Google Digital Humanities Grants
Google wants you to know about this new set of grants. I think there is lots of potential use of Google geospatial tools in the humanities. I note the one grant that obviously uses them below the quote.
Google Awards Nearly $1 Million to Support Digital Humanities Research
Digitization has altered the ways in which printed materials can be searched, analyzed and interpreted. Scholars can now use quantitative techniques to analyze large amounts of literature and identify trends over selected periods of time, by language, by geography and by topic. Just years ago, this wasn’t possible.
To help support digital humanities research, Google is making available nearly $1 million in Google Digital Humanities Awards over the next two years. These awards will fund 12 research projects that touch on various fields within the humanities, such as Linguistics, Literature, Philosophy, Sociology, Archaeology and Anthropology. The projects help answer questions such as the following: Can we better characterize Victorian society by quantifying shifts in vocabulary—not just of a few leading writers, but of every book written during the era? Or can we see and compare every version of the opening line of a work like Virgil’s Aeneid, analyze every place where the line is cited, and examine every instance where it is quoted?
The Digital Humanities Awards are the result of a call for proposals Google issued in April to universities and academic institutions, In total, these 12 projects will receive $479,000 in the first year, with the possibility of renewal next year. In addition to financial support, the recipients will also be able to access Google data, tools, technologies and expertise.
Quick look reveals at least one using geotools:
Elton Barker, The Open University, Eric C. Kansa, University of California-Berkeley, Leif Isaksen, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. Google Ancient Places (GAP): Discovering historic geographical entities in the Google Books corpus.
