Digging into Data Challenge

LOI March 15; full July 15

The Digging into Data Challenge is an international grant competition sponsored by four leading research agencies, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada

The advent of what has been called "data-driven inquiry" or "cyberscholarship" has changed the nature of inquiry across many disciplines, including the sciences and humanities, revealing new opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration on problems of common interest. The creation of vast quantities of Internet accessible digital data and the development of techniques for large-scale data analysis and visualization have led to remarkable new discoveries in genetics, astronomy, and other fields, and—importantly—connections between academic disciplinary areas. New techniques of large-scale data analysis allow researchers to discover relationships, detect discrepancies, and perform computations on data sets that are so large that they can be processed only using computing resources and computational methods developed and made economically affordable within the past few years. With books, newspapers, journals, films, artworks, and sound recordings being digitized on a massive scale, it is possible to apply data analysis techniques to large collections of diverse cultural heritage resources as well as scientific data. How might these techniques help scholars use these materials to ask new questions about and gain new insights into our world? To encourage innovative approaches to this question, four international research organizations are organizing a joint grant competition to focus the attention of the social science and humanities research communities on large-scale data analysis and its potential application to a wide range of scholarly resources.