Collaboration

Collaboration with Prof. Christopher (Cal) Lee

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States

PI Contribution

Participation in “The Lifespan of the Digital Text” (Sept. 2018) workshop. U. of Oxford, Weston Library, Centre for Digital Scholarship. _Obtained funding from Loughborough U. Institute of Advanced Studies Open Programme (2018-19). £2,200. To invite Cal Lee to deliver a programme of Digital Humanities activities.

Collaborator Contribution

Cal Lee delivered a programme of Digital Humanities activities at Loughborough University in May 2019.

Impact

Two main activities were organised in May 2019 at Loughborough University:

A masterclass during which Professor Lee introduced his research, engaged in a discussion with postgraduate students and provided feedback on their project. The event was widely advertised within the university to attract PG students well beyond Information Management. This was a rare opportunity to meet an expert who has made paradigm-changing contributions to the field of archives and digital records management.
A public lecture followed the Masterclass. It was accessible to a general audience interested in key issues related to the digital revolution. The transition from print to digital has created huge challenges, and Professor Lee offered big ideas to help us think about the digital and its impact on archives and cultural memory. A networking event following the public lecture also allowed us to discuss potential collaborations with Lee.

There were obvious synergies between Lee’s work on digital curation and the work of colleagues in the School of AED (Arts, English and Drama), Business and Economics, Social Sciences and Computer Science.

Start Year

2018

Collaboration with Prof. Ray Siemens

University of Victoria, Canada

PI Contribution

Awarded Leverhulme Visiting Professorship (2018). c. £37K. To invite Ray Siemens to deliver a 3-month programme of activities at Loughborough U in Autumn 2019.

Collaborator Contribution

The general aim of Ray Siemens’s visit in Autumn 2019 was for UK staff and students to benefit from his world-leading expertise in Social Knowledge Creation. For Siemens and his group, access to research data is not enough; research must be presented in ways that encourage public interaction and participation. Social Knowledge Creation traces its roots to Open Access and public-facing scholarship movements. The field has gained momentum with the production of large-scale digital data. Confronted to a world of big data, many Humanists now realise that traditional ways to produce and disseminate knowledge will change radically. Collaboration is a key feature of open social scholarship at the level of research (lab work), dissemination (open access) and public participation (crowdsourcing and other public involvement).

Impact

Professor Siemens’s visit delivered four objectives through a 3-month training programme.

Objective 1 (planning stage): designing research in ways that consider the needs and interests of both academic specialists and communities beyond academia;
Objective 2 (launch stage): exploring and developing public tools and technologies under open licenses to promote wide access, education, use, and repurposing;
Objective 3 (implementation stage): co-creating and interacting with openly-available cultural data;
Objective 4 (sustainability stage): sustaining productive dialogues between academics and nonacademics

Start Year

2018