The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) has received a Level-One Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This grant will support planning activities among 10 institutions and a scholarly advisory committee to continue developing the MHL (www.medicalheritage.org). The project furthers the MHL’s mission to “provide the means by which readers and scholars across a multitude of disciplines can examine the interrelated nature of medicine and society, both to inform contemporary medicine and strengthen understanding of the world in which we live.” This groundbreaking partnership in the digital humanities will highlight unique research resources in the history of medicine held by these institutions and enhance their utility for research.
“At the most basic level of full-text searching, digitization enables scholarship that simply could not be performed otherwise,” says Scott H. Podolsky, M.D., Director of the Center for the History of Medicine, Countway Library, and Assistant Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School. “Using runs of historical journals that are fully digitized, for example, it is possible to study the development of randomized controlled trials by performing full-text searches for such terms as ‘alternate patient(s)’ or ‘alternate case(s).’ The possibilities for answering novel questions are seemingly endless, and limited chiefly by the texts that have been digitized, the metadata applied to them, and the accessibility of the resources to scholars. NEH support will help erase these limitations.”
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.