ACLS News

Four ACLS Fellows among First Google Research Award Recipients

Four ACLS Fellows have received the first Google Digital Humanities Research Awards, which support university research groups in the humanities with funding and access to Google tools, technologies, and expertise. John Orwant, Google Books engineering manager, explains that proposals were selected "in part because the resulting techniques, tools and data will be broadly useful: they’ll help entire communities of scholars, not just the applicants."

Three of the awardees are ACLS Digital Innovation Fellows. The ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowships have been supporting scholars working in the digital humanities for five years, with the sixth competition currently open. (Read more about the 2010-11 competition.) The program provides funds for both research leave and for project development, and projects of successful Digital Innovation Fellows exemplify the novel methods of creating and representing knowledge that new information technologies make possible. Like the Google program, it also supports collaborative work. Twenty-six Fellows have been named since 2005, including Google awardees Dan Cohen F’06, Todd Presner F’06, and Timothy Tangherlini F’09. In addition, Google has recognized Andrew Stauffer F'06, an ACLS Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellow.

A panel at the 2010 ACLS Annual Meeting explored the complicated relationship between scholars and mass digitization efforts currently underway, and in particular the merits and demerits of the proposed court settlement of publishers' suit against Google. ACLS is pleased to present "The Google Book Settlement: Implications for Scholarship" in both streaming audio and an mp3 file here.