The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) is pleased to announce a new program promoting digital scholarship in the humanities. 

The ACLS Digital Extension Grant program, made possible by the generous assistance of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will support teams of scholars as they enhance existing digital projects with the goal of engaging new audiences across a range of academic communities and institutions. 

The Digital Extension Grant program builds upon the successes of ACLS’s recently concluded Digital Innovation Fellowship program, which over ten years funded 60 scholars pursuing computationally sophisticated approaches to humanistic research. In recognition of the collaborative nature of much digital scholarship, ACLS has designed the Digital Extension Grant program so that it provides flexible support at the level of the digital research project as opposed to the individual scholar. 

ACLS Digital Extension Grants may: 

• Extend existing digital projects and resources with content that adds diversity or interdisciplinary reach;
• Develop new systems of making existing digital resources available to broader audiences and/or scholars from diverse institutions;
• Foster new team-based work or collaborations that allow scholars from institutions with limited cyberinfrastructure to exploit digital resources; or
• Create new forms and sites for scholarly engagement with the digital humanities and new ways to document and recognize participant engagement.

ACLS will award up to six Digital Extension Grants in this competition year. Each grant provides up to $150,000 in funding, supporting a range of project costs, for terms of 12-18 months.

Proposals must be submitted through ACLS’s online application system, which will begin accepting applications October 15. Further information about the program and eligibility criteria is available online at www.acls.org/programs/digitalextension/. The application deadline for the inaugural competition of the Digital Extension Grant program is February 2, 2016.

The American Council of Learned Societies, a private, nonprofit federation of 73 national scholarly organizations, is the preeminent representative of American scholarship in the humanities and related social sciences. Advancing scholarship by awarding fellowships and strengthening relations among learned societies is central to ACLS’s work. This year, ACLS will award more than $15 million to over 300 scholars across a variety of humanistic disciplines.