Directory of Projects (current)
- Aural Pluralities Network
Principal Investigator (PI): Professor Alice Eldridge (University of Sussex)
Co-Investigators (Co-I): Professor John L. Drever (Goldsmiths, University of London); Dr. Aki Pasoulas (University of Kent); and Helen Frosi, Network Coordinator (Independent - SoundFjord)
Funder: AHRC CHASE
Project dates: 2023-2024
AuralPluralities is a research network led by academics and creative practitioners dedicated to addressing, and extending upon, the ‘auraldiverse turn’ in the Arts and Humanities research: theory and praxis (as referenced by: Drever (2015); Farmer (2020), Hugill (2019), Renel (2018), Thompson (2020)), problematising the onto-epistemological hierarchies associated with sound and audition. The network is a hybrid space acting as: a social hub and a professional forum; a focus for professional practice and debate, both online and in-person; an archive of past research activity; and a website with social media platform. It is structured around a theoretical framework and methodology critiquing normative and hegemonic structures within our contemporary (Western) milieu alongside its associated crises.
Website: coming soon.
- 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.
- 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
Principal Investigator (PI): Professor Tim Hitchcock (University of Sussex)
Co-Investigators (Co-I) and Research Team: Dr Ben Jackson (University of Sussex); Professor Alannah Tomkins (Keele University); Dr Louise Falcini (University of Sussex).
Funder: AHRC
Project dates: 2021-2022
In recent years the nature of historical research has changed. Most family and local historians now combine the use of online digital resources with the photography of un-digitised materials in physical archives for later analysis. This methodology has fundamentally transformed the nature of historic research. Now, a single visit to an archive might produce hundreds of images. During the same years thousands of ‘citizen historians’ have come to contribute to large-scale collaborative heritage projects, drawing together academic historians, repositories, and local and family historians to co-create new ‘participatory archives’. Yet collaborative public history projects have taken a little longer to incorporate this ‘click and collect’ methodology. Capturing the Past is designed to create the tools and workflows that will optimise archival photography to the benefit of all parties. It draws on this democratisation of history by using the affordances of smart phones and the cloud; of digital cameras and the growing significance of public history to recreate a community of sharing and scholarship.
Project website: https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/capturing-the-past/about-us/
- CEPOL - Communication Power of Politicians in a Digital Age & Consequences for Participation & Democracy
PI: Kari Steen-Johnsen, Institute of Social Research, Oslo
Partner: Klaus Johannsen, Uni Research, Bergen
Partner: Andrew Salway, SHL
Partner: Cristian Vaccari, Loughborough UniversityDigitalization challenges the traditional role of mass media as gatekeepers and distributors of political information in the public sphere. Thus new opportunities open up for politicians to set the agenda and communicate with voters. The CEPOL project will study the implications of this development for representative, deliberative and participatory democracy by studying politicians' agenda setting and framing powers vis-a-vis citizens, and citizens' use of this type of political information.
Funded by the Institute for Social Research
- Communicating Climate Risk
PI: Martine Barons (Warwick)
Co-I: Jo Walton (SHL), Polina Levontin (Imperial), Mark Workman (Imperial)
Funding provider: COP26 Universities Network
- Designing the Future of Cloud Emissions Data
Project title: Designing the Future of Cloud Emissions Data
Principal Investigator (PI): Dr Jo Walton (University of Sussex)
Co-Investigator (Co-I): Rory Brown (GreenPixie Ltd)
Team: Bernie Smith (GreenPixie Ltd)
Funder: Innovate UK
Project dates: November 2023 – May 2024This project will utilise design expertise to democratize the ownership of Cloud Emissions Data (CED). The IT sector has a considerable carbon footprint. Globally, IT’s current contribution to global heating is similar to that of all aviation, and it seems set to grow. Currently CED data is gatekept by stakeholders with significant technical knowledge. And yet less technical users such as Heads of Sustainability (HoS) need, but cannot yet access, CED for compliance, reporting, NetZero targets, and to drive change. Storing and processing data in the cloud can have extensive environmental impacts: from the electricity needed to run the data centres, to the water used to cool them, to the embodied carbon cost of constructing them in the first place. Despite all this, the cloud can feel intangible, ethereal, and very far away.
Project website: coming soon.
- Feedback Musicianship
- Feminist Approaches to Computational Tecnology
- Full Stack Feminism in Digital Humanities
- Hacking Your Way to IT Literacy
PI: Annika Richterich (SHL)
'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.
Funded by MSCA
- Landecker Digital Memory Lab: Connective Holocaust Commemoration
PI: Dr Victoria Grace Walden
Co-I: Dr Kate MarrisonSupporting a sustainable approach to digital Holocaust memory through the development of a 'living database' of digital projects; an interdisciplinary, dialogical online journal; and running a series of career development modules, innovation initiatives and international conferences.
Funded by the Alfred Landecker Foundation
- 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.
- Networking technology and the experience of ensemble music-making
PI: Ed Hughes (SHL Associate)
Co-Is: Alice Eldridge and Chris Kiefer (SHL)The initial project ran from 1 Sept 2015 to 31 March 2016 and explored whether networking technology can help more people access the benefits of ensemble music-making in schools and community settings, and was featured in the Brighton Science Festival in February 2016.
The project has recently been awarded follow-on funding from the AHRC to develop and release their dynamic, networked notation software as a series of iOS and android apps.
Funded by AHRC
- 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
- Sensing Wild Spaces
The WILDSENS projects aims to integrate ecoacoustic and participatory walking methods to create maps of wilderness spaces for use by conservation actors and agencies. We are exploring ways to integrate geophysical, acoustic and ecological data with human perceptions and attitudes to wild landscapes to support better environmental decision making in the future.
PI: Alice Eldridge (SHL)
Co Is: Dr Roger Norum (Independent researcher (anthropology) Jonathan Carruthers-Jones (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Research Fellow, ENHANCE-ITN, University of Leeds)
Conservation of wilderness areas is essential for future planetary and human well-being. Effective conservation policy planning must be evidence-based and represent the needs of human and non-human species alike, but methodologies that integrate ecological, geophysical and ethnographic appraisals are lacking. 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.). The WILDSENS project aims to develop innovative methods that will enable the creation of more inclusive, comprehensive and robust maps of dynamic wilderness spaces, ensuring that the voices of multiple actors are heard and represented in conservation efforts. Our key innovation is to develop ecoacoustic and participatory mapping methodologies to enable the integration of qualitative and quantitative data from ecological, geophysical and ethnographic appraisals.
- Sonic Writing: Technologies of Musical Expression, Notation and Encoding
PI: Thor Magnusson
The Sonic Writing research project explores work and practices using new technologies for musical expression. Through tracing the historical conditions of material and symbolic design in three interconnected strands of inscription - instruments, notation, and phonography - the project studies how established techniques are translated into new methods of musical composition and performance in digital musical media.
Funded by AHRC
- Sussex Surveillance Group
Current members of the Sussex Surveillance Group: Duncan Edwards (IDS); Gordon Finlayson (HAHP); Paul Lashmar (MFM); Chris Marsden (LPS); Erik Millstone (SPRU); Ioann Maria Stacewicz (SHL); Judith Townend (LPS); Alban Webb (SHL); Dean Wilson (LPS).
The Sussex Surveillance Group (SSG) – a cross-university network established in 2016 – runs a programme of interdisciplinary workshops and seminars that brings together academics from journalism, history, philosophy, geography, law, sociology, criminology, informatics, psychology, politics, international development and digital humanities and Mass Observation. We explore critical approaches to understanding the role and impact of surveillance techniques, their legislative oversight and systems of accountability in the countries that make up what are known as the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence alliance (United Kingdom, America, Canada, New Zealand, Australia), and identify lessons to be learnt by developing countries in the process of building surveillance capabilities. In this, we are motivated by three interrelated concerns. In what ways are surveillance practices changing public, corporate and governmental behaviour and what are the implications for democratic society? How are digital technologies and computational cultures reconceptualising the role and purpose of surveillance in the Twenty-First Century? What effective mechanisms of accountability are available to scrutinize and monitor surveillance activities?
The SSG emerged from two ‘masterclass’ seminars supported by the Sussex Humanities Lab and organised by Dr Paul Lashmar (MFM) and Dr Alban Webb (SHL) in 2016. The first seminar, featuring investigative journalist Duncan Campbell and former NSA Technical Director and whistle-blower William Binney, examined bulk data collection in the context of the UK Investigatory Powers Bill (now Act). At the second, Dr Lina Dencik (Cardiff University) reported on the impact of the Snowden intelligence leaks, three years on.
In addition: the moral implications of personal bulk data collection were explored at a seminar convened by the Sussex Centre for Social and Political Thought; Dr Paul Lashmar is Co-Investigator on the ESRC-funded Data Psst! Network; and Dr Judith Townend (LPS) leads, with Guardian Media Group, research involving an expert group of journalists, NGOs and policy-makers and lawyers, which has led to a report on surveillance and journalistic source protection that was launched in Parliament in February 2017.
- Text Analysis Group (TAG)
The TAG laboratory was co-founded by Professor David Weir and Dr Jeremy Reffin. We have a team of 14 PhD students and research fellows. See here for further details.
TAG is part of a long line of AI research at Sussex, starting in the 1960's. We conduct research in NLP, the analysis of text and language by computers, and apply these technologies to the interpretation of text documents, social media and other communications, working with business, government and others.
- 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)
- WILDSENS - Making Inclusive Wilds
PI: Roger Norum (Oulu)
Co-I: Eldridge(SHL), Carruthers-Jones (Leeds), Hassal (Leeds)
Funding provider: INTERACT