Professor Andrew Prescott, King’s College London

AHRC Theme Leader Fellow

JISC Digital Festival, 11 March 2014

Digital transformations: new challenges

for the arts and humanities

AHRC Digital Transformations

Theme• Exploring the transformative potential of

digital technologies in arts and humanities

research

• Developing flagship activities to exemplify the

possibilities

• Ensuring that arts and humanities research

contributes to wider agendas around such

issues as big data, the digital and creative

economy, intellectual property, identity,

privacy and security

AHRC Digital Transformations

Theme• Research fellowships and networks under highlight calls

• Research Development Awards

• Large grants

• Community co-creation awards (with RCUK Connected

Communities theme)

• Big data research grants

• Award amplification awards (recently closed)

• Possible theme highlight later this year

• Collaboration with institutions like JISC at heart of

theme’s development

Manuscript of Peter of Capua’s Distinctiones Theologicae, 13th cent.:

University of Wales Trinity St David, MS. 1

Distinctiones intended to help preachers locate texts more quickly; among

earliest experiments in alphabetisation

Biblical concordance in a 14th-century manuscript

from Rochester: British Library, Royal MS 4 E.V

The Biblical Concordance:

an innovation in

information handling

• Team working: compiled by c. 500 Dominicans under

direction of Hugh of St Cher

• Radical approach to a sacred text, providing more rapid

ways of locating and juxtaposing information

• Reflects recent intellectual developments (Langton on

numbering of bible; use of logic in canon law and

elsewhere)

• An enormous scholarly achievement in itself, but seen

as a tool

• Wide-ranging in its impact and significance, but difficult

to pin down

http://www.corpusthomisticum.org

www.janeausten.ac.uk

Electronic Beowulf: ebeowulf.uky.edu

What is Changing?

• No longer an easily defined set of methods

• Reflects Web 2.0 agenda, but increasingly look beyond

• Wide variety of formats: not just text but sound, image, moving

image, animation, visualisation, making

• Recycling: visualising, linking, mash-up

• Cannot be confined within single disciplinary practice or structures

• More experimental and ad hoc

• Stronger cross-connections with practice-led research of different

types, particularly in arts

• Requires fresh appoaches to initiating and conceiving research

• Reflects increasing availability of born-digital data; digitisation no

longer at centre of agenda

The political and literary papers

of Gladstone preserved in the

British Library comprise 762

volumes containing approx.

160,000 documents

George W. Bush Presidential Library:

200 million e-mails

4 million photographs

Analysis of 11,616 SIGACT (“significant action”) reports

relating to the war in Iraq from December 2006:

jonathanstray.com

Blue=‘criminal event’

Green= ‘enemy incident’

Visualisation of languages used in tweets in London in

Summer 2012: Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL:http://mappinglondon.co.uk/2012/londons-twitter-tongues/

A Distant Reading of Hamlet

A Thousand Words: Advanced Visualisation in the

Humanities

Texas Advanced Computing Center

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvOuJ2RwBTA

Mapping Metaphor Project: University of Glasgow

http://blogs.arts.gla.ac.uk/metaphor/

www.oldbaileyonline.org

www.connectedhistories.org

www.digitalpanopticon.org

www.fragmentedheritage.com

http://vimeo.com/70106246

transforming-musicology.org

Data objects developed by Ian Gwilt, Sheffield Hallam University:

http://www.shu.ac.uk/research/c3ri/projects/data-objects

www.tangible-memories.com

www.productresearch.ac.uk

www.bareconductive.com