BA/Jisc Grants for Digital Research in the Humanities

This opportunity represents a partnership between the British Academy and Jisc, the UK higher, further education and skills sectors’ not for profit organisation for digital services and solutions.

This programme aims to extend support for researchers engaging with Digital Research in the Humanities by offering grants to carry out novel research through the application of new methods and tools to existing digital resources. The use and re-use of existing resources such as digital collections and datasets will demonstrate their capacity to generate new knowledge. 

The intersection of digital technologies and the humanities enables new kinds of research, both in the humanities disciplines and in computer science. Digital Research in the Humanities covers a wide range of methods and practices, including: visualisations of large datasets, 3D modelling of historical artefacts, data mining of large datasets, text mining, data linking, Geographical Information Systems, image and sound processing and analysis.

This is not a call for the digitisation of material that is not currently available in digital format. Rather, it is more explicitly aimed at highlighting outstanding examples of where existing digital material can be used and re-used to demonstrate the capacity to generate new knowledge. Successful applicants must identify and address specific humanities research questions and will be expected to state explicitly in their application the ways in which their use of digital resources will make a significant difference not only to knowledge and understanding of the material that is specifically the subject of the application, but also to wider understanding of how other projects might follow the examples being set through this programme.

The programme is expected to be able to support the award of around six grants in total of up to £10,000 each. These grants will be awarded to researchers intending to work in any aspect of research relevant to digital research resources in the humanities, including:
• History, including History of Science and Medicine
• History of Art and Cultural History
• Philology and Linguistics
• Film, dance or music studies (within a historical or critical context)
• Literary texts and/or documents in any Humanities subject area
Three of the grants are available through Jisc funding and are earmarked specifically to support research that makes use of the digitised UK Medical Heritage Library (UKMHL) corpus, which includes over 65k digitised 19th century history of medicine texts openly available on Jisc’s Historical Texts at http://historicaltexts.jisc.ac.uk. A copy of the dataset can be provided to successful grantees on request. Researchers are free to propose to conduct any type of research (linguistic, historical, image-based…) that uses this corpus or cross-analysing this corpus with any other datasets to which they may have access

Eligibility

• Grants are available for established researchers, on a permanent contract (which may be part-time or full-time) or, if temporary, on a contract that will not end during the course of the grant, in any field of the humanities. Postgraduate students are not eligible to apply.
• Applicants must be employed by a recognised UK university or research organisation. Collaborative projects are welcomed, but only one application per project will be accepted.
• Awards will not be made retrospectively: this means that the work for which support is requested must not have commenced before the award is announced.

Level of award

Up to £10,000.

Please note that the scheme is not covered within the FEC regime – the £10,000 are available to the award-holder only for direct research expenses.