This document summarizes research opportunities and themes in digital scholarship from the AHRC Digital Transformations Theme Leader Fellow. It outlines flagship activities to exemplify the possibilities of digital technologies in arts and humanities research, including fellowships, grants, and collaboration with institutions. It provides examples of digital scholarship projects involving textual analysis, visualization of data, digital archives, and more. It notes that digital scholarship now involves a wide variety of formats beyond text and requires new approaches as it is no longer confined to single disciplines.

1. Research Opportunities and Themes in
Digital Scholarship
Professor Andrew Prescott, King’s College London,
AHRC Digital Transformations 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
Community co-creation awards (with RCUK Connected
Communities theme)
• Big data research grants
• Future opportunities to be announced over the next few
months
• Collaboration with institutions like The British Library and
the British Museum, as well as with university libraries,
archives and museums, at heart of theme’s development

4. Manuscript of Peter of Capua’s Distinctiones Theologicae, 13th cent.:
University of Wales Trinity St David, MS. 1
Distinctiones intended to help preachers locate texts more quickly; among
earliest experiments in alphabetisation

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

6. 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

8. Long-standing tradition of
quantitative analysis using
computing by scholars such as the
economic historian Roderick Floud
working in the 1960s and 1970s

12. www.janeausten.ac.uk

13. Online Chopin Variorum Edition: www.ocve.org.uk

14. Electronic Beowulf

15. 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

16. 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

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

18. 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

20. 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/

21. Visualising milllions of books: The Industrial
Revolution in the Ngram Viewer

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

25. www.connectedhistories.org

26. www.oldbaileyonline.org

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

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

32. 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/

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

34. Parametric Modeling Quantitatively Maps Single Cell Protein
Levels to Individual Qualitative Components
Component
and Behavior
for Protein 1
Component
and Behavior
for Protein 2
Component
and Behavior
for Protein 3

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

36. www.bareconductive.com

37. www.productresearch.ac.uk

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