. Proposals are welcome in any area of the humanities from organizations of all types and sizes.
    • Timeline: June 24, 2021 (biannual cycle); 36 month period
    • Amount: Level I $50,000; Level II $100,000; Level III $325,000, with an additional $50,000 in matching funds
  • 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. Applicants may apply to create institutes that are a single opportunity or are offered multiple times to different audiences.  Institutes may be as short as a few days or as long as six weeks and held at a single site or at multiples sites; virtual institutes are also permissible.
    • Timeline: March 2, 2022
    • Amount: $250,000 (36 months)
  • Digital Projects for the Public
    • The Digital Projects for the Public program supports projects that interpret and analyze humanities content in primarily digital platforms and formats, such as websites, mobile applications and tours, interactive touch screens and kiosks, games, and virtual environments. All Digital Projects for the Public projects should
      • present analysis that deepens public understanding of significant humanities ideas;
      • incorporate sound humanities scholarship;
      • involve humanities scholars in all phases of development and production;
      • include appropriate digital media professionals;
      • reach a broad public through a realistic plan for development, marketing, and distribution;
      • create appealing digital formats for the general public; and
      • demonstrate the capacity to sustain themselves.
    • Timeline: June 9, 2021
    • Amount: $30,000 (Discovery); $100,000 (Prototyping); $400,000 (Production)
  • Humanities Collections and Reference Resources
    • The Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program supports projects that provide an essential underpinning for scholarship, education, and public programming in the humanities.  Thousands of libraries, archives, museums, and historical organizations across the country maintain important collections of books and manuscripts, photographs, sound recordings and moving images, archaeological and ethnographic artifacts, art and material culture, and digital objects.  This program strengthens efforts to extend the life of such materials and make their intellectual content widely accessible, often through the use of digital technology.  Awards are also made to create various reference resources that facilitate use of cultural materials, from works that provide basic information quickly to tools that synthesize and codify knowledge of a subject for in-depth investigation.
    • Timeline: July 15, 2021
    • Amount: Foundations ($15,000 – two years); Implementation ($350,000 – three years)
  • Scholarly Editions and Scholarly Translations
    • The Scholarly Editions and Scholarly Translations program provides grants to organizations to support collaborative teams who are editing, annotating, and translating foundational humanities texts that are vital to learning and research but are currently inaccessible or are available only in inadequate editions or translations.  Typically, the texts are significant literary, philosophical, and historical materials, but other types of work, such as musical notation, may also be the subject of an edition.
    • Timeline: December 1, 2021
    • Amount: $300,000; up to $450,000 for projects that respond to “A More Perfect Union”: NEH Special Initiative Advancing Civic Education and Celebrating the Nation’s 250th Anniversary.
  • NEH-Mellon Fellowships for Digital Publication
    • Through NEH-Mellon Fellowships for Digital Publication, the National Endowment for the Humanities and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation jointly support individual scholars pursuing interpretive research projects that require digital expression and digital publication. To be considered under this opportunity, an applicant’s plans for digital publication must be integral to the project’s research goals.  That is, the project must be conceived as digital because the research topics being addressed and methods applied demand presentation beyond traditional print publication. Competitive submissions embody exceptional research, rigorous analysis, and clearly articulate a project’s value to humanities scholars, general audiences, or both. All projects must be interpretive. That is, projects must advance a scholarly argument through digital means and tools. Stand-alone databases, documentary films, podcasts, and other projects that lack an explicit interpretive argument are not eligible.
    • Timeline: April 27, 2022 for six to twelve months
    • Amount: $5,000 per month
  • Collaborative Research
    • The Collaborative Research program aims to advance humanistic knowledge through sustained collaboration between two or more scholars. Collaborators may be drawn from a single institution or several institutions across the United States; up to half of the collaborators may be based outside of the U.S. The program encourages projects that propose diverse approaches to topics, incorporate multiple points of view, and explore new avenues of inquiry in the humanities. The program allows projects that propose research in a single field of study, as well as interdisciplinary work. Projects that include partnerships with researchers from the natural and social sciences are encouraged but must employ a humanistic research agenda.
    • Timeline: December 1, 2021
    • Amount: up to $250,000
  • Dynamic Language Infrastructure: Documenting Endangered Languages Senior Research Grants
    • The Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) program is a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop and advance knowledge concerning endangered human languages. Made urgent by the imminent death of an estimated half of the 6,000-7,000 currently used languages, this effort aims also to exploit advances in information technology. Awards support fieldwork and other activities relevant to recording, documenting, and archiving endangered languages, including the preparation of lexicons, grammars, text samples, and databases.
    • Timeline: September 15, 2021 for up to 3 years
  • Digging into Data Challenge (2009-2016; closed)
    • The Digging into Data Challenge aims to address how “big data” changes the research landscape for the humanities and social sciences. Now that we have massive databases of materials available for research in the humanities and the social sciences–ranging from digitized books, newspapers, and music to information generated by Internet-based activities and mobile communications, administrative data from public agencies, and customer databases from private sector organizations-—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 materials. Digging into Data challenges the research community to help create the new research infrastructure for 21st-century scholarship.
  • Humanities Open Book Program (2016-2019; closed)
    • The Humanities Open Book Program was designed to make outstanding out-of-print humanities books available to a wide audience, and was jointly sponsored by NEH and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Over four years (2016-2019), the Humanities Open Book Program made 31 awards to university and non-profit presses to support the release of digital, open access editions of humanities books, released under a Creative Commons license.

Mellon

  • Higher Learning: Research Universities and Institutes
    • The Foundation’s grants to research universities and institutes for advanced study seek to help institutions train the next generation of faculty in the humanities, strengthen humanities research, and renew and broaden disciplines, research areas, and curricula.  Although some grants support projects that are specific to individual institutions, many are ranged within broader initiatives that encourage participating universities to exchange information about research outcomes and institutional practices.  Through its grantmaking, the program aims to strengthen the entire system of higher education in the humanities, and enable lesser-resourced institutions to participate fully in it. “Training faculty and students in digital humanities” is specifically listed as supported.
  • New Directions Fellowship
    • Serious interdisciplinary research often requires established scholar-teachers to pursue formal substantive and methodological training in addition to the PhD.  New Directions Fellowships assist faculty members in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who seek to acquire systematic training outside their own areas of special interest.  The program is intended to enable scholars in the humanities to work on problems that interest them most, at an appropriately advanced level of sophistication.  In addition to facilitating the work of individual faculty members, these awards should benefit scholarship in the humanities more generally by encouraging the highest standards in cross-disciplinary research. This is a limited submission competition.  Institutions will be invited to participate in this program and will be asked to solicit proposals from eligible faculty members in the humanities and humanistic social sciences wishing to further their research through engaging in programs of study in fields other than their own.

ACLS

  • Digital Extension Grants
    • ACLS invites applications for ACLS Digital Extension Grants, which are made possible by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The grants are designed to advance humanistic scholarship by enhancing established digital projects, extending their reach to new communities of users, and supporting teams of scholars at all career stages as they participate in digital research. This program aims to promote inclusion and sustainability by extending the opportunity to participate in the digital transformation of humanistic inquiry to a greater number of humanities scholars.
    • Amount: up to $150,000
    • Timeline: December, for 12-18 months