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The Digital Classics research group has been instrumental in transforming the cultural capital of the ancient world online, through changing the way that information about the ancient world is found and can be used. It builds transferable tools and has established a set of international standards for exploring and visualising the ancient world online. For example, Barker's Google Ancient Places (GAP) project has built an innovative web platform for reading texts spatially while the Pelagios network, using the infrastructure of the Internet, links data from international archives and museums in creating a world wide web of antiquity.
The Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration (DMVI, www.dmvi.cardiff.ac.uk) used research and technological innovation to bring illustrations of Victorian culture to multiple users. Before DMVI, illustrations accompanying nineteenth-century literary texts were largely forgotten, and there was no structured way of searching for them as images. Despite their cultural importance, illustrations are rarely reproduced in modern editions, and mass digitisation projects omit them or describe them inadequately for independent retrieval. DMVI's bespoke software tools harnessed literary research in a multifaceted mark-up system, to create a tagged 'image bank'. Its content and searchability have made it the resource of choice for designers, publishers, broadcasters, film-makers, and heritage organisations worldwide when presenting images of nineteenth-century life.
Research carried out by the University of Reading's Department of Typography & Graphic Communication into the design of information for everyday reading has contributed to public services and policy making by:
— improving government communications and
— changing the use of design by non-specialists, particularly in government departments.
The Department's expertise has been used in areas where communication is challenging (prisons and UK Jobcentres), benefiting disadvantaged user groups. The Department of Typography's input to the communications of GOV.UK and HMRC has benefited the UK public in contexts where poor design decisions can prove costly to both individuals and government departments.
In addition, the Department's research-based exhibitions have spread public understanding of information design, attracting specialists and non-specialists and receiving significant coverage in the professional, national and international press.
The Dr Williams's Centre for Dissenting Studies, a collaboration between the Queen Mary English Department and Dr Williams's Library, Gordon Square, London, has undertaken a long-term and ongoing programme of funded research projects, public engagement events, and publications in print and online. Dr Williams's Library is a non-HEI (owned by Dr Williams's Trust, Charity number 214926) dedicated to the preservation and study of collections related to the history of Protestant dissent. Prof Isabel Rivers (QMUL 2004-), and Dr David Wykes, Director of the Library, founded the Centre in 2004 because of their mutual interest in the field. The work of the Centre's Queen Mary researchers, including publications hosted on the Centre's website, has enhanced the public profile of the Library, improved its accessibility to the wider public, and transformed the public understanding of the history of Protestant dissent.
Since 1993, the outcomes of preservation management research at Loughborough University have:
This case study relates to cultural life and education. Kenneth Fincham is an internationally renowned scholar in the field of British Early Modern History, and the impact arose from a major research programme funded by the AHRC to create:
The database is an online resource launched in 2005 and available free to all users. It provides a relational database and supporting website containing key information on clergy, schoolteachers and ecclesiastical patrons which has brought together for the first time a comprehensive range of sources. From the start CCEd was designed to serve constituencies outside as well as within academia, and it has proved an invaluable resource for genealogists across the globe seeking information on clerical ancestors, local historians researching parish histories, independent researchers interested in the clergy, and hard-pressed archivists responsible for managing and interpreting major diocesan collections. It has received in excess of 9.9m hits since 2010 and highly positive feedback from its many different types of user.