The National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities awarded a nearly $25,000 Digital Start-Up grant to Fordham University Sociology and Anthropology professor Micki McGee to convene a September 2011 meeting on fostering open access interoperable data. The Compatible Data Initiative, or CompDB, was one of just 22 projects funded in the competition. CompDB aims to focus scholars working in digital network mapping projects on developing conventions that will will make their data interoperable to allow for cross-project connections.  

Scholars from the University of Nebraska, the University of Southern California, the University of California-Berkeley, Indiana University-Bloomington, Lehigh Univerisity, and the University of Virginia will meet to brainstorm on data standards. This project has been developed in collaboration with The Corporation of Yaddo, one of America’s oldest and most distinguished artists’ retreats, and the New York Public Library’s Division of Manuscripts and Archives, where Yaddo’s records are housed.