1. Transforming Research: British Library Labs and AHRC
Digital Transformations Strategic Theme
How Arts and Humanities Research is
Being Transformed through Digital
Scholarship
Professor Andrew Prescott, Theme Leader Fellow

2. 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

3. 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

4. The ‘Diamond Sutra’, 868: the world’s
earliest surviving dated printed text
British Library Or.8210/P.2

5. 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/a
ccessible/introduction.html

6. Edison Class M Phonograph, dating from c. 1893.
British Library, 54 Frow 1988.
For further information, see: http://sounds.bl.uk/Sound-recordinghistory/Equipment/029M-54XFROWX1988-0001V0

7. Penny Black Printing
Press

8. Biblical concordance in a 14th-century manuscript
from Rochester: British Library, Royal MS 4 E.V

9. 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

15. www.janeausten.ac.uk

16. 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

17. 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

18. George W. Bush Presidential Library:
200 million e-mails
4 million photographs

19. Blue=‘criminal event’
Green= ‘enemy incident’
Analysis of 11,616 SIGACT (“significant action”) reports
relating to the war in Iraq from December 2006:
jonathanstray.com

21. 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/

24. Mapping Metaphor Project: University of Glasgow
http://blogs.arts.gla.ac.uk/metaphor/

26. www.connectedhistories.org

27. www.oldbaileyonline.org

30. A Thousand Words: Advanced Visualisation in the
Humanities
Texas Advanced Computing Center
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvOuJ2RwBTA

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

33. Jekyll 2.0: A React Hub project. Collaboration between
Slingshot (Pervasive Game Developers) and Dr Anthony
Mandal, Cardiff University: http://www.reacthub.org.uk/books-and-print-sandbox/projects/2013/jekyll20/

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

35. Parametric Modeling Quantitatively Maps Single Cell Protein
Levels to Individual Qualitative Components

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

37. www.bareconductive.com

38. www.productresearch.ac.uk

39. Eduardo Kac, Lagoglyph Sound System
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=cCYn7oQlLiA