The opportunity aims to support a diverse range of projects that advance digital scholarship in line with the following themes:
i) Organising, creating, and interrogating all collection types
In what ways can digital collections become richer and more user-friendly through existing methods such as optical character recognition, text extraction and parsing, linked open data, and network analysis?
How can artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning be leveraged to help organise, search, and understand digital collections?
What sorts of new and emerging methods will enable breakthroughs in working with digital collections?
How can digital technologies unlock new data, uncover hidden or under-researched histories, and facilitate discovery research?
ii) Evolving institutions to face the twenty-first century
What innovative training programs can be developed to address leadership and digital skills gaps in cultural institutions and how can these programs build capacity for smaller institutions?
What challenges do AI and machine learning methods present in terms of privacy, ethics, research integrity, copyright, reproducibility, and bias?
How can digital innovation be harnessed to inform and advance the process of decolonisation across the sector, such as in collections, acquisitions, storytelling, programming, staffing, visitor participation, and physical spaces?
How can digital tools help to improve visitor-facing experiences, enhance accessibility and inclusion, and better interpret visitor needs and interests?
iii) Fostering digitally-enabled equitable participation
In what ways can digital scholarship and tools enhance access and create more equitable and inclusive approaches to community engagement, including for people of colour and others who have been historically underserved, marginalised, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality?
How can existing methods such as crowd-sourcing and co-creation be used to broaden participation or increase engagement across cultures or borders?
How can digital technology help to interrogate and address issues relating to representation across cultural institution staff and volunteers, for example in terms of diversity and precarity in the sector?
This opportunity can support activities, such as:
- developing new or improved research methods, tools, or infrastructure
- linking dispersed collections or resources
- researching and developing digital methods, standards, and workflows for preserving and making accessible humanities collections
- large-scale collaborative humanities-oriented research resulting in print or digital publications
- training to provide scholars, cultural institution professionals, and/or advanced graduate students deeper knowledge of new and emerging digital scholarship methods for cultural institutions
- developing innovative approaches to outreach and engagement; for example, engaging smaller or less well-resourced cultural institutions in digital methods or the use of digital tools to widen audiences and improve accessibility across communities and user groups.
If you are interested in a smaller project you can apply for up to £60,000 in level two.
You should choose the funding level appropriate to the scope and maturity of your proposed project.
Projects must begin by 1 February 2022.
