Writing grants

Grant applications

If you are considering writing an application for a grant or other source of funding, and if your project incorporates digitizing, computing, audio or video technologies, we may be able to help you.

We can:

  • estimate costs of equipment and labour
  • provide resources or services as a contribution in-kind or as a chargeable service
  • help you plan a project in support of a grant proposal

Typically, your project will be expected to provide a small amount of money to pay for the ongoing costs of maintaining and supporting the bookable computers space. To maximize our ability to accommodate your request fully, please provide as much advance notice as possible.

You can find details about the services we provide using the tabs below. For more information, please contact us.

Estimate costs of equipment and labour

Many granting agencies require detailed estimates of costs for technology and technology-related work. We have years of experience in preparing estimates for

  • the costs of equipment
  • data preparation and
  • coding for projects ranging in budget (from the low thousands to the low millions), and ranging in span (from ten weeks to seven years) for a number of funding agencies.

We can help you estimate the details for everything from computers and hardware peripherals, through application programs and network services, to data preparation (digitization, text-entry, markup) and coding in any number of development environments.

We would be more than happy to sit down with you, discuss what would be suitable for your project and then provide you with an appropriately detailed breakdown of costs. We will complete a project proposal document with you.

Please contact us, and we'll set up a time to meet.

HCMC labour or resources

If your grant proposal includes resources from us, you must obtain permission from us (and likely the Digital Humanities committee) before you can commit our resources in your proposal.

We will work with you to estimate the costs for labour, space, equipment or other resources to be provided by us, and then what fraction of that total is to be provided as an in-kind contribution by the university through us and what fraction is to be provided in exchange for financial compensation from the project.

If you are interested in this for your proposed project, contact us, and we will discuss your situation with you, and possibly present it for consideration by the Digital Humanities committee.

Plan your project

The scale and scope of the project plan will vary with the specific circumstances of the project. 

Each project has different requirements for additional planning documentation. You will work in collaboration with one of our developers on any planning documents needed in addition to the project proposal, whether it be a full project plan or more details on one element of the project proposal (e.g. schedule for research assistants).

We are involved in a number of projects at any time. Therefore, we have to consider not only a given specific proposal, but the overall work flow of our office. For example, to solve a problem in your project, we may need to write some code, but we may wish to ensure that such code is written in a way that it is easily reused or repurposed for another project.