ACLS Fellowships, Chicago Colloquium, Scholar for Firefox Update

I’m back from vacation and have lots to catch up on, but wanted to pass along some quick notes about upcoming opportunities and deadlines that might be of interest to this blog’s audience.

I feel incredibly fortunate to have received an American Council of Learned Societies’ Digital Innovation Fellowship for the next year. 2006-7 will be the first year for this fellowship, which is supporting five projects, including efforts involving GPS, corpus digitization, map mashups, text and data mining, and software development. The call for applications for 2007-8 has already gone out, and the paperwork is due in just a couple of months, on September 27, 2006. Having written one of these applications, I recommend getting an early start. Beyond the normal “what I’m going to do” narrative, you need to come up with a budget and think about institutional support for your project (digital projects often require such things).

The Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science has sent out a call for papers in anticipation of a meeting on November 5-6, 2006. The meeting is going to expand upon the topics discussed in the March 2006 issue of D-Lib Magazine. I’m going to try to be there. The deadline for applications is August 15, 2006.

Finally, we still have a few spaces for beta testers for our upcoming release of Scholar for Firefox. For those who are hearing about this for the first time, Scholar is a citation manager and note-taking application (like EndNote) that integrates right into the Firefox web browser. Since it lives in the browser, it has some very helpful—and, we think, innovative—features, such as the ability to sense when you are viewing the record for a book (on your library’s website or at Amazon or elsewhere) and to offer to save the full citation information to your personal library of references (unlike del.icio.us or other bookmarking tools, it actually grabs the author, title, and copyright information, not just the URL). Scholar will have “smart folder” and “smart search” technology and other user interface capabilities that are reminiscent of iTunes and other modern software. And we hope to unveil some collaborative features soon as well (such as the ability to share and collaborate on bibliographies and notes, find new books and articles that might be of interest to you based on what you’ve already saved to your library, etc.). If you’re interested in testing the software, please email me. The limited release beta should be available around August 15, 2006.