UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

The QRator project, a collaboration between UCLDH, CASA and UCL Museums, funded by the Beacon for Public Engagement, has been chosen for inclusion in the 2011 Museum edition of the Horizon report, produced by the New Media Consortium.

The Horizon Report is an international report about leading museum technologies.  The report’s main aim is to identify and describe emerging technologies which will have a large impact over the next five years.   The 2011 edition highlights six emerging technologies or practices that are going to have an impact on the sector and breaks them down into three distinct time frames or horizons.

Here are the Technologies to watch:

• Near term Horizon (the next 12 months): Mobile Apps and Tablets.
• Mid term Horizon (2-3 years): Augmented Reality and Electronic Publishing
• Far term Horizon (4-5 years): Digital Preservation and Smart Objects.

QRator is included in the Far term Horizon under Smart Objects and is highlighted of for using QRcodes to allow users to share their own interpretations about museum collections.   It is a significant achievement for QRator to be included in the report, identifying our work as a future model for the rest of the museums sector.  We are looking forward to developing the QRator project further.

You can download the report from here

UCLDH’s Deputy Director, Melissa Terras’s work using social media and Open Access is featured today in the Times Higher. Melissa has been carrying out an experiment into the way that social media can be used to make the most of the impact of her research. In recent weeks she has been uploading her publications to UCL Discovery, our new Institutional Repository, at various different times of the day- and night- and blogging and tweeting about each one. She has found that this increases massively the number of downloads of each paper, unless she tweets at 11PM, when, for some strange reason fewer people seem to be using Discovery (they are surely tweeting at that time, as we at UCLDH do, aren’t they?). There are more details of how she did this on her blog, as well, of course, as the entries about individual publications.

We’re very excited to find that her work has attracted the interest of the THE, but it’s even more significant that it’s caught the attention of the twitter- and blogospheres. All of you people out there who are downloading her publications demonstrate that there is a real interest out there in the work that we do here at UCLDH. It’s great to have some real evidence of that, and to be able to prove that social media really are useful in furthering the impact of academic research.

UCLDH’s Dr Julianne Nyhan is a joint Author of a new Science Policy Briefing from the European Science Foundation, entitled Research Infrastructures in the Digital Humanities. This report was written by the ESF Working Group on Research Infrastructures in the Humanities under the editorial chairmanship of Professor Claudine Moulin (Trier Center for Digital Humanities, Universität Trier). It also in includes contributions from many Scholars from across Europe who are researching the areas of digital humanities and digital infrastructures.

Today, ESF has described the report as follows:

“Europe’s leading scientists have pledged to embrace and expand the role of technology in the Humanities. In a Science Policy Briefing released today by the European Science Foundation (ESF), they argue that without Research Infrastructures (RIs) such as archives, libraries, academies, museums and galleries, significant strands of Humanities research would not be possible. By drawing on a number of case studies, the report demonstrates that digital RIs offer Humanities scholars new and productive ways to explore old questions and develop new ones.” (see here)

Both the full report and a shorter document that excerpts the report’s main findings are freely available on ESF’s publication page.  We hope you find it interesting and relevant.