A consortium of funding agencies from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom have announced the Digging Into Data Challenge, a grant competition that aims to drive progress in large-scale data analysis. Its goals are

• to promote the development and deployment of innovative research techniques in large-scale data analysis 
• to foster interdisciplinary collaboration among scholars in the
  humanities, social sciences, computer sciences, information sciences,
  and other fields, around questions of text and data analysis
• to promote international collaboration
• to work with data repositories that hold large digital collections to ensure efficient access to these materials for research

Awards are up to US$300,000.00, and letters of intent are due by March 15, 2009. More information here.