The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce its new Digital Innovation Fellowship program, in support of digitally based research projects in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. These fellowships, created with the generous help of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, are intended to support an academic year dedicated to work on a major scholarly project of a digital character that advances humanistic studies and best exemplifies the integration of such research with use of computing, networking, and other information technology-based tools. The online application for the fellowship program is located at http://ofa.acls.org; applications must be completed by November 10, 2005 (decisions to be announced in late March 2006).

This is the first national fellowship program to recognize and reward humanistic scholarship in the digital sphere, and to help establish standards for judging the quality, innovation, and utility of such research. Many scholars have been working in the humanities for years with such tools as digital research archives, new media representations of extant data, and innovative databases-and now the ACLS sees an important opportunity to start identifying and providing incentive for distinctive work, on a national basis. "Information technology can be the means for scholars to answer new and old questions that have so far resisted our curiosity and our effort. This program will support a rising generation of scholars in making exactly that kind of progress," says James O'Donnell, provost of Georgetown University, Chair of the ACLS Executive Committee of Delegates, and author of Avatars of theWord: From Papyrus to Cyberspace (1998).

Up to five Digital Innovation Fellowships will be awarded in this competition year, for tenure beginning in 2006-2007. As this program aims to provide the means for pursuing digitally-based scholarly projects, the fellowship includes a stipend of up to $55,000 to allow an academic year's leave from teaching, as well as project funds of up to $25,000 for purposes such as access to tools and personnel for digital production, collaborative work with other scholars and with humanities or computing research centers, and the dissemination and preservation of projects.

The ACLS criteria for judging applications include the project's intellectual ambitions and technological underpinnings, likely contribution as a digital scholarly work to humanistic study, satisfaction of technical requirements for a successful research project, degree and significance of preliminary work; potential for promoting teamwork and collaboration (where appropriate), and articulation with local infrastructure at the applicant's home institution.

Applicants must be citizens or permanent residents of the United States as of the application deadline date and must hold a Ph.D. degree conferred prior to the application deadline. However, established scholars who can demonstrate the equivalent of the Ph.D. in publications and professional experience may also qualify.

Applications for the 2005-06 ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship Program
Deadline: November 10, 2005
Contact: American Council of Learned Societies, 633 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Phone: (212) 697-1505
E-mail: sfisher@acls.org
Web: www.acls.org/difguide.htm

Citation: , " ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship," SBL Forum , n.p. [cited Aug 2005]. Online:http://sbl-site.org/Article.aspx?ArticleID=446