ODH 2021: Year in Review
Office of Digital Humanities Awards
In 2021, the Office of Digital Humanities worked with sixty-nine external reviewers to evaluate over two hundred grant applications, and made sixty-seven awards across five grant programs. We distributed funds to fifty-one different institutions across twenty-six states and territories.
This year’s awards include:
- A free, digital platform that promotes U.S. Hispano/Latinx texts as resources to learn Spanish in the undergraduate classroom.
- A three-year project in community and capacity building that will create a digital hub using digitized collections of Black texts to explore questions of humanity and diversity in American society.
- A collaboration between Southern University and A&M College and the University of Leicester (UK) to develop resources in digital leadership for museum professionals.
- A digital humanities institute about the use of immersive digital technologies for teaching and learning about the Global Middle Ages.
- A digital publication that will use close and distance reading of newspapers to show the dynamic communal life of 19th-century black Ohioans.
- The conversion of more than fifteen recent scholarly monographs into open-access digital editions.
American Rescue Plan: Humanities Organizations
This year, the Office of Digital Humanities joined the NEH’s six other program offices, as well as staff across the agency, to oversee the distribution of $87.8 million in pandemic relief funding through competitive grant programs funded by the American Rescue Plan. Across the agency, this involved reviewing over one thousand applications and making almost 300 awards.
Among the institutions that received support through this program are:
- The New Hampshire Historical Society, which received funds for their “Moose on the Loose” online resource for elementary school students.
- King Manor Association of Long Island, which received funding to develop Voices from The Green: African American Activism in 19th Century Jamaica, Queens, a virtual exhibition and self-guided, digital walking tour.
- The Bishop Museum, which received funds to digitize Indigenous Hawai’ian and Pacific Islander cultural objects.
- The University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, received funding to establish an Oral History Lab led by the English department, the film program, and the libraries.
ODH in the Community
In 2021, ODH staff held more than 236 consultations with teams developing digital projects to discuss funding opportunities and project ideas. We also provided feedback on 104 drafts of grant applications for our DHAG and IATDH programs.
Through our virtual visits program, which was launched in response to the coronavirus pandemic, the ODH conducted 29 virtual workshops, speaking with more than 1,000 people about NEH funding opportunities for digital research and teaching in the humanities. Thanks to everyone who joined us for these virtual sessions!
We were also fortunate to have four graduate student interns in 2021, who worked with our team to conduct in-depth research into the impact of our grant programs. Learn more about the work of Bria Paige, Alyssa Fernandez, Leah Dudley, and Demetra McBrayer. Stay tuned for more information about our summer 2022 internship program.
Looking Forward
The staff of the Office of Digital Humanities will continue to work remotely, with limited return to our office spaces, until at least November 2022, and to run all of our grant programs from our home offices. Unfortunately, this means we will not be holding an in-person Project Directors meeting in the spring of 2022. We will miss seeing all of you in person, but look forward to a future where we can all safely and easily convene again.
We also expect to continue to hold virtual visits with digital humanities groups throughout 2022. We are fully booked for the Spring 2022 series, but you can contact us to be added to our waitlist for the 2022-23 academic year.
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Download the infographic as a PDF
Infographic summarizing the numbers described in the blog post, including awards, outreach activities, and grant programs.
Infographic summarizing the numbers described in the blog post, including awards, outreach activities, and grant programs.