Growing Opportunities in the Digital Humanities

When the NEH first launched our Digital Humanities Initiative (now known as the Office of Digital Humanities) nearly three years ago, one of our goals was to help spur more work in the wide range of scholarly activities that might fall under the banner of "digital humanities." It is great to see so many activities and projects going on throughout the nation.

Just in the past few weeks, it seems like there has been a flurry of new announcements in the digital humanities arena. For example, there was an announcement from Stanford University, which is offering a Digital Humanities Fellowship; there was an announcement from the American Council of Learned Societies about their Digital Innovation Fellowship and their Collaborative Research Award; and an announcement from HASTAC and the MacArthur Foundation about their Digital Media and Learning Competition.

These announcements represent a variety of different institutions and have different objectives, but all represent, I believe, a growing trend that digital scholarship is -- and will continue to be -- an important part of the humanities. I suspect we'll see many more announcements of this type over the coming year.