The American Council of Learned Societies is pleased to invite applications for Digital Justice Seed Grants, which are made possible by the Mellon Foundation.
Donor Name: American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS)
State: All States
County: All Counties
Type of Grant: Grant
Deadline: 12/03/2024
Size of the Grant: $10,000 to $100,000
Grant Duration: Less than 1 Year
Details:
Through both their content and methods, projects funded by ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grants pursue the following activities:
- Critically engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities, including (but not limited to) Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities; people with disabilities; and queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people through the ethical use of digital tools and methods.
- Explore or experiment with new materials, methodologies, and research agendas by way of planning workshops, prototyping, and/or testing products.
- Cultivate greater openness to new sources of knowledge and strategic approaches to content building and knowledge dissemination.
- Engage in capacity building efforts, including but not limited to: pedagogical projects that train students in digital humanities methods as a key feature of the project’s content building practice; publicly engaged projects that develop new technological infrastructure with community partners; trans-institutional projects that connect scholars across academic and cultural heritage institutions.
This program addresses inequities in access to tools and support for digital work among scholars across various fields, those working with under-utilized or understudied source materials, and those in institutions with less support for digital projects. It promotes inclusion and sustainability by extending the opportunity to participate in the digital transformation of humanistic inquiry to a greater number of humanities scholars and projects at the beginning stages of development. Finally, ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grants offer scholars and project leaders general financial planning coaching from the Nonprofit Finance Fund. Such an opportunity provides a foundation upon which grant recipients can envision the possible long-term financial options for supporting their digital projects.
Funding Information
Amount: between $10,000 and $25,000.
Grant Period
Grant terms must begin between July 1, 2025 and December 31, 2025.
Eligibility Criteria
- At least one of the project’s principal investigators must be a scholar in the humanities and/or the interpretative social sciences.
- Project must be within the start-up or prototyping phase of development.
- Projects must be made as widely available as intellectual property constraints allow, ideally with the most liberal open-source and Creative Commons license that is appropriate for the underlying content.
- An institution of higher education in the United States must administer awarded grant funds.
Evaluation Criteria
Peer reviewers in this program evaluate all eligible proposals on the following criteria:
- The project’s critical engagement with the interests and histories of people of color and/or other historically marginalized communities through the ethical use of digital tools and methods.
- The feasibility of the project plans, as well as a realistic assessment of how risks and challenges will be managed.
- The proposal’s analysis of the various technological, financial, and/or institutional supports (or lack thereof) and how grant funds might complement, or in some cases, completely underwrite, these gaps in support.
- The project’s potential to bolster the ecosystem of digital scholarship within and/or outside the project’s home institution, whether by (yet not limited to) its intellectual contributions, innovative use of existing technology, and/or networks of skills-building and sharing.
- The project’s clarity with respect to how it will engage its longstanding or new primary audiences and/or beneficiaries.
- The strategic and intentional use of specific digital tools and methods, as well as the anticipated impact and clarity of the project’s digital deliverables.
For more information, visit ACLS.
