Hello!
What a difference a year makes! As we celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Centre for Data, Culture & Society, we find ourselves in a new office with new colleagues, seeing new horizons opening before us. This report presents our accomplishments over the academic year 23/24, setting out the ways in which we have collaborated with and supported digital research communities in the arts, humanities and social sciences in Edinburgh and beyond. It also shows how we are beginning to work more collaboratively within our new home, the Edinburgh Futures Institute, as we begin to scale up the support we offer to build even greater capacity for data-led research.
This year has seen the team explore new formats for skills development, begin to establish new services and consolidate our relationships across the College. Highlights have included supporting the University's Students as Change Agents programme; becoming part of the UK's DARIAH community; hosting the Digital Humanities Research Software Engineering Summer School in partnership with King’s Digital Lab, Cambridge Digital Humanities and the Alan Turing Institute; planning our annual lecture, this year given by artist and scholar Mary Flanagan; and, of course, congratulating winners of the CDCS Digital Research Prizes at our ceremony in June. You can read all about these activities and more in the pages that follow.
During the refurbishment of the old Royal Infirmary into what is now EFI's new home, a group of creative makers collaborated with local communities to build ‘The Spirit Case’, an object that honours the transition of the building into a new kind of public space. Assembled out of memories and materials from the building and grounds, it is a symbol of both transition and EFI’s ambition to remain a place of care, compassion, openness and accessibility. Passing the Spirit Case every day in our new building, at a time of transition for the Centre, it is inspiring to imagine how we, too, are in an ongoing process of renewal. We hope that the work in this report represents not only the original spirit of CDCS but also the foundations from which we will grow and develop in the coming years.
Dr Lisa Otty, Director
This report is available below in PDF format. While we have made every effort to make this document accessible, it performs best in a screen reader using manual controls. A Word version is available on request.