Digital Humanities

U Michigan Wins 2 New Digital Humanities Grants

• By Leila Meyer
• 04/07/16

The University of Michigan (U-M) has received two new grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support digital scholarship in the humanities.

In February 2016, the University of Michigan Press received a grant of $28,000 for its "Mapping the Free Ebook Supply Chain" project. During the year-long project, researchers will use qualitative and quantitative metrics to study how readers discover and use free e-books.

At the conclusion of the project, the researchers will publish a white paper and journal article with "recommendations about best practices for ensuring discovery of free e-books and meaningfully measuring their impact" and "an open-source Web survey application that publishers can use to capture qualitative information about e-books usage," according to information on the University of Michigan Press's site.

U-M and Emory University are sharing a grant of $73,500 for the "Model Contract for Digital Scholarship" project, which will develop "a model author-publisher contract optimized for the publication of digital scholarship," according to a news release from U-M. The project is led by Emory's scholarly communications office, and U-M faculty and administrators will participate in consultative workshops and interviews.

When the model contract is complete, it will be made "openly available along with ancillary legal documents such as a sample permissions letter for authors to use with third-party rights holders," according to U-M.

Last year, U-M received a grant of $899,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to build a new online publishing platform.