ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grants

The ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grants support projects that enhance equity and justice in digital scholarship, particularly focusing on marginalized communities. Funded by The Mellon Foundation, these grants foster innovative methodologies and resource sharing across disciplines. By promoting inclusivity in digital humanities, the program empowers scholars to engage with under-studied materials and develop sustainable practices, ensuring broader access to digital tools and expertise for impactful research initiatives.

Background
The ACLS Digital Justice Grant program is designed to promote and provide resources for projects at various stages of development that diversify the digital domain, advance justice and equity in digital scholarly practice, and/or contribute to public understanding of racial and social justice issues.  This program supports digital projects across the humanities and interpretative social sciences that critically engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities through the ethical use of digital tools and methods. In this way, the program seeks to address the inequities in the distribution of access to tools and support for digital work among scholars across various fields, those working with under-utilized or understudied source materials, and those in institutions with less support for digital projects.
The American Council of Learned Societies is pleased to invite applications for Digital Justice Seed Grants, which are made possible by The Mellon Foundation. Through both their content and methods, projects funded by ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grants pursue the following activities:
Critically engage with the interests and histories of people of color and other historically marginalized communities, including (but not limited to) Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities; people with disabilities; and queer, trans, and gender nonconforming people through the ethical use of digital tools and methods.Explore or experiment with new materials, methodologies, and research agendas by way of planning workshops, prototyping, and/or testing products.
Cultivate greater openness to new sources of knowledge and strategic approaches to content building and knowledge dissemination.  Engage in capacity building efforts, including but not limited to: pedagogical projects that train students in digital humanities methods as a key feature of the project’s content building practice; publicly engaged projects that develop new technological infrastructure with community partners; trans-institutional projects that connect scholars across academic and cultural heritage institutions.
This program addresses inequities in access to tools and support for digital work among scholars across various fields, those working with under-utilized or understudied source materials, and those in institutions with less support for digital projects. It promotes inclusion and sustainability by extending the opportunity to participate in the digital transformation of humanistic inquiry to a greater number of humanities scholars and projects at the beginning stages of development. Finally, ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grants offer scholars and project leaders general financial planning coaching from the Nonprofit Finance Fund. Such an opportunity provides a foundation upon which grant recipients can envision the possible long-term financial options for supporting their digital projects.

Eligibility

EligibilityProject’s principal investigator must be a scholar in the humanities and/or the interpretative social sciences.Project must be within the start-up or prototyping phase of development.Projects must be made as widely available as intellectual property constraints allow, ideally with the most liberal open-source and Creative Commons license that is appropriate for the underlying content.An institution of higher education in the United States must administer awarded grant funds.Seed grants can be used to purchase equipment and software.A portion of the funds can be used to pay for the digitization or cataloguing of analogue materials. Grant awardees can allocate a portion of their budget to contracting freelancers, consultants, or other partners outside of the university who provide technical expertise in service of forwarding the project’s goals.However, we encourage applicants to consider what, if any, technological resources are available to them at their home institutions and to supplement grant funds with those resources when possible.

Ineligibility

ACLS grants may not support projects whose sole or primary focus is the production of creative works (e.g., novels or films), textbooks, straightforward translations, or purely pedagogical projects.Institutional indirect costs will not be covered.