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ADHO Prizes at DH2016

The yearly ADHO conference is also the occasion for handing out a number of prizes. The triennial Roberto Busa Prize for outstanding lifetime achievements in the Digital Humanities was awarded to Helen Agüera, and her key-note address on the occasion of the reception of the prize on 15 July was well-received. The Prize recognises Helen’s work at the US National Endowment for the Humanities on grants to digital humanities projects. In three decades of service at the NEH, Helen has shepherded grants to projects which have shaped the DH landscape we know today, notably the TEI, the TLG, the Blake Archive, the Women Writers Project, the Corpus of American English, ARTFL, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, as well as scores of smaller grants, and larger programs with US and international partners beyond the NEH.

The Paul Fortier Prize for the best young scholar’s paper of the conference went to Marine Riguet & Suzanne Mpouli for their paper À la Croisée des Discours Littéraire et Scientifique : La Comparaison comme Haute Figure Dialogique.  

The winner of the triennial Antonio Zampolli Prize for a singular project or accomplishment, to be awarded at DH2017, was also announced at this year’s DH conference: in honor of what will be its 30th anniversary the 2017 Zampolli Prize had been awarded to the Textual Encoding Initiative community. While the nomination and honor goes to the entire community, accepting the award in Montréal, on behalf of the community as a whole, will be three foundational figures in the history of the TEI: Nancy Ide, who as President of the ACH convened the initial meeting that led to the creation of the TEI; Michael Sperberg-McQueen, who in 1987 became Editor-in-Chief of the TEI; and Lou Burnard, who in 1989 became European Editor of the TEI.

This year, as an experiment, the conference also included four poster-slams in which poster-presenters who wished to do so could promote their poster in a maximum of four minutes’ time. The attendees at each of these four parallel slams voted for the best presentation. The winners did not receive any prize except an honourable mention during the closing ceremony. We are happy to mention them again with equal honour on the website.

Finally, ADHO awarded 14 bursaries, to a total of 18 students and early-career scholars, to support travel to DH2016 and in recognition of the excellence of their accepted conference submissions.  Recipients of the 2016 ADHO bursaries were:

  • Jonathan Pearce Reeve

  • Rui Hu

  • Jeri Wieringa

  • Elizabeth Winfree Garbee

  • Chiara Di Pietro, Ilaria Tiezzi, Chiara Alzetta, Julia Kenny

  • Martin Grandjean

  • Marion Lamé

  • Stephanie Marie Lindeborg

  • Nephelie Chatzidiakou

  • Rommie Leigh Stalnaker

  • Nirmala Menon

  • Hannah Petrie

  • Emily Franzini, Greta Franzini

  • Vayianos Pertsas

ADHO’s various prizes, including the student bursaries, are a very important instrument for the promotion of the digital humanities. It takes a lot of time and effort to make sure the process of preparing and publishing the calls for awards and selecting the winners is done in a careful and fair way. This is done by the ADHO Awards Committee. In 2015-1016 this committee was chaired by Øyvind Eide. Hugh Craig was chair of the Busa Award Committee, Elena González-Blanco was responsible for the Fortier Prize, and Mark Algee-Hewitt chaired the Zampolli Prize Committee. The poster slam was an initiative of the Program Chair Manfred Thaller. The winner of the Fortier Prize was selected with the help of a group of anonymous referees attending the six papers that had been nominated at the start of the conference.  Many thanks are due to all.