DFG/NEH Bilateral Digital Humanities Program

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in the United States and the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft e.V., DFG) are working together to offer support for digitization projects in the humanities. These grants provide funding for up to three years of development in any of the following areas: new digitization projects and pilot projects; the addition of important materials to existing digitization projects; and the development of related infrastructure to support international digitization work and the use of those digitized resources. Collaboration between U.S. and German partners is a key requirement for this grant category. Each application must be sponsored by at least one eligible German individual or institution, and at least one U.S. institution (see Eligibility requirements below), and there must be a project director from each country. The partners will collaborate to write a single application package, which the U.S. partner will submit to the NEH (via Grants.gov) and the German partner will submit to the DFG via regular postal service (additional submission of a pdf version via e-mail is encouraged). All potential applicants should note that, while NEH and DFG each host a version of the guidelines on their respective Web sites, the requirements for the application package as outlined in Section V, “Application and Submission Information ,” are identical. However, each set of guidelines contains some variations in grant administration procedures to be followed by successful applicants. These variations reflect local administrative and organizational requirements of each country. Applications should explain the need for the U.S.-German partnership and provide workable solutions to some of the issues of managing and developing transatlantic collections. Proposals for digitization projects may include: digitization of humanities collections that are relevant to either or both scholarly communities for use in research and higher education, developing a detailed plan for the digitization of humanities collections that could benefit humanities research and performing a limited pilot digitization program to test shared infrastructure and procedures, connecting existing split digitized collections and detailing suitable transatlantic standards and communication strategies, and creating a virtual archive or resource that would join complementary materials (analog or digital) internationally.