UCL CENTRE FOR DIGITAL HUMANITIES

UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

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Research Projects

This page provides a list of projects being undertaken in digital humanities at UCL.  Projects are associated with us either because they include staff from the core UCLDH team or because members of the project teams identify themselves as part of the UCLDH network; attend our events or discussion group, Decoding Digital Humanities; or have received advice from, or collaborate with us on aspects of their research. 

Current Research Projects

Assyrian Empire Builders & State Archives of Assyria Online

Part of the research project 'Mechanism of communication in an ancient empire: the correspondence between the king of Assyria and his magnates in the 8th century BC', Assyrian Empire Builders & State Archives of Assyria Online with the help of the Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project brings together translations and transliterations of 1200 items of correspondence between king Sargon II (721-705 BC) and his governors and magnates.  This corpus of letters, the largest known from antiquity, gives first-hand insight into the mechanisms of communication between the top levels of authority in an ancient empire.

CELM: Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts

CELM will be a free on-line record of surviving manuscript sources for over 200 major British authors of the period 1450-1700. It will incorporate descriptions of many thousands of manuscript texts, many hitherto unrecorded, found in several hundred public and private collections world-wide. It will provide a new research tool for those interested in particular authors and works; the literary culture of the early modern period; manuscript production and dissemination; and the history of literacy and readership.

DHOER: Digital Humanities Open Educational Resources

The DHOER project is creating Open Educational Resources (OER) from a comprehensive range of introductory materials in Digital Humanities, enriched with multimedia and Web 2.0 components, made freely available to anyone. As well as supporting the Digital Humanities, the DHOER project will benefit many cognate disciplines, including the whole spectrum of the Arts and Humanities, Cultural Heritage, Information Studies, Library Studies, and Computer Science.

Digital Lives

The Digital Lives Research Project is a path finding study of personal digital collections. It focuses on personal digital archives and their relationship with research repositories. It brings together both academics and expert curators and practitioners in digital preservation, digital manuscripts, literary collections, web archiving, history of science, and oral history from the British Library.

eSAD: e-Science and Ancient Documents

(with the University of Oxford)

The eSAD project aims to use computing technologies to aid experts in reading ancient documents. The four year project, being undertaken at the University of Oxford with input from University College London will run until the end of 2011.

Humanities Information Practices

Humanities Information Practices is a RIN funded study which aims to develop a sense of the range of information behaviours in the humanities. Through case studies, observations and interviews, this study will aim to understand how humanities scholars appropriate both analogue and digital resources in their work. It will highlight issues in the current information environment which affect user information seeking behaviour in the humanities.

INKE: Implementing New Knowledge Environments 

INKE is funded by the SSHRC Major Collaborative Research Initiatives Program, and involves 35 researchers and 20 industry partners. Its aim is to design new digital environments for reading and research in the humanities, and for the general public. It seeks to document the features of previous textual forms; advance our understanding of how reading texts and using information is affected by digital, multimedia delivery; develop tools to produce accessible, flexible information architecture: and create dynamic interface prototypes for new knowledge environments. Warwick is lead researcher of User Experience, one of the four research areas.

LinkSphere

(with the University of Reading)

The aim of LinkSphere is to create a single virtual interface for searching across the repositories and collections held by the University of Reading, this will not only make the data and information more readily available, and also ensure that all the resources that need to be accessed will be easy to find and interact with. The project will also integrate a social network for researchers that will show that such a system can help researchers get to know each other, enable collaboration and ensure that it is possible to work more closely together on cross-disciplinary projects.

Livingstone Online

Livingstone Online provides access to the medical and scientific writings of the missionary, doctor and African explorer David Livingstone (1813-1873). The project provides detailed transcriptions of many of his letters and aims to make all his medical and scientific writings freely available online. It has also created a catalogue of Livingstone's letters and has published a collection of essays concerning the historical contexts of his life, works and writings.

Open Learning Environment for Early Modern Low Countries History

This project is part of the individual strand of JISC's and the Higher Education Academy's Open Educational Resources programme.  The project aims to turn a comprehensive survey course in Early Modern Low Countries history into a multimedia and Web 2.0 enriched Open Educational Resource.  A special focus of the project will be put on relations between the Low Countries and the Anglophone world.  The UKOER programme has been designed to support institutions, consortia and individuals to release open educational resources for use and repurposing worldwide, by assisting the development of appropriate processes and policies to make this process an integral part of the learning material creation workflow.   

QRator

The QRator project is exploring new models for public engagement and informal learning in museums using handheld mobile devices and new interactive digital labels. QRator is creating small printed tags (QR codes) for museum objects, linked to an online database.  These will allow the public to view curated information and, most notably, to send back their own interpretation and views via their own mobile phone or interactive digital label. Enabling the public to collaborate and discuss museum concepts and object interpretation with museum curators, and academic researchers.

Reassembling the Thera Frescoes

This is an international project involving Archaeologists and Computer Scientists from Belgium, Greece, the UK and the US, in which UCL plays a lead role. Its goal is to assist archaeologists and conservators by digitising excavated fragments of wall paintings which have been preserved in volcanic ash since the sixteenth century BCE. Computer algorithms are used to semi-automatically search the fragments for matches. By creating an interface that bridges between automated match retrieval and the intuition of an experienced user, the hope is to greatly reduce the time that is currently spent manually testing large numbers of fragments for matches.

Sitelines

Sitelines is a collaboration with Headway East London, a brain injury charity. The project is about turning Headway members’ everyday experience of the city into a coherent vision for an urban design social enterprise. We use pen-and-paper map-making as an accessible mode of representation, a grounded theory approach to understand participants' experiences and expressions, computational methods to generate ‘group intelligence’ data and visualisation to help produce the design vision.

TEI by Example

(with the Centre for Scholarly Editing and Document Studies, the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature and the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College, London)
TEI by Example is concerned with developing an online resource for teaching TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). Featuring freely available online tutorials walking individuals through the different stages in marking up a document in TEI, these online tutorials will provide examples for users of all levels. Examples will be provided of different document types, with varying degrees in the granularity of markup, to provide a useful teaching and reference aid for those involved in the marking up of texts.

The Bentham Project 

The Bentham Project is preparing a new definitive edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher, jurist, economist, political theorist and social reformer. The project has also produced an online database containing a detailed catalogue of the Bentham Papers, held in UCL Library.

Transcribe Bentham

The Transcribe Bentham initiative is a highly innovative and novel attempt to aid in the transcription of Bentham’s work. A digitisation project will provide high quality scans of the papers, whilst an online transcription tool will be developed which will allow volunteers to contribute to the transcription effort: providing a “crowdsourcing” tool which will be used to manage contributions from the wider audience interested in Bentham’s work, including school students, and amateur historians.

The E Curator project

The E-Curator project explores the use of 3D colour scanning and e-Science technologies to capture and share very large 3D colour scans and detailed datasets about museum artefacts in a secure computing environment. This project draws on UCL's expertise both in curatorship and in e-Science. It takes advantage of the presence at UCL of world class collections across a range of disciplines and of a state of the art colour scanner, the quality of which is unequalled in the UK.

Completed Research Projects

LAIRAH: Log analysis of Internet Resources in the Arts and Humanities
The LAIRAH survey investigated the use of online digital resources in the humanities to determine whether they are sustainable. No systematic studies of the use of such resources had previously been undertaken, and LAIRAH aimed to provide comprehensive, quantitative, qualitative, and robust measures for evaluation of real-time use, utilising deep log analysis techniques on automatically recorded server data. This analysis provided the basis for follow-up qualitative work. The findings will aid the selection of projects for future funding, and provide evaluatory measures for new projects developing digital online resources for the humanities

ReACH: Researching e-Science Analysis of Census Holding
e-Science allows large datasets to be searched and analysed quickly, efficiently, and in complex and novel ways. Little application has been made of the processing power of grid technologies to humanities data, due to lack of available datasets, and little understanding of or access to e-Science technologies. The ReACH workshop series investigated the potential application of grid computing to a large dataset of interest to historians, humanists, digital consumers, and the general public: historical census records.

UCIS: User Centred Interactive Search with Digital Libraries
There is an ongoing shift towards digital provision of information, including through digital libraries. However, few knowledge workers have strong information seeking skills, and existing digital libraries provide poor support for acquiring such skills.  UCIS addressed this situation by studying the information seeking activities of Humanities users (chosen as a group who typically have impoverished information seeking skills in digital environments); studying the development of expertise with information management students; and developing and testing novel interface features that support novice users and the development of expertise.

VERA: Virtual Environments for Research in Archaeology
The VERA project's aim has been to produce a virtual research environment for the archaeological community. It is based on the excavation of Roman Silchester, and uses the Integrated Archaeological Database. Research during VERA has addressed user needs in order to determine the best way of efficiently documenting archaeological excavation and its associated finds. It has also created a web portal that provides enhanced tools for the user community.