The European Research Council (ERC) has a program called the Proof of Concept Grant (PoC). The program distributes funds to currently ERC-financed projects so that they can develop innovative ideas – ideas which have arisen out of the project’s research and which have commercial potential or otherwise may benefit society.
Innovative project within digital humanities
The new project is called ”Tool for the Analysis of Information Transfer in Manuscript Cultures” (TInTraMaC) and is connected to the project “Storyworlds in Transition: Coptic Apocrypha in Changing Contexts in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods” (APOCRYPHA). This project is financed by an ERC Consolidator Grant and lead by professor Hugo Lundhaug. He tells us that the new project is an innovation-project within digital humanities.
- TInTraMaC aims to generalize, and make widely available, central parts of our primary project’s methodology connected to the analysis of how textual content and traditions change over time through reception in a manuscript culture, says Lundhaug.
He says that the aim is to develop a free and easily accessible analysis tool for the study of information transmission through manuscripts. This tool will will be easy for all interested parties to use, and will allow them to do thorough research which combines close reading and distant reading, qualitative and quantitative analysis.
A first in Norway
Together with CoFutures Literacy, a project at the Faculty of Humanities, TInTraMaC is one of two projects at UiO to have just received PoC funds. This is not only the first time projects at UiO have successfully applied for a Proof of Concept Grant, it is also the first time anyone in Norway has done so within the humanities. The ERC announced PoC grants to 90 new projects on 24 January. The awards will facilitate commercialization of the results of ERC-financed research projects and societal innovation.
-This grant implies further recognition of the strong research environment we have in Coptic literary and manuscript studies, says Lundhaug.
Through two ERC-projects, he has established a world class academic environment which is leading the field. At the same time, the new grant entails new challenges for him and his research team.
-An innovation-project like this one is more than just a research project and requires a different way of thinking and a different focus. So this is a new challenge which we are really looking forward to getting started with, he says