[Foundation-l] NEH grant

[Andre Engels]

I would like to use this opportunity to once more bring forward an idea I
have been toying with at least since the Frankfurt Wikimania: Using
Wikimedia's methods in making archives available.

Archives are starting to put their material on the web, but still it's only
used sparingly. Which is a pity, because it means there is much archival
material that historians (both professional and amateur) are interested in
that is not available to them because it is in an archive far away, and
perhaps even unknown to them.

My idea was to scan these materials, put them on the web, and then make it
available to some wiki-like collaborative effort. Volunteers from all over
the world could then make themselves useful by doing the transcription of
the material (I am thinking in the first place of manuscript material here -
printed material is probably easier to transcribe through machine character
recognition) and by creating descriptions, indices etcetera.

My idea would be to have something wiki-like, where the main pages would
consists of a scan, its transcription (if available) and an area for
comments.

Andre Engels

2007/1/9, Sage Ross <ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail.com>:
>
> In the past there was some effort put into grant writing, but I'm not
> sure if any grant applications ever got submitted.  In any case, it's
> been quite a while since anything was done on Meta about grants:
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants
>
> There is a new NEH grant that looks like something appropriate for
> Wikimedia (or at least for English Wikipedia, through Wikimedia):
> http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/Digital_Partnership.html
>
> From the program description, they want:
> "...proposals for innovative, collaborative humanities projects using
> the latest digital technologies for the benefit of the American
> public, humanities scholarship, and the nation's cultural
> institutions. These grants will support collaborations among
> libraries, museums, archives, universities, and other cultural
> organizations that may serve as models for the field. We encourage
> projects that explore new ways to share, examine, and interpret
> humanities collections in a digital environment and to develop new
> uses and audiences for existing digital resources."
>
> It almost looks like it was written with Wikipedia in mind.  The grant
> range is $50,000 to $350,000 over two years; not enormous, but it
> seems worth the time of some Wikimedian grant writers.
>
> With some creativity, there are probably some other NEH and possibly
> NSF grants that Wikimedia might have a shot at as well.
>
> -User:Ragesoss
>



-- 
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels