Google has established a “collaborative research program to explore the digital humanities using the Google Books corpus.” Evidently they sent out a notice to a select group of scholars, offering grants of up to $50,000 for one year with the possibility of a renewal for a second year. The disciplines selected were literature, linguistics, history, classics, philosophy, sociology, archeology and anthropology.
They are looking for such things as: building software for tracking changes in language over time; creating utilities to discover books and passages of interest to a particular discipline; developing systems for crowd-sourced corrections to book data and metadata; the testing of a literary or historical hypothesis through innovative analysis of a book.
More information at Resource Shelf.
