Digital Heritage & Humanites

For many years HATII staff have been engaged in a number of innovative projects that exploit the power of the Internet to enhance access to cultural heritage assets, such as TheGlasgowStory, funded under the NOF-digitise programme, the AHRC funded Glasgow Emblem Digitisation Project, and the Andy Goldsworthy Digital Catalogue. TheGlasgowStory was singled out for praise in the external review of the NOF programme for the methodological advances made in metadata definition and application, workflow, and the design and presentation of interactive and participatory online resources. The Digital Culture Forum (DigiCULT), funded by the EU under FP5, investigated ways to improve the integration of leading edge technology with the cultural heritage sector across Europe. 

Other projects contribute to the study of resource discovery from the user perspective in both the analogue and digital environment domains. Anderson’s investigation of the working practices of academic historians (Primarily History) has attracted considerable attention within the archive community. This developed into an exploration of the potential for visualising user interfaces employing Zig-Zag structures, supported by an AHRC speculative research grant. More recently Anderson has examined the business case for digital libraries in the arts and social sciences.

HATII's research interests in access to digital heritage and furthering digital humanities research combined in the Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951 project. The project's database, developed by Barr, is the main outcome of the research and contains over 50,000 records about sculptural practice. Barr and Anderson then worked on the follow-on Mobilising Mapping Sculpture project which saw the development of a mobile interface to the database, facilitating in situ sculptural research, and the addition of unique personalisation features to support individual research.