Leading research agencies announce new international competition: "The digging into data chall...( Today a new international competitio...)

Today, a new, international competition called the Digging into Data Challenge was announced by four leading research agencies: the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) from the United Kingdom, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada.

The Digging into Data Challenge encourages humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis, challenging scholars to develop international partnerships and explore vast digital resources, including electronic repositories of books, newspapers and photographs to identify new opportunities for scholarship.

Applicants will form international teams from at least two of the participating countries. Winning teams will receive grants from two or more of the funding agencies and, one year later, will be invited to present their work at a special conference. These teams, which may be composed of scholars and scientists, will be asked to demonstrate how data mining and data analysis tools currently used in the sciences can improve humanities and social science scholarship. The hope of this competition is that these projects will serve as exemplars to the field and encourage new, international partnerships among scholars, computer scientists, information scientists, librarians and others.

"It is exciting to us to be able to foster research with outcomes of equal excitement to the humanities and computer and information science and engineering disciplines," said Haym Hirsh, director of NSF's Division of Information and Intelligent Systems. "Through this program, twenty-first century technologies will enable new modes of scholarship that complement centuries-old ways of conducting research."

"The Digging into Data Challenge brings together scientists and humanities scholars to take advantage of the digitization of millions of books
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