As an Independent Research Organisation, we lead and produce high-quality, interdisciplinary research.
Read more about some of our current projects at the links below:
- Deep Discoveries
- Engaging Crowds: Citizen research and heritage data at scale
- Historicizing the Dot Com Bubble and Contextualizing Email Archives
- Safeguarding the nation’s digital memory
- Shell shock, syphilis and self-inflicted wounds: injury, disease and discipline in the British Army during the First World War
- Tudor Chamber Books
- The Northern Way
- In Their Own Write
- Computational Archival Science Network
- DIGIT.EN.S
Deep Discoveries
Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council under Towards a National Collection: Opening UK Heritage to the World
Timeframe: 2020-2021
In collaboration with: University of Surrey, Victoria and Albert Museum and Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh.
Overview: The project aims to create a computer vision search platform that can identify and match images across digitised collections on a national scale. The research will focus on botanically-themed content, testing how far we can stretch the recognition capabilities of the technology.
Find out more about this project
Engaging Crowds: Citizen research and heritage data at scale
Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council under Towards a National Collection: Opening UK Heritage to the World
Timeframe: 2020-2021
In collaboration with: University of Oxford, Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh and National Maritime Museum.
Overview: The project explores the current and potential practice of engaging diverse audiences with the creation, use and reuse of heritage data, developing a new indexing tool that gives volunteers the agency to choose their own pathway through a project.
Find out more about this project
Historicizing the Dot Com Bubble and Contextualizing Email Archives
Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council under the US-UK networking grants scheme
Timeframe: 2020–2021
In collaboration with: Bristol University, De Montfort University (UK), University of Maryland and the Hagley Museum and Library (US).
Overview: The project will analyse the email archive of a failed US software company from the dot.com era, allowing researchers and wider user groups to explore emails for their content, inter-relationship and broader contextual significance.
Safeguarding the nation’s digital memory
Funder: The National Lottery Heritage Fund and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSPRC) Impact Acceleration Account
Timeframe: 2019–2020
In collaboration with: The University of Warwick, Dorset History Centre, Gloucestershire Archives, Transport for London Archives, University of Brighton Design Archives, University of Leeds Brotherton Library, and the Digital Preservation Coalition.
Overview: This project proposes a collaborative approach to managing digital preservation risk, bringing established statistical risk management methods into the digital heritage sphere. Project participants will create a structured evidence base, pooling collective experience to map and explain an interconnected network of risk events, actions and impact on heritage.
Find out more about this project
Shell shock, syphilis and self-inflicted wounds: injury, disease and discipline in the British Army during the First World War
Funder: The Wellcome Trust
Timeframe: 2017–2019
Overview: To make available detailed catalogue entries to the thousands of medical sheets for First World War army personnel.
This project will see 135 of these boxes (around 50,000 items) to allow individual cases to be searched for and found. This data will then be made available through Discovery, our catalogue.
Find out more about this project
Tudor Chamber Books
Funder: The Leverhulme Trust
Timeframe: 2016–2019
In collaboration with: The University of Winchester, and The Digital Humanities Institute at the University of Sheffield.
Overview: This project will transcribe and translate the contents of the payment and receipt books of the King’s Chamber, otherwise known as the Chamber Books, between 1485 and 1521. For the first time, the text of these records will be digitally available and searchable, enabling and promoting further research into Tudor court, culture, politics and kingship.
Find out more about this project
The Northern Way
Funder: The Arts and Humanities Research Council
Timeframe: 2019–2021
In collaboration with: The University of York, with the support of the Chapter of York Minster
Overview: This project is investigating the political role of the Archbishops of York, 1304-1405. The principal aim is to make the key records of spiritual governance more digitally accessible and searchable for free. This will be achieved through the digital indexing of archbishops registers held at the Borthwick Institute for Archives, the University of York, and at regional and national archives. These registers will also be linked to new evidence taken from the many records of government that relate to ecclesiastical affairs held at The National Archives.
Find out more about this project
In Their Own Write
Funder: The Arts and Humanities Research Council
Timeframe: 2018–2021
In collaboration with: The Department of History at the University of Leicester
Overview: This project uses letters from paupers and other poor people, and associated manuscript material such as petitions, sworn statements and advocate letters to investigate the lives of the poor between 1834 and 1900.
The project aims to sample, transcribe and analyse the letters, and will lead to a variety of impactful outcomes, including the production of a number of scholarly articles and organisation of outreach events.
Find out more about this project
Computational Archival Science Network
Funder: The Arts and Humanities Research Council
Timeframe: 2018–2020
In collaboration with: King’s College London Department of Digital Humanities, the University of Maryland iSchool Digital Curation Innovation Center (US), and the Maryland State Archives (US)
Overview: This one year International Research Networking grant will explore how collections can be made available, digitally, for large scale computational research. Through a series of events held in both the US and the UK, the Network will address the application of computational methods to the contextualisation of records within archival collections, at a time when the archive is becoming an increasingly digital space.
Find out more about this project
DIGIT.EN.S
Funder: The European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme
Overview: We have partnered in an international research project on eighteenth century sociability. A core element of the project is to fund staff secondments from one partner institution to spend time at another partner institution. The exchanges will produce entries for inclusion in a digital encyclopaedia of sociability for the period 1650-1850, as well as conferences, events and collaborations with museums and archives.