Rice wins NEH grant to create digital database of Atlantic slave trade | Rice News | News and Media Relations | Rice University

“A Rice history professor’s work to create a digital database of the Atlantic slave trade has won a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

Associate professor of history Daniel Domingues has been awarded $149,995 for his project with Lancaster University to develop the Digital Archive of the Atlantic Slave Trades. He’s one of 208 winners of $24.7 million in NEH grants this year.

This open-access resource will digitize, transcribe, translate and link manuscript materials documenting the South Sea Company and its contribution to the trans-Atlantic and intra-American slave trades. The NEH award will also allow all of this vital data to be linked to SlaveVoyages, the world’s largest repository of data on the slave trade, which is housed at Rice and overseen by Domingues….”

OpenStax to vastly expand open education library with support from national foundations

“OpenStax, Rice’s educational technology initiative, is vastly expanding its library of free textbooks, working toward a goal of ensuring that no student ever has to worry about textbook costs again. This work is possible as a result of new grants totaling $12.5 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation and the Stand Together community….”

How a University Took on the Textbook Industry | EdSurge News

“This kind of free online textbook was novel in 1999 when Rice professor Richard Baraniuk started gathering them online for students and faculty around the world to use. As demand for low-cost, high-quality materials increased during the Great Recession, the nonprofit project shifted from curation to creation, publishing its first five free textbooks in 2012.

Today, OpenStax—part tech startup, part publishing house, part cognitive science research lab—has a library of three dozen titles. By the nonprofit’s estimates, more than half of U.S. colleges use at least one. And some credit it for helping kick-start a trend—now known as open educational resources, or OER—that has sent shockwaves through the traditional publishing industry….”