The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research and the Texas A&M University Libraries’ Sterling C. Evans Chair announce a new program to assist the early development of projects in digital humanities. This program will support all faculty scholars, non-tenure track as well as tenured and tenure-track in any department in the university by providing a grant of up to $10,000 to a project in digital humanities (collaborative or singly directed).

This program is meant to offer significant but flexible assistance to faculty – as individuals or in collaborative teams – whose current scholarly project depends on or is fundamentally inflected by information technology, computer-aided research, and/or the ‘digital revolution.’ The program is especially aimed at those who have embarked on or who are keen to embark on research in the humanities that is ‘born digital.’

Another call will be made in spring 2008.

The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research and the Texas A&M University Libraries’ Sterling C. Evans Chair are pleased to announce Dr. Amy Earhart as the recipient of the 2007-2008 Evans/Glasscock Digital Humanities Project Fellowship. This fellowship provides $10,000 to support to a project in digital humanities by faculty in any department in the university. The award aims to assist faculty projects that depend on or are fundamentally inflected by information technology, computer-aided research, and the ‘digital revolution.’

Dr. Earhart (Department of English) received this fellowship to continue work on “The 19 th-Century Concord Digital Archive” (CDA), which is being developed in partnership with the Concord Free Public Library, Concord, Massachusetts. The CDA collects the cultural record of nineteenth-century Concord, Massachusetts, in an interactive digital archive useful to a multidisciplinary group of scholars. It may be found here http://www.digitalconcord.org/.

The archive will include texts from canonical figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott, along with materials from lesser known figures and groups: free African-Americans, Irish immigrants, the poor, and the criminal class. Literary texts, maps, photographs, music, and newspapers are among the varied records that will be included in the repository. The CDA will offer visual means of addressing information, and given the importance of location, geography, and landscape in shaping life and culture in Concord, this instrumentality should encourage new avenues of research.