what we do Based at CeRch, King’s College London Funded by JISC
ICT Guides: funded by JISC MN: Funded by AHRC 2005-08
This is what a-h.net looks like now – the two services have been merged, and content added to become a comprehensive knowledge base of the field.
With JISC funding, the priorities were around embedding expertise and therefore protecting investment in ICT in arts and humanities
Projects: greater visibility of publicly funded research with digital output Methods: Advanced ICT methods include: text analysis and mining; image analysis; moving image capture and analysis; and quantitative and qualitative data analysis. They can be found at a key point of intersection between disciplines, collections and researchers: data-rich disciplines (e.g. archeology, library and information science, and musicology) have refined new ICT methods, and within the data-driven sciences research methods have emerged around data and information processes. The use of advanced ICT methods can effect significant benefits in arts and humanities scholarship: they can enhance existing research methods (for example, by harnessing the processing power of grid technologies to allow large datasets to be searched quickly and efficiently, and in complex or novel ways); and they enable new research methods (for example, developing pattern matching algorithms for image analysis that can be applied to digital images of manuscripts). New approaches can also come about from creative collaboration: for example, the REACH (Researching e-Science Analysis of Census Holdings) workshop series investigated the potential application of grid computing to use of historical census datasets, by applying record linkage research methods developed by researchers in Physics working on the AstroGrid project
Computational methods demand the utmost rigour and precision in their application, and accordingly, research practitioners working in the emerging field of the digital humanities have begun to formalize new theories of the interaction between content, analytical and interpretative tools and technologies, methodological approaches, and disciplinary kinships. The discussion about methodologies of use also gives a focus to any discussion of the role, and future use of, digital tools for the arts and humanities . It creates a framework for investigation of existing activity and requirements, and for the work that is still required at a strategic (i.e., funding) level, as well as understanding how digital tools sit within research practice , by understanding and demonstrating how digital tools can best support advanced ICT Research Methods in the arts and humanities.
The discussion about methodologies of use also gives a focus to any discussion of the role, and future use of, digital tools for the arts and humanities. It creates a framework for investigation of existing activity and requirements, and for the work that is still required at a strategic (i.e., funding) level, Shows how digital tools sit within research practice, by understanding and demonstrating how digital tools can best support advanced ICT Research Methods in the arts and humanities. It used to be thought that ‘methodologies of use’ related merely to the end-use of digital materials by scholars (for example, applying text analysis to a re-existing digital corpus). However, methodologies of use are an equally crucial component of the entire digital life cycle. The use of advanced digital tools and methods by researchers impacts on decisions made at every stage of this life cycle: selection, digitization, curation, preservation, and, most importantly, sustainability over the long term. The way that digital resources end up being used may be unanticipated at the outset; or they may have value for different communities and disciplines than originally intended. Conversely, some digital resources are less “valuable” to scholarship because their creator did not factor methodologies of use into the development of the resources. This resource is an evidence base for the integration of advanced methods into various communities of practice. Showcases expertise of MN, AHeSSC, the AHDS, and the AHRC-EPSRC-JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Initiative. The work of all these projects has contributed to the development of a body of evidence that shows the value and use of ICT in the arts and humanities, Provides input into the future agenda for ICT in the arts and humanitie digital resources, while now ubiquitous (some 50 per cent of new projects funded by the AHRC have a digital output), are also expensive to develop, assessing and articulating their value, use and impact is not only timely, but also essential in this period of reduced centralized funding for such work. Important: cross-research council initiative. This reflects the fact that as the e-Science field matures, it is becoming recognized as one in which enables collaboration, and in which partnerships between different aspects of research, and indeed, between researchers from multiple disciplines, must be supported in order for the e-Infrastructure to be fully exploited. There are mutual benefits for collaboration: that the arts and humanities could benefit form scientific approaches to dealing with large amounts of data; and that the scientific and computational disciplines could benefit form a better understanding of arts and humanities approaches to complex data. research life cycle of discovery, analysis, publication and dissemination, and anticipates the additional layer of collaboration and interdisciplinary exchange Provide valuable evidence about the emerging e-Rsearch infrastructure for the arts and humanities.