I wanted to share the announcement that came out earlier this week for the second round of the Digging into Data Challenge. This is a very important initiative that facilitates both international and interdisciplinary collaboration to advance the use of computational technologies for large cultural corpora. It also represents a substantial collaboration among a range of funding bodies that support work in this area.

CNI has featured work from this initiative (and related efforts) at our recent membership meetings, and we look forward to continue to track developments on behalf of our member community.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
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Eight International Research Funders Announce Round Two of the
Digging into Data Challenge

Washington, DC-Today, eight international research funders are jointly announcing their participation in round two of the Digging into Data Challenge, a grant competition designed to spur cutting edge research in the humanities and social sciences.

The Digging into Data Challenge asks researchers these questions: How can we use advanced computation to change the nature of our research methods? That is, now that the objects of study for researchers in the humanities and social sciences, including books, survey data, economic data, newspapers, music, and other scholarly and scientific resources are being digitized at a huge scale, how does this change the very nature of our research? How might advanced computation and data analysis techniques help researchers use these materials to ask new questions about and gain new insights into our world?

The first round of the Digging into Data Challenge sparked enormous interest from the international research community and led to eight cutting-edge projects being funded. There has also been increased media attention to the question of so-called “big data” techniques being used for humanities and social sciences research, including a recent cover article in the journal Science.

Due to the overwhelming popularity of round one, the Digging into Data Challenge is pleased to announce that four additional funders have joined for round two, enabling this competition to have a world-wide reach into many different scholarly and scientific domains.

The eight sponsoring funding bodies include the Arts & Humanities Research Council (United Kingdom), the Economic & Social Research Council (United Kingdom), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (United States), the Joint Information Systems Committee (United Kingdom), the National Endowment for the Humanities (United States), the National Science Foundation (United States), the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (Netherlands), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada).

Final applications will be due June 16, 2011. Further information about the competition and the application process can be found at www.diggingintodata.org.

The February 11, 2011 issue of Science has a special section titled “Dealing with Data” with a number of papers and articles covering data intensive science and data curation issues. They have set up a web site that consolidates some of the material from this issue and some related topical material from other Science journals (Signaling, Translational Medicine, Careers) for public access (registration required for non-subscribers) at

http://www.sciencemag.org/site/special/data/

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

I wanted to share this symposium announcement with the CNI community. This is a topic of intense interest, and they’ve prepared an excellent panel. Note that they also intend to webcast the event.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI

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Dear Colleague,

You are cordially invited to attend a public symposium on The Value of Shared Access and Reuse of Publicly
Funded Scientific Data. The event is being organized by the National Research Council’s Board on Research
Data and Information, and will be held on the afternoon of December 1 in Washington, DC. A formal invitation
with the summary description of the symposium, the location, and RSVP instructions may be found below.

Please feel free to forward this invitation to others who you think may be interested. More complete information
about the event and the Board on Research Data and Information is at: http://www.nationalacademies.org/brdi.
The symposium will be webcast, if you cannot attend in person, but we hope to see you there!

Best wishes,

Paul Uhlir
Director, Board on Research Data and Information

INVITATION

The Value of Shared Access and ReUse of Publicly Funded Scientific Data
A PUBLIC SYMPOSIUM
Organized by the
Board on Research Data and Information
National Research Council
(http://www.nationalacademies.org/brdi)
Wednesday, December 1, 2010, 2:00-4:15 p.m.
20 F Street Conference Center
Conference Room B, 20 F Street, NW, Washington, DC

This symposium will examine some of the research, economic, and social benefits that can be derived from providing online access to publicly-funded scientific data, as well as how such benefits can be evaluated. The event will include presentations on the scientific data sharing and reuse policies of the federal government; compelling examples of the value of free online access and unfettered reuse of data; methods of assessing the value and effects of shared access and reuse on research, the economy, and society; and prepared comments by Board members. The symposium is open to the public, but advance registration is requested (contact: Cheryl Levey, clevey@nas.edu or call 202-334-1531).

Moderator:
Michael Lesk, Rutgers University and Board Chair

Speakers:
Interagency Working Group on Digital Data, OSTP (invited)
Rod Atkinson and Jan Johansson, Congressional Research Service
Neil S. Buckholtz, National Institute on Aging, NIH
Carl Shapiro, U.S. Geological Survey
Heather Joseph, SPARC
Michael Carroll, Washington School of Law, American University
Paul David, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Stanford University

Panel discussion of invited speakers and Board members
and
General discussion with the audience

20F Street Conference Center
Conference Room B, 20 F Street NW, Washington, DC

Wednesday, December 1, 2010, 2:00-4:15 p.m.

The symposium is free and open to the public, but advance registration is requested because of space limitations.

RSVP to Cheryl Levey at clevey@nas.edu.
For additional information about the program, please visit
http://www.nationalacademies.org/brdi
or contact Paul Uhlir, the Board Director, at puhlir@nas.edu or 202-334-1531.

The Symposium will be webcast–see the Board website for details on December 1.

There’s an interesting free upcoming event being hosted by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University on November 30 titled “Big Data: Public Policy and the Exploding Digital Corpus”, which offers a great set of speakers exploring some important and neglected issues at the interfaces between the management of the historical record, the data deluge, and a range of public policy challenges.

Full information on the meeting is here:

http://citp.princeton.edu/events/big-data/

Clifford Lynch
Director, Coalition for Networked Information