Money Pwease!

The Digital Humanities Advancement Grants (DHAG) focuses on the impact of technology on the humanities. The strength of this kind of grant is that projects can get funding for the lifetime of the project. This is important for some projects if they long processes that need funding for a number of years. This grant really focuses on preserving pieces of history and culture online for generations to come. Since this is a pretty broad topic, I feel like a lot of different and unique projects can get funding through this.

The Digital Projects for the Public grants is all about getting history (and humanities) out to the public, specifically using digital platforms. This grant supports a lot of different technologies that are focused on bringing history to the American public. For this grant, unlike the DHAG grant, individuals may apply. This is important for individual scholars, educators, or students who want to implement some kind of technology in their own field of work that will enhance whatever they might be working on.

Both of these grants focus on preserving or presenting humanities to the public. They both have levels of funding in which people can apply for. Projects do not have to apply for the first level of funding in order to get the third level of funding later. This to me is very important. Some projects simply need to start off with more money in order to achieve specific goals. One interesting thing that I noted on each grant website was that projects could not be used to “persuade audiences of a particular political, religious, or ideological point of view.” (pg. 7, The Digital Projects for the Public Grant) I wonder how projects surrounding topics like LGBTQ history, Black Lives Matter, Civil War/Slavery, Mexican immigration, etc get funding. Could any of these get funding through grants like these? Could a project dedicated to telling the story of Mexican migrant workers be denied? What about a project dedicated to digitizing interviews of Syrian refugees who have made it to America?

Also, I read the instructions wrong on the syllabus but I don’t feel like deleting all of my above work, so here are the strengths from the narratives:

DHAG:

The sample narrative, Mobilizing the Past for a Digital Future: The Potential of Digital Archaeology really focuses on bringing technology to the humanities and helping a variety of fields through workshops understand how mobile devices can be used. I think this is very important in the historical and archaeological fields. Digitizing things can help speed up research and can help bring the public in.

The strength of Image Analysis for Archival Discovery is that it has a very particular goal in mind, finding and digitizing poetry in newspapers, but it also has the ability to help other historians. By creating new techniques to electronically scan newspapers for textual clues to find poetry, other historians can use that technology to find other topics in newspapers. This grant and the above Archaeology grant both would help other academics with their research techniques.

Digital Projects for the Public:

In the Exploring the Four Elements: Towards a Digital Environmental History of the Americas, they describe exhibits that will showcase the human engagement in earth, air, fire, and water. While they don’t show a very detailed plan of user-generated content, they do seem to be focused on reaching out to a more diverse museum crowd and hope to engage with them.

The Digital Giza: A New Portal to the Pyramids is focused on creating a 3D immersive computer model of the entire Giza Plateau. This kind of project is really focused on bringing digital history to the public. This kind of research and project could be useful in k-12 classrooms as well as college classrooms. This kind of project, like the Exploring the Four Elements project is focused on reaching a larger audience.