The Plains Humanities Alliance, a unit of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln that promotes the interdisciplinary study of the Great Plains, announces an upcoming deadline to apply for its Digital Research in the Humanities Fellowships. A major agenda of the Plains Humanities Alliance is to encourage the development of digital projects in the humanities of the Great Plains and regionalism.

The Plains Humanities Alliance web site (see http://plainshumanities.unl.edu /index.html) features the Plains Gateway Project, an on-line cultural inventory of digital resources in the humanities that relate to the Great Plains, the innovative on-line bibliography, Great Books of the Great Plains, as well as Digital Projects. As of January, 2009, two digital projects have been completed with funding from the PHA, and two are expected to go on line in summer, 2009. The Digital Research in the Humanities Fellowship is intended to support humanists interested in developing digital projects in the humanities. Projects may be on any subject, theme or approach in the humanities relating to the Great Plains and regionalism. PHA will offer one fellowship in the spring of 2009.

Proposals that derive and develop from previously published or completed work or are viewed as a parallel project to a written work nearing completion will be given preference. Our goal is not to support information-oriented web sites, or on-line archival based collections, or bibliographies. Rather we hope to foster interpretive projects that use the power of digital technology to tell stories and advance scholarship in new ways.

Each recipient of a fellowship will receive funds up to a limit of $6,500.00. These funds must be spent during the calendar year following the receipt of the fellowship. Funds will be distributed from an account at the Center for Great Plains Studies upon submission of receipts or an invoice or transfer request from the recipient’s home institution. Funds may be used for any of the following purposes in any combination up to the limit of the fellowship: funding a course buy out or course buy outs, hiring a research assistant or research assistants; funding the scanning of materials that can not be transported to the digital center at the University of Nebraska for scanning, covering the cost of permissions to use photos or texts, and travel to gather materials and carry out research. The fellowship is not intended to be used for the purchase of hardware, software, or a scanner. Technical digital research skills are neither required nor expected. Fellowship recipients will receive technical support through the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for the period it takes to get the site up and running. This period may extend beyond the term of the funding. CDRH will assign a team of staff to develop the site's structure, metadata, and design in consultation with the funded scholar. Successful applicants will provide text or other content, most images for scanning, as well as necessary permissions and copyrights for use of materials. It may not be possible for us to scan materials if they are held at special collections in another institution. In that case fellows will be expected to use fellowship funds for scanning or seek funds from other sources to do so. Fellows will be required to provide correct citations for all scanned images and texts. The staff at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities will use these citations to request permissions to use all images and texts in the project. The costs of the permissions will, however, be covered by the fellowship. Server space for the project will be provided by the University of Nebraska Libraries. Recipients will be permitted to apply for a renewal or extension for the fellowship a second time at any time after receiving the first fellowship. Recipients of two previous fellowships are ineligible for further funding on the same project. Recipients must agree that the digital project when completed will become a permanent featured part of the Digital Initiatives on the Plains Humanities Alliance web site. Upon completion of the fellowship or project, the recipient may be invited by the PHA to the University of Nebraska –Lincoln to present a talk about his or her project.

All proposals should thus include a statement of purpose, a work plan on how one intends to translate one's subject or theme into a digital project, a budget request with, if appropriate, an email from one's supervisor indicating costs at your institution for a course buy out or a graduate assistant for one semester, and a curriculum vita or résumé. All proposals will be screened and assessed by a panel of scholars in the digital humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Whenever possible, fellowship recipients should match support provided by the Alliance with other funding (internal or external grants or a commitment of department resources, for example). We encourage fellowship recipients to be resourceful in gathering support and managing research time so as to make possible the initial development of an ambitious project. Typically, there are significant intellectual and labor challenges associated with digital projects. Digital projects are often collaborative, multi-year projects that exceed the scale of an article, or edited volume.

All applications should be submitted by email to Plains Humanities Alliance at tmahoney1@unl.edu. The deadline for receipt of applications is May 15, 2009. If you would like to discuss your proposal previous to submission feel free to contact Timothy R. Mahoney, Project Administrator of the Plains Humanities Alliance, by phone or email (tmahoney1@unl.edu; (402) 472-3247). Applicants will be informed of a decision within a month after the application deadline. Funds will be made available immediately for use at any point in the eighteen months after the receipt of the fellowship. The recipient of the Spring, 2009 fellowship, for example, will be expected to use the fellowship funds by the end of 2010.