Log in
Research in UCL Information Studies enables innovative forms of cultural interaction which encourages a deeper, more personal experience for the public. Our crowd-sourcing transcription project, Transcribe Bentham, has enabled a worldwide audience to participate in the transcription of previously unstudied manuscripts. Our QRator project has empowered museum visitors to think of exhibits as social objects, discussing them with other visitors and curators in three important museums via social media. Both have been recognised and imitated as ground-breaking methods of creating partnerships between the public, the academy and cultural heritage institutions.
Regional and national audiences have benefited from enhanced perceptions of the linguistic and literary heritage of the West Midlands. Cultural capital has been created by engaging members of the public in the discovery of their linguistic and literary past through their unprecedented access to and understanding of a manuscript written in the dialect of the medieval West Midlands. Increased national interest in the region's cultural heritage has been generated.
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.
Research at Sheffield has led to international cultural and conservation impact, as well as commercial impact in the UK. Two free international exhibitions designed to attract visitors of all ages and nationalities (Royal Armouries 2007/08, 20,000 visitors; and Musée national de l'Armée, Invalides, Paris (2010, 80,000 visitors) were underpinned by research on illuminated manuscripts of Jehan Froissart's Chronicles of the Hundred Years' War (covering the years 1325-1404). The exhibitions were inspired by the desire to raise awareness, regionally and nationally, of the culture of the Book and of Franco-English relations in the later Middle Ages. Miniatures from the manuscripts depicting key events were displayed alongside items selected from each country's national collection of arms and armour; interactive displays showed how the manuscripts were copied and illustrated. The research enabled an SME to be launched and opened up new access to major aspects of French cultural heritage whilst enabling the preservation of the originals' integrity, part of the intellectual and artistic patrimony of Western Europe.
Jane Austen has, since the late nineteenth century, occupied a powerful position within English- speaking culture, popular and canonical, accessible and complexly academic. Kathryn Sutherland's engagement with audiences beyond academia has improved public understanding of how Austen's works and life acquired the forms and significance they have had. Sutherland's research has enabled better-informed teaching of Austen at secondary school and university level, and assisted high quality educational programme making for television. Her collaborative work on the digitization of Austen's working drafts has set new standards for the encoding of literary manuscripts, assisting literary curatorship and improving public accessibility to cultural heritage.
Research on the theory and design of faceted classifications as exemplified in the Bliss Bibliographic Classification 2nd edition (BC2) has influenced the recent development of two out of the three internationally important library classification schemes, the Universal Decimal Classification, and the Dewey Decimal Classification. Collectively these are used in over 350,000 libraries worldwide, and thousands of new publications in the relevant subject classes are now classified using systems based on research undertaken in UCL Information Studies.
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.
The Bloomsbury Project, which gathers the results of archival research into the geographical, cultural, and social development of Bloomsbury, London, in the 19th century, has assisted and enriched the investigations of local historians and organisations into the area. The Bloomsbury Project website receives over 3,000 hits each month (and often closer to 5,000), Professor Rosemary Ashton's monograph Victorian Bloomsbury (2012) has been widely reviewed, and a series of well-attended public events has brought together members of the community working on Bloomsbury-related projects.
William Wordsworth's poetry is of lasting value to our cultural and national identity and to perceptions of the Lake District. The desire to communicate core Wordsworthian principles shapes and informs the research undertaken by the Wordsworth Centre, Lancaster University, which seeks to vitally reconnect poetry and the region in the twenty-first century. Such research has produced an increased engagement with Wordsworth's poetry and transformed the understanding of his work and its continuing relevance for a range of beneficiaries.
Two research projects undertaken through collaboration with the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere have realised considerable impact in the assessment period through three main channels:
1) a pioneering website, designed for diverse users, containing the first digital versions of selected Wordsworth manuscripts, which has received over 580,000 hits;
2) contributions to the visitor experience at Dove Cottage, Grasmere;
3) 40 `Wordsworth Walks' around Grasmere and its environs involving over 950 participants from a range of different groupings (business, public sector, general public).