Critical Digital Humanities and Archives
Critical Digital Humanities and Archives builds on the existing DH aims of digitising the human record and making it accessible via new digital tools or methods. This is an established strength of SHL which we are keen to build on and extend.
Work in this cluster also encompasses projects with a more critical dimension. Such projects acknowledge the role of digital humanities in addressing and intervening in societal challenges that either stem from historic bias and injustices and/or are amplified by current digital technologies. They address questions of power imbalance and power redistribution investigating the ways in which a focus on queer, feminist and anti-racists digital humanities can subvert this.
Work in this cluster also uses critique, the traditional strength of the humanities, to interrogate technology itself through software studies, technofeminism, critical theory, media archaeology and other approaches.
Two publications which reflect the ongoing development of the idea of critical digital humanities within the lab are Sichani et al., ‘How to Avoid Being a DH Lab’ (forthcoming, 2023) and Berry et al., ‘No Signal without Symbol: Decoding the Digital Humanities’.
SHL researchers working in this cluster include (alphabetical order):
Dr Alexander Butterworth, Dr Cecile Chevalier, Dr Louise Falcini, Dr Irene Fubara-Manuel, Prof Tim Hitchcock, Dr Kate Howland, Dr Ben Jackson, Prof Margaretta Jolly, Dr Justyna Robinson, Dr Ben Roberts, Suzanne Tatham, Prof Rachel Thomson, Amy Waldron, Dr Sharon Webb, Dr Alban Webb, Prof David Weir
Projects IN THIS CLUSTER INCLUDE:
- Automation Anxiety
Automation Anxiety was an AHRC research network which aimed to develop digital methods to analyse contemporary cultural anxiety about automation. - 100 Voices that made the BBC
A series of themed websites exploring the role of the BBC in the history of the nation. Previously unseen images and footage from the BBC oral history archives are accompanied by rich curation and commentary from historians and others, helping to open up these fascinating archives to the wider public. Part of the BBC Connected Histories project.
- BBC Connected Histories
David Hendy is joined by Tim Hitchcock, Margaretta Jolly, Alban Webb, and Anna-Maria Sachini
BBC Connected Histories is a ground-breaking collaboration between the BBC and the Sussex Humanities Lab, creating a new digital catalogue of hundreds of rarely seen audio and video interviews with former BBC staff – from those in the corridors of power to those at the broadcasting coal face.
Connected Histories of the BBC, a project which worked with the BBC to digitise an archive of interviews with BBC employees, enrich the data, and build a fully-searchable interface via a ‘macroscope’ approach.
- Capturing & Preserving the Copts' intangible cultural heritage in Eygypt
PI: Mariz Tadros (IDS)
Partner Organisations:
- (BLESS) Coptic Orthodox Bishopric of Social Services
- (CASC) Coptic Association for Social Care in Minya
- (CCC) Coptic Culture Centre
- (SHL) Sussex Humanities Lab at University of Sussex (James Baker)
The Coptic Culture Conservation Collective (CCCC) initiative will create a narrative and visual archive of contemporary Coptic intangible cultural heritage (ICH).
Funded by the British Council
- Capturing the Past
PI: Tim Hitchcock
Co-I: Ben Jackson
Funding provider: AHRC
start: Nov 2021 end: May 2022
- Concept Analytics
Concept Analytics aims to understand human thinking by analysing conceptual layering in texts. We develop and apply innovative tools and techniques that combine both the distant reading of texts and corpus linguistic techniques to objectively identify suitable targets for analysis and subsequently analyse them. Our ideas embrace Digital Humanities thinking in that big data exploration works best when there is dialogue between different views and layers of data.
- Curatorial Voice: legacy description of art objects & their comtemporary uses
PI: James Baker (SHL)
Co-I: Andrew Salway (SHL)Extensive and increasingly available, digitised collections of curatorial art descriptions are valuable resources for generating new knowledge about curatorial practice, the historical and cultural contexts of curation, and the content of image collections. However, digitised catalogues have not yet been recognised as a form of ‘big data’ such that new and different kinds of research questions can be asked. This project demonstrates how applying computational text analysis techniques to large collections of curatorial art descriptions, and incorporating ideas related to ‘distant reading’ and ‘macroscopes’ into interpretations of those descriptions, can establish new directions in art historical research.
Funded under the British Academy Digital Research in the Humanities
- Digital Forensics in the Historical Humanities Hanif Kureishi, The Mass observation Archive, Glyn Moody
PI: Thorsten Ries (Institute of Modern German Literature, Ghent University)
Supervisor: James Baker (SHL)The project demonstrates the innovative potential of digital forensic methodologies in the historical humanities, and sets forensic standards for future research using born digital archives.
Funded by MSCA
- FACT///.
- Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities
PIs: Dr Sharon Webb, Dr Jeneen Naji (Irish Co-PI, Maynooth University)
Co-Is:Dr Cecile Chevalier (Sussex), Dr Irene Fubara-Manuel (Sussex), Dr Katherine Nolan (TU Dublin), Dr Kylie Jarrett (MU)
Funding Provider: AHRC - Irish Research Council
Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities aims to enhance and diversify public access to and engagement with digital cultural heritage by developing and embedding intersectional feminist praxis through data and project lifecycles.
Subverting Digital Spaces event
- Identity, Representation and Preservation in Community Digital Archives and Collections
PI Sharon Webb
Identity, Representation and Preservation in Community Digital Archives is an intervention in three important areas; community archives, digital preservation and content representation.
As communities take charge of their heritage, and create their own digital archives, the long-term viability and sustainability of these increasingly important collections, is uncertain. LGBTQ+ communities, feminist networks, black communities, among other marginalised groups, use digital technology to ensure representation and to protect against future erasure from the historical record. However, these representations are at risk of loss because of the fragility of digital archives and their associated infrastructures, both the human infrastructures (i.e. volunteers) and the digital infrastructures. This project asks what are the implications of a community-driven approach to long-term sustainability of these materials, and how might we support community archives without removing their agency.
Funded by a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award (April 2018 – March 2019).
- Legacies of Catalogue Descriptions and Curatorial Voice: Opportunities for Digital Scholarship
PI: James Baker (SHL)
Co-I: Rossitza Atanassova (British Library)
Research Fellow: Andrew Salway (SHL)
Partner: Cynthia Roman (Curator Walpole Library)This 12-month project will develop a platform for a transformational impact in digital scholarship within cultural institutions by opening up new and important directions for computational, critical, and curatorial analysis of collection catalogues. Extensive digital and digitised sets of curatorial descriptions from legacy catalogues are increasingly available. We seek to realise their potential as valuable resources for cross-disciplinary research into curatorial practice, and for enhancing access to and analysis of collections at scale.
Funded under the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK)
- Making African Connections
PI: JoAnn McGregor (SHL)
Co-I: James Baker (University of Southampton)The Making African Connections project researches historic African collections held in Sussex and Kent museums with the aim of furthering both conceptual and applied debates over decolonising public institutions.
Funded by AHRC
- Mass Observation and the Digital Archive
PI: Rebecca Wright, Research Fellow in Mass Observation Studies
A project examining how digital humanities methods can transform how the Mass Observation archive is approached and utilised.
- Reanimating Data: Experiments with People, Places & Archives
This project uses archival methods to fold 1988 into 2018 - with teenage sexuality providing a focus for critical digital pedagogy and feminist time travel.
PI: Rachel Thomson (SHL)
Co-Is: I Niamh Moore (Edinburgh), Sharon Webb (SHL), Alison Ronan (Feminist Webs)
Research Fellow: Ester McGeeneyFunded by UKRI
- The Invisible Women - Developing a Feminist Approach to Film Archive Metadata and Cataloguing
PIs: Prof. Keith Mark Johnston, University of East Anglia, Dr Sarah Arnold, Maynooth University
Co-Is:Dr Sharon Webb (Sussex), Dr Lorna Richardson (UEA), Kasandra O'Connell (Irish Film Archives)
Funding provider: AHRC - Irish Research Council
- The Lysander Flights: A story told through digital cartography
Developing innovative methods to explore and curate historical data relating to objects and people in space and time. Watch this space for further information.
- The Poor Law: Small Bills and Petty Finance
PI: Alannah Tomkins (Keele)
Co-I: Tim Hitchcock (Sussex)
Research Fellow: Louise Falcini (Sussex)
Research Associate: Peter Collinge (Keele)In collaboration with volunteer researchers this project investigates the lives of those concerned with the Old Poor Law through a little used class of records – overseers’ vouchers
Funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
- Tools of Knowledge
PI: Prof Liba Taub (Cambridge University)
Co-I: Dr Alexander Butterworth (Sussex)
Co-I: Dr Rebekah Higgitt (National Museums Scotland)
Co-I: Dr Boris Jardine
Co-I: Dr Joshua NallThe project ‘Tools of Knowledge: Modelling the Creative Communities of the Scientific Instrument Trade, 1550-1914’.based in the Whipple Museum at the University of Cambridge, will begin on 1 Jan 2021.
Working with an interdisciplinary team, 'Tools of Knowledge' will apply cutting-edge methods of digital analysis to data on almost four centuries of the scientific instrument trade in Britain. The project will provide highly accessible information on the history of science, specifically as it relates to commerce, industry, teaching, and questions of local, national and international geography.
It will be grounded in the existing Scientific Instrument Makers, Observations and Notes (SIMON) dataset due to Dr Gloria Clifton and held by the National Maritime Museum, comprising more than 10,000 records on individual instrument makers and firms from Great Britain and Ireland. The project is in partnership with Royal Museums Greenwich and the Science Museum, London.
In this time when so many people everywhere are working digitally, Tools of Knowledge will provide quick information in addition to deep context on thousands of objects in museum collections all around the world.
Funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC)