The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) issued the first public appraisal of the Digging into Data Challenge, an international grant programme first funded by JISC, the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the US National Science Foundation and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
These findings are presented in a report, “One Culture. Computationally Intensive Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences”. It was made public at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries JCDL 2012 conference in Washington, DC. The findings come along with a series of recommendations for researchers, administrators, scholarly societies, academic publishers, research libraries and funding agencies. The report is available online in pdf format; an extended version with case studies is also available in html format. Print copies are available for ordering through the website.
The Digging into Data Challenge was launched in 2009 to better understand how ‘big data’ changes the research landscape for the humanities and social sciences. Scholars in these disciplines now use massive databases of materials that range from digitised books, newspapers and music to transactional data such as web searches, sensor data, or cell phone records. The Challenge seeks to discover what new, computationally based research methods might be applied to these sources.
In its first year, the Digging into Data Challenge made awards to eight teams of scholars, librarians and computer and information scientists. Over the following two years, report authors Christa Williford and Charles Henry conducted site visits, interviews and focus groups to understand how these complex international projects were being managed, what challenges they faced, and what project teams were learning from the experience.
In 2011, four additional funding bodies joined the four original cooperating agencies in support of 14 new international collaborative research projects. These funders include the Institute of Museum and Library Services (US); the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK); the Economic and Social Research Council (UK); and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.
CLIR is an independent, non-profit organisation that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions and communities of higher learning.
