About the Fellowship

The Kluge Fellowship in Digital Studies provides an opportunity for scholars to examine the impact of the digital revolution on society, culture, and international relations using the Library's collections and resources.

History teaches that groundbreaking technological innovations can be agents of broad and profound change. Their transformative effect on society can be greater than is anticipated or originally understood. Innovations such as the printing press and aerial flight continue to affect every level of human experience. The digital revolution is another such transformation.

Application and Selection

The Library's John W. Kluge Center seeks proposals from scholars worldwide that will generate deep, empirically-grounded understanding of the consequences of the digital revolution on how people think, how society functions, and how international relations shift. Proposals may also explore and analyze emerging trends and new phenomena that may generate consequential changes in the future. All proposals must state the importance of the research to fundamental thinking about the human condition.

Scholars should include a discussion of how the resources of the Library of Congress will inform the intended research. Resources at the Library of Congress include:

• The National Digital Library with more than 30 million online documents in support of the study of the history and culture of the United States
• The World Digital Library, a collaborative digitization of national and cultural treasures from countries worldwide
• The Library of Congress web archiving program, which preserves millions of websites pertaining to significant events such as the terror attacks of 9/11 and United States Presidential elections
• The National Digital Newspaper Program of 5 million newspaper pages.
• The Records of the U.S. Copyright Office, including digital deposits
• The Law Library of Congress collection of more than 2.8 million law books and other legal resources
• The Library's general collection of 35 million volumes
• The Library's subscriptions to e-journals and electronic databases

Scholars are encouraged to think creatively about how the Library's collections may inform a study of the digital revolution's impact on how we think, how we live, and how we relate to one another.

Please note: Although the Library of Congress continues to collect and archive select tweets, the Twitter Archive is not currently available to researchers.

Read more about the application and selection process