Scope

The Paul Fortier Student Prize is an award of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO). It is named in honour of the late Professor Paul Fortier (1939-2005), who was a long-serving member and Committee member of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC) and of the Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (SDH/SEMI). He was the 2004 recipient of SDH/SEMI's Award for Outstanding Achievement, Computing in the Arts and Humanities.

The Fortier Student Prize is awarded to one of the ADHO Bursary winners at the annual Digital Humanities conference. It is awarded to the Bursary winner whose conference submission is judged by the Bursary Award Panel to be the most outstanding.

Terms

All Bursary winners in a given year will automatically be considered for the Fortier Prize.

The recipient will receive prize money of 500 GBP (five hundred GB pounds), or a round number of about the same value in the currency in which the prize is to be awarded. The recipient is expected to attend the Conference Dinner at which the Prize will be awarded. Note:The prize winner will in any case, as a Bursary winner, be attending the Conference Dinner as a guest of honour of ADHO.

The recipient will be invited to prepare a paper based on their conference submission for one of the ADHO publications, as agreed between the Editors. The Editor of the agreed publication will arrange for a mentor to support the Fortier Prize winner in the preparation of her/his paper, so as to offer experienced advice, to make sure the paper is of the highest possible quality, and to ensure that the process is career-enhancing for the author in terms of gaining both valuable experience and a useful addition to their CV.

Selection

The award will be made every year provided the Bursary Award Panel judge there is a Bursary winner whose conference submission is of sufficient merit. The Bursary Award Panel will base their assessment of the conference submissions on factors such as:

• research excellence;
• imaginative and/or innovative use of technology in support of scholarship;
• development or extension of research methodology;
• contribution to the digital humanities, in general or in some specific field of arts and humanities research.

Schedule

The award will be given annually. The first award is to be made at the Digital Humanities conference to be held in 2009.

Finances

ADHO is responsible for financing the award, i.e. the prize money of ca. 500 GBP. The ADHO Treasurer is responsible for ensuring that the prize money is paid to the recipient of the award.

Certificate of Award

The Chair of the ADHO Standing Committee on Awards (SCA) is responsible for ensuring that an appropriate Certificate of Award is prepared for presentation at the Conference Dinner at which the Prize is awarded.

Local Arrangements

The Local Organiser of the Digital Humanities conference at which the award is to be made will ensure that the arrangements for the Conference Dinner include the presentation of the Fortier Prize, immediately following the presentation of the Bursaries.

Alternative Fortier schemes

Note that prior to the Committee meetings in Oulu in June 2008, there has been little systematic discussion as to the specifics of the Fortier Prize. Other conceptions that have been put forward for dicussion include:

• A prize awarded in an advertised competition, in which applicants are invited to submit a piece of work of publication quality, which would be published in an ADHO publication etc, perhaps as described above. A prize of this kind could be annual or triennial.
• A triennial prize conceived to match as far as possible the status of the Busa and Zampolli awards, with the Prize awarded for an essay or other outstanding piece of work submitted by a student or young scholar, and the Prize-winner invited to give a plenary lecture at the conference at which the Prize is awarded.