Digging into Data Challenge has launched its third round in Canada, the Netherlands, the UK and the US. The event aims to help arts, humanities and social science researchers and developers build new insights into data on both sides of the Atlantic.
The international grant competition sees the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) deliver the programme management and grants administration, with £1 million funding for the successful UK grantees coming from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
During the first two rounds of the Challenge, held in 2009 and 2011, nearly 150 teams, representing universities from across Canada, the Netherlands, the US and the UK, competed to demonstrate how innovative research methods could be used to address questions in the humanities and social sciences.
Twenty-two of those teams were awarded grants during those earlier rounds, each of them demonstrating new methods for analysing vast digital resources used for humanities and social science research, like digital books, survey data, economic data, newspapers, music and other scholarly, scientific and cultural heritage resources that are now being digitised on a huge scale.
Due to the overwhelming popularity of the earlier rounds, two additional funders have joined for round three, enabling this competition to have a world-wide reach into many different scholarly and scientific domains.
The nine sponsoring funding bodies include the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), the Canada Fund for Innovation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (US), the National Endowment for the Humanities (US) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada).
The others include the National Science Foundation (US), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in collaboration with the Netherlands eScience Center (NLeSC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada). The deadline for applications is May 15, 2013.
