Similar case studies

REF impact found 24 Case Studies

Currently displayed text from case study:

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Summary of the impact

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.

Submitting Institution

University of Oxford

Unit of Assessment

History

Summary Impact Type

Cultural

Research Subject Area(s)

Studies In Human Society: Policy and Administration, Political Science
History and Archaeology: Historical Studies

Editing Literary-Historical Manuscripts

Summary of the impact

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.

Submitting Institution

De Montfort University

Unit of Assessment

English Language and Literature

Summary Impact Type

Cultural

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Information Systems
Language, Communication and Culture: Literary Studies
History and Archaeology: Historical Studies

Widening understanding of the earliest written literature through The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature

Summary of the impact

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.

Submitting Institution

University of Oxford

Unit of Assessment

Classics

Summary Impact Type

Cultural

Research Subject Area(s)

Language, Communication and Culture: Cultural Studies, Literary Studies
History and Archaeology: Historical Studies

The Newton Project

Summary of the impact

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.

Submitting Institution

University of Sussex

Unit of Assessment

History

Summary Impact Type

Cultural

Research Subject Area(s)

Language, Communication and Culture: Literary Studies
History and Archaeology: Historical Studies

The Poetry of Guto'r Glyn

Summary of the impact

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.

Submitting Institutions

University of Wales,University of Wales, Trinity Saint David

Unit of Assessment

Modern Languages and Linguistics

Summary Impact Type

Cultural

Research Subject Area(s)

Language, Communication and Culture: Cultural Studies, Literary Studies
History and Archaeology: Historical Studies

Anglo-Norman Dictionary Case-study

Summary of the impact

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.

Submitting Institution

Aberystwyth University

Unit of Assessment

Modern Languages and Linguistics

Summary Impact Type

Cultural

Research Subject Area(s)

Language, Communication and Culture: Linguistics, Literary Studies
History and Archaeology: Historical Studies

Corpus Research: Its Impact on Industry

Summary of the impact

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.

Submitting Institution

Lancaster University

Unit of Assessment

English Language and Literature

Summary Impact Type

Societal

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
Psychology and Cognitive Sciences: Cognitive Sciences
Language, Communication and Culture: Linguistics

Public dissemination of the British National Corpus

Summary of the impact

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.

Submitting Institution

University of Oxford

Unit of Assessment

Modern Languages and Linguistics

Summary Impact Type

Economic

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
Psychology and Cognitive Sciences: Cognitive Sciences
Language, Communication and Culture: Linguistics

Research on natural language processing leading to improved language tests and dictionaries for millions of language learners

Summary of the impact

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:

  • Cambridge University Press has significantly improved the quality of its language learning materials (over 60 books) via key enhancements to its core source material that have been enabled by CLAWS4 and the BNC;
  • The Society for Testing English Proficiency (STEP) in Japan has based a widely-used Language Test (EIKEN) on data analysed by CLAWS4. The EIKEN test is taken by two million schoolchildren every year.

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.

Submitting Institution

Lancaster University

Unit of Assessment

Computer Science and Informatics

Summary Impact Type

Societal

Research Subject Area(s)

Information and Computing Sciences: Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
Psychology and Cognitive Sciences: Cognitive Sciences
Language, Communication and Culture: Linguistics

Preserving a linguistic heritage: Biak, an endangered Austronesian language

Summary of the impact

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.

Submitting Institution

University of Oxford

Unit of Assessment

Modern Languages and Linguistics

Summary Impact Type

Cultural

Research Subject Area(s)

Language, Communication and Culture: Language Studies, Linguistics

Filter Impact Case Studies

Download Impact Case Studies