The Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing Network (SHARCNET) recently announced the recipients of the Round I competition for Digital Humanities Fellowships.

SHARCNET is awarding $74,000 in cash and technical resources to Kris Inwood of the University of Guelph ($39,000) and Marcello Guarini of the University of Windsor ($35,000).

A professor of philosophy at the University of Windsor, Dr. Guarini has trained artificial neural networks (ANNs) to classify moral situations. He will be using SHARCNET resources to scale up his simulations and to visualize the performance of the networks. After training a network, hierarchical cluster plots can be generated of an ANNs' internal representations of different situations, and this amounts to a way of visualizing the similarity and differences between the different cases a network is dealing with. By drawing on SHARCNET resources, Guarini aspires to make contributions both to age-old questions in philosophy and to the newly emerging interdisciplinary field of machine ethics.

Kris Inwood, a professor in economics and history at the University of Guelph, researches industrialization, inequality and the standard of living using simple economic ideas and new evidence to understand long-run change and important historical experiences. He is director of the Historical Data Research Unit that is creating public use samples of the 1891 Canadian census and the 1871 Scottish and Canadian censuses. SHARCNET will be used for a phase of the research linking family/personal life histories that will provide the first systematic evidence about large numbers of Canadians for a long and formative stretch of Canadian history. The longitudinal data greatly expand the potential for analysis of early-life and intergenerational influences on adult health and occupational and residential mobility during a period that was of particular importance to the emergence of modern Canada.

The Digital Humanities Fellowship is a new SHARCNET research support program. The objectives are to allow researchers from the digital humanities and arts communities to undertake projects of exceptional promise that leverage the HPC resources and infrastructure of SHARCNET, and to increase the interaction and integration between the digital humanities and arts communities and the traditional HPC disciplines in the use of SHARCNET resources and infrastructure.

Applications were evaluated through a peer review process by the SHARCNET Resource Allocation Committee, which includes representatives from across disciplines of SHARCNET partner institutions.

For more information, visit www.sharcnet.ca.