Projects aim to study how computational techniques can change humanities and social sciences research
Eight international research funders have announced the winners of the 2011 Digging into Data Challenge.Total grants of more than £3m will be divided between 14 teams of researchers based in the UK, the Netherland, Canada and the US, to investigate how computational techniques applied to the sciences can also be applied to change the nature of humanities and social sciences research. Following the first round in 2009 this is the second Digging into Data Challenge, which aims to address how “big data” changes the research landscape for the humanities and social sciences and forms part of an international competition to promote innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis. The winning teams are comprised of scholars, scientist, archivists and librarians from leading universities worldwide.
Eleven of the winning projects are led by UK organisations. They include an investigation into how humanities and social science research impacts on social networks and blogs as well as traditional scholarly sources, a study of changes in Western musical style between 1300 and 1900 using the digitised collections of several large music repositories and an examination of the economic and environmental impacts of commodity trading in the 19th century.
The eight sponsoring research funders are the Arts & Humanities Research Council (UK), the Economic & Social Research Council (UK), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (US), the Joint Information Systems Committee (UK), the National Endowment for the Humanities (US), the National Science Foundation (US), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada).
More information on Digging into Data and the challenges faced by the research community in helping create the new research infrastructure for 21
st century scholarship, can be found at
www.diggingintodata.org