In 2009, JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), a higher education IT consortium in the UK, launched the Digging Into Data Challenge. The digitization of large archives of books, folios, images, artworks and sound recordings in recent years has posed numerous challenges to scholars in the humanities; the Digging Into Data Challenge offered funding to 90 projects at universities all over the world that proposed ways of handling this large influx of data. Now the project is calling for a second round of bids for funding, as reported in Times Higher Education:

“What we wanted to do was get humanities people together with librarians and computer scientists and start (accessing) all those documents. We can ask new questions, and we can ask old questions in new ways,” Mr Dunning [program manager for digitization at JISC] said. “Instead of searching for one document out of 3 million, they can start to do an analysis of the whole 3 million.”

Importantly, the second tranche of funding is not being issued to digitise new archives, but to help researchers exploit existing digital data through new computing techniques.

Project proposals are due on June 16, 2011. Read more at Times Higher Education.