Directory of Projects (past)

  • Automation Anxiety


    PI: Ben Roberts (SHL)
    Co-I: Patrick Crogan (University of West England)

    This AHRC network explores innovative methods by which the humanities might address contemporary cultural anxiety about new forms of automation, which we are calling automation anxiety. The focus of this network is to address, as a topic in its own right, the cultural and social anxiety generated by these new forms of computational automation. What new research methods can the humanities use to to map and understand automation anxiety around opaque computational decision making? What digital tools can be brought to bear on the diverse types of online public culture in which this anxiety is expressed?

    Funded by Art & Humanities Research Council

    link to project

  • Designing Interfaces for Creativity

    PI: Chris Kiefer

    The Designing Interfaces for Creativity symposium took place in November 2016, bring together artists, designers, scientists, historians and hackers to discuss the design on new interfaces for creativity.The two-day event brought fifty people together for concerts, a day of practical workshops and a day of keynotes and panel discussions.

    Funded by a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award

  • 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

    further information

  • Digital Culture and the Limits of Computation


    PI: Beatrice Fazi

    As the speed and scale of computing expand, and as software becomes more ubiquitous in everyday life, the following question comes to the fore: what, today, can be said to challenge, or even resist, the calculations of computation? This research engages with that question by bringing the notion of ‘incomputability’, as defined by mathematics and computer science, into the cultural theory of digital media. Computing is founded upon the logical discovery that certain functions will never be calculated. In 1936, Alan Turing showed that there are limits to computation, because there are problems that cannot be resolved via algorithmic means. In digital media theory, questions about the limits of computation have become equally important, and are often expressed via renewed critiques of instrumental rationality. These critiques are drawn and developed from established philosophical traditions within the humanities (e.g. phenomenology, critical theory, poststructuralism), which see computation as limited because life, experience and culture can never be fully encompassed by calculation. The two debates, in science and the humanities, are different, yet they are both predicated upon the same striving to understand processes of mechanisation. This project brings the two perspectives into dialogue with one another in order to explore some of the ways in which the limits of computation can be theorised in digital media studies.

    Funded by: British Academy / Leverhulme Small Research Grant

  • Disrupting Daesh: measuring takedown of online terrorist material and its impacts

    PI: Suraj Lakhani

    This article contributes to public and policy debates on the value of social media disruption activity with respect to terrorist material. In particular, it explores aggressive account and content takedown, with the aim of accurately measuring this activity and its impacts. The major emphasis of the analysis is the so-called Islamic State (IS) and disruption of their online activity, but a catchall “Other Jihadi” category is also utilized for comparison purposes. Our findings challenge the notion that Twitter remains a conducive space for pro-IS accounts and communities to flourish. However, not all jihadists on Twitter are subject to the same high levels of disruption as IS, and we show that there is differential disruption taking place. IS’s and other jihadists’ online activity was never solely restricted to Twitter; it is just one node in a wider jihadist social media ecology. This is described and some preliminary analysis of disruption trends in this area supplied too.

    Funded by: Home Office

     

  • 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

    link to project

  • Critical Heritage

    Reimagining the past to reimagine the future

    How can new ways of navigating the past generate fresh images of the future, and vice-versa? How can cultural heritage reckon with the overwhelming realities of colonialism and neocolonialism? How can re-ordering and re-analysing archives, and re-framing how they are encountered and interpreted, unlock the secrets, powers, and affordances hidden under our noses all along? How might different heritage and archiving practices challenge accepted conventions around what deserves to be preserved, and around whose expertise and experience should count in curation? How do archives relate to activism, and what kind of agencies might the archive exercise in our present moment?

    These are just a few of the questions we're exploring at the Sussex Humanities Lab, collaborating with a wide range of external partners, and applying cutting-edge digital techniques within history, heritage, and archive studies.

    Our BBC Connected Histories project is a ground-breaking collaboration with the BBC, 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. The project team is David HendyTim HitchcockMargaretta JollyAlban WebbAnna-Maria Sichani, and Denice Penrose100 Voices that made the BBC, part of the Connected Histories project, tells the story of the BBC and its wider world through richly curated individual testimonies.

    Community archives, and in particular those of LGBTQ+  communities, is a major focus of Sharon Webb’s research. For community archivists, institutional partnerships can unlock badly needed funding and resources, while also creating complex risks around autonomy, ownership, and sustainability. As communities take charge of their own heritage, and create their own digital archives, Sharon’s research explores the viability, sustainability, politics, epistemology, and ethics of community archiving. In addition, Reanimating Data, a project also including SHL's Rachel Thomson and colleagues from Manchester, Edinburgh, and the community archive Feminist Webs, explores ways of archiving, sharing, and reanimating data associated with the Women, Risk & AIDS project conducted in Manchester in the late 1980s.

    Queer Codebreakers, a collaboration between Sharon and Elle Castle, uses interactive installation art as an innovative way of experiencing and engaging with community archives. It is based on the Queer in Brighton oral history collection, a set of over seventy interviews gathering individual and collective queer histories, drawing on lived experience to challenge the frameworks and the gaps of official histories. The Queer Codebreakers project explores how history can be playful, and how that playfulness can make it more and differently accessible to the public. At the same time, it probes complex questions about how histories and publics are constructed in the first place, and the role of risk, fragility, and obsolescence in the making and re-making of history. Queer Codebreakers 2.0 is now exhibiting as part of the Queer the Pier exhibition in the Brighton Museum & Art Gallery.

     

    Louise Falcini and Tim Hitchcock’s work on the Poor Law, in collaboration with researchers at Keele and members of the public, is pioneering new methodologies for data collection and analysis, to enrich the archival catalogues of partner institutions, and to generate original biographies of individuals whose lives are currently underrepresented in the historical record.

    JoAnn McGregor and James Baker’s Making African Connections project explores the decolonial possibilities of collections of artefacts from Botswana, Namibia, Angola, and Sudan currently held in UK museums, seeking to further the theory and practice of decoloniality in British institutions.

    Jacob Norris and Leila Sansour's Planet Bethlehem Archive project is collecting digital versions of materials scattered around the Palestinian diaspora among families whose roots go back to the town of Bethlehem. The project aims to recast Palestinian heritage as the product of an ongoing series of global movements and exchange.

    James Baker and Andrew Salway, together with colleagues at the British Library and Lewis Walpole Library, are opening up new directions for computational, critical, and curatorial analysis of collection catalogues through their Legacies of Curatorial Voice project. What is curatorial 'voice'? How might it differ from (or resemble) the voice of the artist, the writer, the critic, the researcher? How can we tune into the quirks, cadences and curiosities of curatorial voice when it is distributed across thousands of objects? Building methods and tools to investigate the 1.1 million word British Museum 'Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires,' this project seeks empirical and interpretative insight into 'voice' across a large curatorial catalogue, while also exploring questions about the enduring legacies of curatorial labour.

    We engage all these themes not only through our research projects, but also through our bold and exploratory programming. Alex Peverett and Andrew Duff's 'Game Studies and Media Archaeology' day, for example, revived game consoles spanning over four decades, creating a forum for lively play and debate around gaming cultures and their wider penumbra. Events such as 'Mapping, Maps, and Digital Enquiry,' organised by Alex Butterworth and Margaretta Jolly, and 'Feminist Maps and Mapping Feminism: Lessons from The Women’s Atlas,' jointly held with the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research, have sought to examine an enlarged sense of mapping and cartography in the context of history, narrative, and data perceptualisation. For more upcoming events, please check out 'What's On.'

    Across many of these projects, there emerges a concern with the kinds of stories told by individuals, by communities, by institutitions, and by the kinds of stories told by data. There is nothing new about the need for arts and humanities research to create spaces for the invisible and the silenced to emerge. But new technologies and infrastructures are creating new possibilities for who and what can speak, in what ways, and who and what can listen, and perhaps do more than listen. We are also developing new understandings of how such encounters can be distributed in time and space. At the same time, 'data' can exist in an uneasy tension with personal testimony and lived experience. Even as we explore new digital methodologies to help us to reveal untold stories, we need also to reflect critically on what might be concealed or sidelined by such methodologies.

  • The Computed World

    Understanding the social life of digital technology

    We live in an algorithmic age. As data networks deepen their entanglement with everyday life, new affordances arise for the quantification, analysis, administration, and platformisation of our experience and conduct. Where do we draw lines between ourselves and the many automated processes we live in and through? How far should we delegate our agency to cutesy automated assistants, to social media platforms stitched from algorithms, or to the dark brilliance of bespoke and opaque Artificial Intelligences, whose intricate machine reasoning so often eludes human understanding? With the growing interest in explainable AI, new questions arise around the nature and purpose of "explanations": explainable to whom, for what purposes, and in what ways? And when technological processes are not adequately explainable — when vast impersonal systems, fed on our data, claim to know our hearts better than we do ourselves — on what grounds can we challenge them? As the shared agency of humans and machines continues to evolve, we at SHL are working to ensure that the insights of the arts and humanities are heard at the heart of these debates.

    Collaborative intelligence

    Close links between the Sussex Humanities Lab and the Text Analysis Group (TAG Lab) allow us to undertake applied AI research, using automated methods to interpret corpori at scale including text documents, social media, and other communications. Researchers including Alex ButterworthDavid BanksFrancisco BernardoAlice EldridgeChris KieferJack PayAndrew SalwayDavid Weir, and Simon Wibberley actively collaborate across computer science and the arts and humanities, including the development of intuitive interfaces to allow the expertise of social scientists and humanists to inform machine learning processes.

    The social life of AI

    AI is political, social, and cultural. From self-driving cars, through to high-frequency trading, military drones, and organised swarms of shelf-stacking robots, this is a moment marked by rising automation and fresh concern for its likely social implications. Automation has become, not for the first time in history, a locus of fierce contestation about possible and desireable futures. Automation culture  — the ways we think, talk, and feel about automation — is merged with dreams of abundance and convenience, of liberation from hierarchy and toil. It is just as entangled with nightmares of technological unemployment, or endlessly multiplying obligations for grinding busywork side-by-side with our robot pals.

    So how might the arts and humanities address contemporary cultural hopes and fears about new forms of automation? At the Sussex Humanities Lab, researchers such as Ben Roberts and Beatrice Fazi are furthering our understanding of the social life of AI. Placing AI in its historical contexts, including long traditions of philosophy, art and literature about AI, is vital to such research. But so too is being aware of what might be new and unprecedented, as Beatrice's research on the automation of thought demonstrates. With the rise of the social media and other digital platforms, and the 'datalogical turn' of recent decades, humans have become legible to and manipulable by machinic systems in unprecedented ways. And there is a complicated flip side to this: not only the advent of new tactics and habits to evade or undermine automated surveillance and persuasion, but also the possibility that these emerging forms of machinic agency might become sensitive and hospitable to 'the human' in wholly new ways.

    Technoacoustics

    The Sussex Humanities Lab also shares many members and research interests with the Experimental Musical Technologies Lab at Sussex (Emute). How might AI and associated technology and science transform the meaning of 'listening'? How might emerging assemblages of humans and non-humans be capable of synthesising forms of knowledge traditionally seen as incommensurable —including data collected by sensor networks and the embodied and storied knowledge of communities? How do we develop technology that reveals and mimics the rhythms, patterns and dynamics of biological and ecological systems? Alice Eldridge's research explores machine listening in applied ecoacoustic research, including biodiversity monitoring and wilderness mapping from Ecuadorian cloud forests, to Indonesians reefs, to mountain wilderness spaces. Alice's collaborations with Chris Kiefer further examine the intersection of experimental music, ecoacoustics, and artificial life, including evolutionary agent-based models of acoustic niche formation. Chris's other research explores machine learning and signal processing for audio and interaction, with a particular emphasis on nonlinear and dynamical systems, and the agency of musical instruments. Building on a long and rich tradition of live coding at Sussex, Francisco Bernardo's research explores the intersection of live coding and interactive machine learning.

    The (in)computable

    The growing interest in the computational within human life also shines a light on the longer history of the computational, including pre-digital incarnations of the algorithm and the automaton. What is ‘computation,’ and in what machines, bodies, entities, substrates can computation occur? Computation has a mixed and contradictory reputation: it’s associated both with reliability and predictability, and also with creation, indeterminacy, emergence, with wilderness and wildness. Beatrice Fazi's groundbreaking research brings together both arts and humanities and STEM understandings of the (in)computable, to elaborate exhilarating new philosophical perspectives on aesthetics, on necessity and contingency, on abstraction and representation, on the automation of thought, and on algorithmic opacity and transparency.

  • Creative Practice

    Exploring future digital arts practices

    Knowledge takes myriad forms, not all of which is confineable between book covers. SHL's core team of researchers includes musicians, artists, writers, media artists, designers, technologists and programmers, and our wide network of creative collaborators spans many more arts and creative disciplines.

    As machines take on more and more tasks once seen as impossible to automate, creativity is often invoked as a kind of haven of ‘the human’: as the lofty activity to which no robots will ever rise. We take a different approach. Our practice research begins from the standpoint that expression, vision, imagination and play have always been implicated with technology, not securely separate from it. 

    Practice research in SHL develops upon a long history of interrogating, celebrating and nurturing the rich interactions between art and technology through creative, technical and formal experimentation. Real-time sensors and algorithmic processes, motion capture and live coding, artificial intelligence and artificial life techniques are investigated through creative digital renderings of motion and gesture in sonic and visual arts, extending to haptics and multimodal forms.

    Musical assemblages

    The Sussex Humanities Lab supports and shares several members with Emute, Sussex's research centre and artist collective for experimental music, music informatics, and performance technology. Music and technology have long been in an intimate relationship (as research by SHL's Thor Magnusson has explored), a history traceable from classical civilisation and earlier to the present day and emerging futurity. Music can be a medium for scientific and technological experimentation, for responding to or anticipating innovations and new cultural forms. At the same time, music is deeply expressive and connective, a space where technology and humanity coevolve.

    Music can also be a space where technology encounters its more-than-humanity: music can also be machinic, animal, microbial, climactic, ecological. For example, Alice Eldridge’s expertise as both musician and scientist underpins her ecoacoustic research into human and non-human sonic systems. In addition to cultivating machines capable of listening to biodiversity on land and sea, Alice's research includes exploring the perceptualisation of big data for human interpretation, develops networked notations to support ensemble music making, and designing and building new feedback musical instruments.

    A work such as 'TIDES,' by Visiting Fellow Ian Winters, uses site-specific multi-modal installation and performance to explore rising sea levels and the erasure of coastal lands, drawing on citizen science and a range of range of scientific data about the human and more-than-human systems of the San Francisco tidelands area, including NOAA oceanographic data, GIS models of tidal levels and sea level rise, species occurrences, as well as human factors.

    Musically Intelligent Machines Interacting Creatively (MIMIC), a groundbreaking collaboration with Durham University and Goldsmiths College, explores how machine learning can support and transform creativity. Researcher-practitioners including Chris KieferFrancisco Bernardo, and Thor Magnusson are contributing to the rich tradition of live coding at Sussex, experimenting with the intersection of machine learning and dynamical systems, the creation of user-friendly interfaces, and the nesting of languages within languages within live code ecosystem Sema.  

    Generative aesthetics and sound/media installations

    The word 'installation' might imply a kind of fixity: something slot firmly into place, something that won't budge. SHL's creative practice tells another story. Not only artworks, but also artists, audiences, and ways of being with art, can be the effects of productive intervention. Artists are continually looking for new ways to make their work fruitfully responsive to accident and contingency. Alex Peverett’s multi-disciplinary generative media art, for example, spans electronic and computer music, audio-video art, multi-media installations, computer graphics, excavating alternative futurities. Alex's practice research also often puts creative practice in a media-archaeological frame, exploring the complex dynamics of layered technological and aesthetic obsolescence and revitalisation. Alex and Andrew Duff, both individually and collaboratively, creatively and critically explore the possibilities of games consoles and other digital and analogue visualisation systems.

    Cécile Chevalier's practice research is likewise hybrid, playful, collaborative, and generative, exploring how media installations as ludic environments can be sites for fresh encounters in relation to digital cultural transformation, embodiment, performativity, and self and other. Cécile's interdisciplinary media research integrates installation, sound art, performance, instrument design, and systems art, to investigate the human body and technological forms of augmentation, and enquire into the profound transformation of individual and collective expression through computational technology. Works such as '200.104.200.2' (Chevalier / Duff) and 'Listening Mirrors' (Chevalier / Kiefer) involve sound installations as evolving instruments, capable of blurring and warping the boundaries between expressing and listening, between musicians and non-musicians, and even between the real and the imagined. 

    How might aesthetic co-production with machines shine a light on 21st century ways of being human? 'Robotic' is, quite unjustly, often used a synonym for predictability or emotional flatness. Evelyn Ficarra's creative practice takes in music, theatre, installation, multi-modal media practice, dance, film, and other modalities, traditions, and possibilities, and has recently begun to investigate the rich and complex affective implications of robotics in performance. The Robot Opera Research Project explores issues of performance, embodiment and voice, as well as theatrical and musical interaction between humans and robots. Other work by Evelyn explores the agency and expressivity of 'inanimate' objects, tracing 'voice' (or something like it) in the lives and in the deaths of everyday objects.

    Data, storytelling, and sense-making

    Other threads of practice research explore how data relates to history and cultural heritage, and the novel kinds of performance / performativity emerging via locative and distributed media, and aggregated big data. For example, Alex Butterworth's creative practice includes distributed multimodal narrative, pioneering the use of locative media, data visualisation, and immersive experiences for the interpretation of complex cultural and historical subjects. This research explores how audience attention can be focalised through emerging narrative technologies. How can an audience be invited into processes of meaning-making, in ways that tell complex stories, while at the same time supplying meaningful freedoms, and accommodating the rich and unpredictable narrative resources the audience brings with them? 

    Queer Codebreakers, a collaboration between Sharon Webb and Elle Castle, also explores innovative ways of experiencing and interacting with history. Queer Codebreakers uses interactive installation art to uncover the playfulness of history, drawing on the oral history collection of the Queer in Brighton archive.

    The relationships of narrative, history, and data are also explored in Jo Lindsay Walton's critical design fiction and digital participatory artworks, which examine the social life of new and emerging technologies. Jo's collaboration with risks scientists and psychologists explore the aesthetic, ludic, and narrative dimensions of visualising and perceptualising uncertainty data to support better decision-making. 

    Ultimately, SHL's practice research also seeks to reckon with the conflicted status of ‘creativity’ itself. The celebration of creativity, so pervasive in academic research and far beyond, remains entangled with the very forces which frequently constrain and regulate creators, creations and creatures, conferring an aura of newness to projects which in reality only reinforce entrenched distributions and dynamics of power.

  • Humanising Algorithmic Listening


    PI: Alice Eldridge (SHL)
    Co-I: Paul Stapleton (Queen’s University Belfast)

    Humanising Algorithmic Listening is an AHRC funded network which brings together experts with an interest in the applications and implications of machine listening from diverse disciplines including oral history, sensory ethnography, archive services, computer science, philosophy and music technology. The principle aim is to develop a critical and methodological agenda for the design, development and application of computational methods for audio analysis - listening algorithms - in the future.

    Funded by AHRC

    link to project

  • Identity, Representation and Preservation in Community Digital Archives and Collections

    PI: Sharon Webb (SHL)

    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).

    link to project

  • 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)

    link to project

  • Merchants & Miracles: global circulations and the making of modern Bethlehem


    PI: Jacob Norris (SHL)
    Archivist: Freja Howat-Maxted
    Partner: Leila Sansour, Open Bethlehem

    A two-year AHRC-funded project that uncovers the global movements of migrants from Bethlehem in the 19th and early 20th centuries

    link to project

  • Political Technology

    Interpreting and transforming politics, in and through technology

    The arts and humanities have a special role to play in studying the political dimension of technology. At the Sussex Humanities Lab, we place inclusion, diversity, and critical awareness at the heart of all our research and activities. This includes techno-feminist research and activism: for example, the FACT///. network (Feminist Approaches to Computational Technology), co-founded by Cécile ChevalierIoann Maria Stacewicz, and Sharon Webb, seeks to promote dialogue and collaboration, and to support diverse voices in transdisciplinary computational thinking and environments. Research by Kat Braybrooke and by Annika Richterich explores the politics of collective and collaborative tech, including crafter, maker, and hacker spaces and communities; Annika's project 'Hacking Your Way to IT Literacy: What digital societies can (and need to) learn from digital learning in hackerspaces' uses digital ethnography and other methods to explore how informal learning takes place in hacker- and makerspaces. Commencing in late 2019, this research has engaged in particular with how hacker- and makerspaces have learned from and responded to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

    SHL is interested in interdisciplinary study of, and intervention in, emerging futures. Another strand of our practice research involves performing, prodding, and prefiguring the future. Jo Lindsay Walton’s critical design fiction explores markets and commodities, and their alternatives, at the limits of the neoliberal imaginary and beyond. Natalia Cecire's Mycological Turn project, a collaboration with Sam Solomon, explores the increasingly prominent place that fungi are occupying in our imagined futures, investigating SF, start-ups, poetry, policy, and more. Research by Caroline BassettEd Steinmueller, and Georgina Voss reveals a complex relationship between speculative fiction and technological innovation, with an exacting nuance sure to dismay those eager to hype the horizon-scanning significance of storytelling, without critically considering where and how such power actually manifests. Another key theme of such research is digital childhoods, involving documenting and analysing contemporary childhoods and exploring the interplay between dynamic processes of technical and bio-social maturation. How do new technologies give rise to new temporalities, and how might these be changing the meaning of childhood and of growing up?

    Environmental issues, and climate change in particular, are set to be a key driver of the politics of the future. Not only does climate change itself promise to transform society, but the measures we adopt to become more sustainable and resilient will also have complex ripple effects. Environment, technology, economics, society, culture, ethics, politics: these are intimately bound together, and whatever field we are working in, we must not allow sustainability and resilience to be treated as politically neutral. The Sussex Humanities Lab Environmental Strategy (2020) commits to keeping considerations of justice squarely in view as the UK and the wider world rise to meet environmental challenges.

    Our ambition is that environmental sustainability and resilience are never merely parameters that we operate within, but rather form a set of live questions running throughout our research in the digital humanities and beyond. For example, Alice Eldridge’s exploration of innovative, multi-sensory participatory mapping methodologies seeks to integrate ecological, geophysical, cartographic, anthropological, and phenomenological data, to comprehensively capture, in situ, community knowledge of towards dynamic environments, and to integrate these with ecological and geophysical data. Traditionally, research methods that attempt to capture the diversity of complex knowledge about wilderness areas have relied upon standard methodological tools from human and physical geography (e.g. GIS, PPGIS, etc.). These new methodologies will build bridges across forms of knowledge traditionally assumed incommensurable, contributing to the co-production of sustainable strategies for the future management of wild spaces and species.

  • Reassembling the University: The Idea of a University in a Digital Age Selfie Stick Project


    PI: David Berry (SHL)

    A project examining how the university has become a highly contested space through the creation of networks of relations between devices, bodies, sites, and institutions.

  • Visualising Uncertainty


    Led by Jo Lindsay Walton (SHL) and Polina Levontin (Imperial), in collaboration with the Analysis under Uncertainty for Decision-Makers Network (AU4DM), the Alan Turing Institute, the designer Jana Kleineberg, and researchers from Imperial and Warwick, this project explores the use of visualisation and other perceptualisation methods to incorporate uncertainty information into decision-making. The project has involved workshop days with AU4DM, The Conduit, and Dstl, and the open publication of Visualising Uncertainty: A short introduction (2020).

    link to publication

Contact

Sussex Humanities Lab, SILVERSTONE SB211, Arts Road, Falmer, East Sussex, BN1 9RG

email: shl@sussex.ac.uk