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The National Endowment for the Humanities’s new Office of Data and Evaluation was established in 2023 to support NEH in fostering a thriving humanities sector through data collection and analysis. It does so through analyzing NEH awards and their impacts; conducting and distributing studies about the humanities; and supporting research into the state, impact, and health of the humanities in the United States.
Meet the Team
The office is led by Scott B. Weingart, Director. A data scientist and historian of science, Weingart previously directed the Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship at the University of Notre Dame as well as Carnegie Mellon University’s library-based digital humanities program. He is a coauthor of The Network Turn (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and Exploring Big Historical Data: The Historian’s Macroscope (Imperial College Press, 2014), and a Fortier Prize winner in digital humanities.
The team includes:
Senior Program Officer Hannah Alpert-Abrams
Senior Program Officer George Lazopoulos (Detail from the Division of Public Programs)
Data Coordination and Enablement Officer Lutie Rodriguez
Humanities Data Scientist Benjamin Skinner
Program Analyst Jess Unger (Detail from the Office of Challenge Programs)
A new interagency partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) will support the American Academy of Arts & Sciences’s Humanities Indicators project to assess the size and health of the nonprofit humanities, arts, and cultural sectors.
Since 2019, the Academy has maintained a National Inventory of Humanities Organizations (NIHO) designed to identify nonprofit institutions—such as libraries, archives, university humanities centers, and historical societies—that support research, education, and public engagement with the humanities.
Under the new partnership, both agencies will work together to expand the dataset to incorporate 80,000 additional organizations and capture a fuller picture of the range of humanities, arts, and cultural activities happening at nonprofits across the United States. The work is supported by a cooperative agreement between NEH and the Academy, with an interagency agreement between NEH and NEA allowing for the project’s expanded vision. This broader remit will allow the Academy to extract federal data on arts and cultural organizations, in addition to humanities organizations, which had been the primary focus of the inventory. In recognition of this expansion, the project will be renamed the National Inventory of Cultural Organizations (NICO).
NEH’s Office of Data and Evaluation (ODE) is pleased to announce the publication of a new report “Assessing the State of the Humanities.” This report shares some of the preliminary feedback provided by the humanities community about a new proposed data-grounded research grant program to be offered by ODE.
Thank you to everyone who participated in our call for comments and constituent community conversations. Your input has been tremendously valuable in understanding the funding needs of the field and identifying possible program themes and supported activities.
Each summer, NEH offers positions for Pathways Interns, a federal program that provides undergraduate and graduate students an opportunity for paid work in agencies and exposure to federal service. NEH interns support work across the Endowment, learning about the needs of the humanities community and the grantmaking process. ODE welcomed two interns for the summer of 2024:
Meet Maya
Maya Dalton is an intern with the Office of Data and Evaluation. She is a PhD student at Penn State University in political science and social data analytics. Maya received her MA in political science (also from Penn State) in 2024. Her research interests include using machine learning and forecasting to examine political violence—specifically around elections—and gender politics. As an intern this summer, her individual project examines the health of the humanities in the Appalachian region.
Meet Sarah-Anne
Sarah-Anne Leverette is an intern with the Office of Data and Evaluation. Her graduate certificate program at the University of Wyoming is in geographic and information science. Sarah-Anne has taught across various settings including elementary, collegiate, and adult basic education. Her research interests include the relationship between one’s access to education and their location and carceral condition. As a summer 2024 ODE intern, her individual project seeks to understand incarcerated populations’ engagement with the humanities.
Interested in an internship with ODE? Pathways internship opportunities at NEH are typically posted in December or January.
Where does the light of the humanities shine brightest, and what grows in its path? How do we cultivate and nurture the benefits to self and society that come from a flourishing humanities sector? And where doesn’t the light reach? What barriers—internal or external—cast shadows and occlude our connections to each other, to our cultures, and to our shared histories? Who is left out?
These aren’t rhetorical questions, but empirical ones. We can find ways to better support the humanities, and through that support we can foster a more wholly connected and thriving nation.
NEH’s new Office of Data and Evaluation has two goals: to support the public’s understanding of the state and value of the humanities in the United States, and to use this knowledge to better understand and strengthen our own grantmaking.
As ODE’s founding director sending its inaugural newsletter, my promise to you is to perform this duty with care, rigor, and excitement. This work demands an exceptional team, and we’re lucky to have the best: Hannah, Ben, Lutie, Jess, George, Sarah-Anne, and Maya are working hard together to build an ODE that can support NEH in supporting the humanities for all Americans.
But the team does not end there; it extends to all of you. For us to do our job well, keeping track of and reporting on the heartbeat of the humanities, we need to know what’s going on in all corners of the humanities world. We can’t do that work alone. That’s why we’re working on mechanisms to support research about the humanities, and it’s why we’re trying to bolster and connect a community of practice around that topic.
In the coming months and years, I’ll use this little corner of our newsletter to keep you up-to-date on recent research on the state, health, and impact of the humanities, as well as on the latest ODE activities.
In the meantime, if you have work in this space, I encourage you to get in touch: drop me a line at sweingart@neh.gov with your published reports on how the humanities are going in your neck of the woods, or to tell me about events you’re running on data collection about the humanities, or whatever else relevant is on the horizon. I’d love to hear from you.
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