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Heinrich Böll (1917-1985) was one of post-war Germany's leading writers and public intellectuals. The Edition of Böll's complete works, prepared by a seven-strong international research team which included Finlay, has had significant impact across a number of areas, including commercial publishing (spin-off publications, marketing opportunities); digital humanities (software and platform development for large-scale critical editions, significantly changing working practices); culture and heritage (in particular in the city of Cologne); the media and the public sphere (public debate on the writer's legacy and the Heinrich-Böll foundation's cultural programme in 30 countries).
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.
Research from the Digital arts strand of the CMR has had an impact in two related areas.
Kafka's Wound', a response to Kafka's short story `A Country Doctor' (1919), was created as part of the `Re-imagining the Literary Essay for the Digital Age' (RILEDA) project. The essay is available at www.thespace.lrb.co.uk.
Commissioned from the London Review of Books (LRB), an independent literary publisher, RILEDA was supported by £45k from ACE who invested £3.5m in 51 commissions. The work was `located' in the Space, an experimental digital arts service, itself a major project within Arts Council England's creative media policy and its Public Value Partnership with the BBC.
Headed by Will Self, novelist and professor of contemporary thought at Brunel University, RILEDA involved over 70 collaborators drawn from the School of Arts and many other departments (especially Computing, Engineering and Design) in a collaborative, interdisciplinary, practice- based, research project. Institutional contributors included the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the Imperial War Museum, and the National Centre for Jewish Film. The research was carried out between March and July 2012 and the essay was `published' in August 2012.
Highly innovative and of high artistic quality, RILEDA has impacted diverse audiences worldwide, evolving the multi-media digital literary essay while encouraging innovative approaches to digital arts and supporting the case for future public digital arts services. It raises important issues about the nature of authorship, collaboration, and co-design in digital forms which frame broader questions about the nature of creativity, intellectual property rights, and the processes and experience of reading.
The high artistic quality and innovative user interface engaged a significant worldwide audience with 49,208 visits in 12 months, 57% from outside the UK.
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.
UCL's Bentham Project has developed an international award winning public engagement and knowledge transfer initiative that brings the views of the renowned 18th century philosopher and reformer, Jeremy Bentham, to life for the modern world. By creating the Bentham Papers Catalogue, Digital Database and crowdsourcing project Transcribe Bentham, the Project has:
The University of Reading's Henslowe-Alleyn Digitisation Project (H-ADP) resulted in the development of a free electronic archive and website (www.henslowe-alleyn.org.uk) concerning the single most important collection of papers on English theatre history and performance in the Shakespearean era. Launched in 2009, the resources, which comprise 2,000 pages of unique manuscript records and 15 digital essays based on original research by leading scholars, have been widely used by academic and non-academic users, broadening their awareness of and access to key literary and cultural texts. Together they attract some 27,000 hits and over 2,000 visitors a month.
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.
This case study focuses on the impact of the research of one member of the UCL English Department, John Mullan. It describes the impact of his introduction of techniques of narrative analysis to the general reader and to secondary school teachers and students. This has involved making accessible to the general public an informed historical understanding of the development of English fiction, communicating techniques of critical reading that assist the appreciation of both canonical and contemporary novels. This has meant acting as a bridge between contemporary writers and readers, and communicating via print, radio and television the history of the genre. It has also meant delivering the benefits of a specialised critical vocabulary to teachers teaching fiction at secondary school level.
Research conducted by the UCL SCEMFA research group into materialising the digital has had many and varied impacts, including the creation of new forms of artistic expression, and the production of new cultural resources. The research has also had demonstrable impacts on cultural heritage, both through the acquisition of its outputs into important national collections and through contributions to policy relating to the preservation of digital artefacts. Wider societal and cultural contributions have been delivered through work in the public realm, and commercial benefits have accrued through collaboration with Liberty.