Professor Andrew Prescott, Theme Leader Fellow

Transforming Research: British Library Labs and AHRC Digital Transformations Strategic Theme

How Arts and Humanities Research is Being Transformed through Digital

Scholarship

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 – about which more later!• Community co-creation awards (with RCUK Connected

Communities theme)• Big data research grants – results to be announced

shortly• Future opportunities to be announced over the next few

months • Collaboration with institutions like The British Library at

heart of theme’s development

The ‘Diamond Sutra’, 868: the world’s earliest surviving dated printed text

British Library Or.8210/P.2

The Mercator Atlas, dating from the 1570s, the most important single collection of work by the celebrated Flemish cartographer

British Library Maps C.29.c.13

Available as a virtual book at:http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/mercator/accessible/introduction.html

Edison Class M Phonograph, dating from c. 1893.

British Library, 54 Frow 1988. For further information, see:

http://sounds.bl.uk/Sound-recording-history/Equipment/029M-54XFROWX1988-0001V0

Penny Black Printing Press

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

www.janeausten.ac.uk

What is Changing?

• No longer an easily defined set of methods• 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

Letter of Gladstone to Disraeli, 1878: British

Library, Add. MS. 44457, f. 166

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/

Mapping Metaphor Project: University of Glasgowhttp://blogs.arts.gla.ac.uk/metaphor/

www.connectedhistories.org

www.oldbaileyonline.org

A Thousand Words: Advanced Visualisation in the Humanities

Texas Advanced Computing Center

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

Michael Takeo Magruder, Data Sea: www.takeo.org

Jekyll 2.0: A React Hub project. Collaboration between Slingshot (Pervasive Game Developers) and Dr Anthony

Mandal, Cardiff University: http://www.react-hub.org.uk/books-and-print-sandbox/proj

ects/2013/jekyll-20/

Available at: http://mith.umd.edu/sharedhorizons/resources/

Data objects developed by Ian Gwilt, Sheffield Hallam University: http://www.shu.ac.uk/research/c3ri/projects/data-objects

www.bareconductive.com

www.productresearch.ac.uk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCYn7oQlLiA

Eduardo Kac, Lagoglyph Sound System