International Digging into Data Challenge launches

This international grant competition sees Jisc in the UK 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).

Stuart Dempster, programme manager for the Digging into Data project at Jisc says: “To enable new research opportunities to flourish and for our universities to remain competitive in an international environment, our researchers and computer scientists need new skills and approaches. We need more data scientists, we need advanced analytics to capitalise on big data and one way to achieve this is through this transformative international challenge. Building on from two previous successful phases we are pleased to announce a third phase of Digging into Data which aims to help our arts, humanities and social science researchers and developers build new insights into data on both sides of the Atlantic.”

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 (United Kingdom)
• The Economic and Social Research Council (United Kingdom)
• The Canada Fund for Innovation (Canada)
• The Institute of Museum and Library Services (United States)
• The National Endowment for the Humanities (United States)
• The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada)
• The National Science Foundation (United States)
• The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research in collaboration with The Netherlands eScience Center (NLeSC) (Netherlands)
• The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada).

The deadline for applications is 15 May 2013. Further information about the competition and the application process can be found at www.diggingintodata.org.