Priority Deadline: March 15, 2024

Each year The Recovery Hub for American Women Writers will provide significant support for two digital projects in their early phases. Projects eligible for support include digital editions of letters, books, short fiction, and other texts as well as experimental projects that explore mapping, visualization, and other content-rich methods. The Hub’s editorial platform is designed to support scholars who want to encode recovered documents using the best technical and sustainability standards but who have limited experience with the digital humanities. For examples of the range in project types and sizes the Hub supports, see Alex W. Black, Brigitte Fielder, and Johanna Ortner’s Just Teach One: Early African American Print edition of Frances Ellen Watkins (Harper)’s Forest Leaves, Kevin Mcmullen’s Fanny Fern in the New York Ledger, or Jordan Von Cannon’s Transatlantic Departures: Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Travel’s Abroad.

Project cultivation support is available for people interested in textual recovery, with or without institutional affiliations. Recovery practitioners who are awarded project cultivation will receive a $2,000 stipend to support their work on the project. Stipends may be used to help buy out time, support student workers, or offset travel or technical costs. Practitioners are expected to dedicate at least 80 hours of work to the project throughout the course of the year and attend meetings and training with the Hub’s staff. The stage of completion at the end of the cultivation year will vary by project. Project cultivation does not guarantee a project will be peer reviewed by the Recovery Hub.

Benefits include:

  • Guidance through the process of creating a MOU or charter that will define the project’s parameters, labor principles, audience, access principles
  • Guidance regarding data and metadata issues (ethical use of materials, copyright and proper credit, image creation and storage)
  • Assistance finding funding, including advice/training in (internal and external) grant writing
  • Assistance choosing tools and platforms for building the project
  • Project planning/management assistance (with the understanding that project directors will take over planning/management after initial training)
  • Assistance with a framework for long-term technological sustainability 
  • Recognition of cultivation on the Recovery Hub’s website 
  • Web hosting as needed