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Public understanding of the national past has been expanded by the creation, updating, and widespread use of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB). It is the most comprehensive biographical reference work in the English language and includes (in May 2013) biographies of 58,661 people over two millennia. The ODNB is the `national record' of those who have shaped the British past, and disseminates knowledge while also prompting and enhancing public debate. The Dictionary informs teaching and research in HEIs worldwide, and is used routinely by family and local historians, public librarians, archivists, museum and gallery curators, schools, broadcasters, and journalists. The wider cultural benefit of this fundamental research resource has been advanced by a programme of online public engagement.
Contributing to the preservation of literary materials through innovative use of technology, DMU's Centre for Technology and the Arts (CTA) — subsequently renamed the Centre for Textual Studies (CTS) — pioneered new digital techniques for analysing, editing and presenting literary-historical manuscripts of international significance. These techniques revolutionized the scholarly task of capturing data about manuscripts, permitting new kinds of analyses, editing and dissemination, now widely practised to facilitate public access and cultural enrichment. In particular, the CTA/CTS invented a manuscript description standard taken up by major libraries across the world, the International Standards Organization (ISO) via the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and by commercial publishers.
The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL) is quoted and used in both schools and colleges across the world and read by people without any direct academic connection to the subject: widening access to, interest in, and understanding of Sumerian literature. Sumerian literature is widely known as one of the oldest literatures in the world, inspiring countless studies of world literature and history of religion. The ETCSL has made the bulk of canonical Sumerian literature (c. 400 compositions) available in prose translations and the original Sumerian to both specialists and informal learners for more than a decade.
The Newton Project transforms public understanding of one of the most significant intellectual figures in history. A pioneering initiative that has set international standards for the digital humanities, it provides an open access online scholarly edition of Sir Isaac Newton's complete writings, making available previously unseen material relating to his ideas about science, mathematics and theology. Under the directorship of Rob Iliffe, the Project has reached a wide variety of benefactors, including secondary schools, broadcasters and the performing arts. Through these creative collaborations, it serves as an outstanding resource for the popularisation of scientific thought.
This project has contributed to Welsh culture by increasing appreciation of the poetry of one of the finest exponents of the bardic tradition, by using that poetry to promote understanding of the literature and history of medieval Wales, and by collaborating with other organisations to further their promotion of Wales's cultural heritage. Impact has been achieved by innovative use of digital technology and by dissemination focusing on significant sites and artefacts featured in the poetry.
The main aim of the Anglo-Norman Dictionary (AND) in impact terms is to provoke a revision of the understanding of the role of Anglo-Norman in the development of English and to demonstrate how the language (especially the vocabulary) of the incoming Normans impinged on and fed into English. The project and its freely-available online dictionary (www.anglo-norman.net) have attracted considerable attention from the educated lay public with interests in language history, genealogy, family names, aspects of language use in Britain in the Middle Ages, and social history.
Impact has been achieved by speaking to non-academic groups; contributing to audio and visual displays in museums; and by being interviewed by Radio 4; Trotter appeared as an expert in a National Geographic film on broadly related matters to do with medieval literature; and the AND has been awarded a prestigious French prize. The AHRC decided to feature the AND as a project on their website in autumn 2012, suggesting that it is perceived as beneficial to their own impact and publicity strategy.
UCREL (the University Research Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language) has been pioneering advances in corpus linguistics for over 40 years, providing users with corpora (collections of written or spoken material) and the software to exploit them. Drawing together 8 researchers from the Department of Linguistics and English Language and 1 from the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University, it has enabled the UK English Language Teaching (ELT) industry to produce innovative materials which have helped the profitability and competitiveness of that industry, and assisted other, principally commercial, users to innovate in product design and development.
The 100-million-word British National Corpus of UK English texts and speech is used regularly and extensively as a reference resource on the contemporary English language. Its users include dictionary makers, school teachers in many countries, teachers of English as a second language, the OCR school examinations board, and many individual writers on the internet as a reference source about questions of contemporary English usage. Its use has led to improved English dictionaries that more accurately reflect actual usage: for Longman, Chambers and OUP dictionaries, use of the BNC provides a unique selling point over their competitors and enhanced educational value to readers. For students and English language teachers world-wide, the BNC provides more realistic examples of the usage of words and phrases in context, and in different registers, free of charge via various online search portals, and thus improved education in English.
Worldwide impact on language learners and others has been generated by the development at Lancaster of a ground-breaking natural language processing tool (CLAWS4), and an associated unique collection of natural language data (the British National Corpus, or BNC). Some highlights selected from the primary impacts are as follows:
The pathways to impact have been primarily via consultancy and via licencing of software IP. The impact itself is largely on the language learners—i.e. users of products such as the above. There is a secondary economic impact on a UK SME which has licenced our software.
Biak (West Papua, Indonesia) is an endangered language with no previously established orthography. Dalrymple and Mofu's ESRC-supported project created the first on-line database of digital audio and video Biak texts with linguistically analysed transcriptions and translations (one of the first ever for an endangered language), making these materials available for future generations and aiding the sustainability of the language. Biak school-children can now use educational materials, including dictionaries, based on project resources. The project also trained local researchers in best practice in language documentation, enabling others to replicate these methods and empowering local communities to save their own endangered languages.