What this program funds
Digital Humanities Advancement Grants (DHAG) fund digital projects throughout their lifecycle — from early experimentation and prototyping, through development and refinement, to scaling and sustaining proven projects. Recent cycles have used tiered funding levels, with lower levels for exploratory work and higher levels for implementation of approaches that have already demonstrated their value. Typical projects include tools, digital archives and editions, computational methods research, and infrastructure for humanities scholarship. The program has at times partnered with other federal agencies on particular priorities — check the current notice for details.
Eligibility in plain English
- The applicant is an institution — a U.S. nonprofit, college, university, library, museum, or similar organization — not an individual. You'll work with your sponsored-programs office.
- The project needs a project director and usually a named team; team members don't need to be U.S. citizens, but the applicant organization must be U.S.-based.
- Choose your funding level honestly: higher levels generally require evidence (a prototype, user testing, prior results) that the approach works. Confirm level definitions in the current guidelines.
What you'll need to submit
- Narrative — significance for the humanities, an environmental scan of existing tools and projects, methodology, and expected outcomes.
- Work plan with phases, milestones, and staffing.
- Budget and budget justification prepared with your grants office.
- Data management and sustainability plan — what happens to the code, data, and site after the grant.
- Résumés or biographies of key personnel and letters of commitment from partners and contributors.
Tips for this mechanism
- Take the environmental scan seriously. Reviewers know the digital humanities landscape; a scan that misses the obvious comparable project sinks otherwise strong proposals. Say what exists and why yours differs.
- Lead with the humanities question, not the technology. Panels fund projects that advance humanistic research or access; a technically impressive build without a scholarly payoff scores poorly.
- Match ambition to level. Applying at a higher level with no prototype or evidence base is a common rejection pattern — a lower-level exploratory application is often the stronger play.
- Budget for sustainability work explicitly. Hosting, maintenance, and preservation commitments are evaluated, not assumed.
Related programs
- NEH Fellowships (individual research time, including digital projects)
- Institutional digital-infrastructure programs from other federal agencies and private foundations
- Library- and museum-sector grant programs for digitization and access