Sam and I had an excellent time at the NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant project directors’ meeting in Washington, D.C. The Office of Digital Humanities staff are lovely people — they seem really excited about the work they’re doing and eager to help digital humanities projects succeed. The meeting was a nice mix: informative sessions by NEH staff, presentations by the project directors present, Barcamp-style “birds of a feather” sessions, and one-on-one meetings with other grant program officers. We left with lots of new ideas for collaboration and potential new directions for eComma development.

ODH is also providing a useful new tool: a searchable Library of Funded Projects and Whitepapers. Since the Start-Up Grants are so young, few projects have whitepapers posted yet, but that will change in the next year.

In other news, we will soon complete the beta version of eComma. We’re also scheduling more classroom tests — including a distance learning class — and, with the help of a student from the iSchool, usability tests. And, like the rest of the digital humanities world, we’re hard at work on our application for the DML competition.