Leipzig eHumanities award

The Leipzig centre for eHumanities has recently announced a new award scheme: the eHumanities innovation award. The award aims to recognise “emerging researchers who have developed new automated methods for the analysis of Humanities content”. The Leipzig team emphasises that they are not looking for scholars who applied existing methods to digital data, but instead want to uncover real methodological innovations that are useful for the Humanities. Many initiatives from the SotonDH community should qualify for this €1000 award. Deadline for proposals 31 July. Read the full call for proposals below.

In fact, the Leipzig eHumanities team really are on a roll! Apart from the new award they also launched the Leipzig eHumanities seminar series. It will take place every Wednesday between October and November. Abstracts of no more than 1000 words should be sent by June, 15th, 2012 to seminar@e-humanities.net. Moreover, it was recently announced that Professor Greg Crane, pioneer in the Digital Humanities and the person behind the hugely successful (and above all useful) Perseus Digital Library, has been appointed Humboldt Professor in Leipzig. With Professor Crane in such a prestigious and well-funded position I am quite sure we can expect to hear great things from the Leipzig eHumanities team.

The eHumanities Innovation Award recognizes emerging researchers who have developed new automated methods for the analysis of Humanities content. We particularly look for research that involves a deep understanding of issues from both the Humanities and from the Information Sciences. Individual researchers may thus be primarily centered in the Humanities or in the Information Sciences but we also invite work that involves collaboration across these boundaries.

Your proposal should clarify the following points:
How does your methodology/technique work? Explain and discuss here in detail not only the technique you propose, but also the distinguishing features of your approach.
Which benefits does your method provide for the humanities? Please explain in detail how your method is used in any field of the humanities? Do not forget to provide good examples.
What are the next steps for your research process?

We are not interested in a combination of digital data with previously available tools or visualization techniques.

Who can apply?
This award focuses on researchers who have received their PhD’s within the previous 5 years or are still working on the PhD.

Procedure:
Send a proposal abstract until July, 31st, 2012.
After reviewing, the participants with the 5 most interesting contributions will be asked to present both data and results of their submissions (early September 2012).
Finally, the winner and two notable mentions will be announced by September 30th, 2012.

The winner will receive a 1000 Euro award and will be invited to the 2012 Leipzig eHumanities Seminar to present the contribution.

Please send an anonymized proposal of no more than 1.500 words by July, 31st, 2012 to award@e-humanities.net.

If you have any questions please contact us at award@e-humanities.net.

Award board (in alphabetical order):
Marco Büchler (Natural Language Processing),
Elisabeth Burr (Digital Romance Linguistics),
Gregory Crane (Digital Classics, Digital Libraries),
Gerhard Heyer (Natural Language Processing,
Gerik Scheuermann (Visualisation),
Ulrich Johannes Schneider (Cultural Studies, University Library).