Our partnerships and collaborations bring together a diversity of skills, perspectives and expertise to design, develop and deliver programmes. Through this collective effort, we build capacity for and explore issues around data-led and computational research. This year, we've worked with colleagues at the University and across the UK to offer opportunities for a variety of communities to learn about digital research and its contexts, from climate impacts to software engineering careers.
We're working the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures to increase awareness of and confidence in digital research methods. This year, we conducted a survey asking researchers in the School to reflect on their interest in digital research and the barriers they have experienced in uptaking new methods. Our findings led to us develop three bespoke sessions providing an introduction to thinking in terms of data and working with digitised texts.
This year, we've been supporting the new leads of the Digital and Data research theme as they map, establish and highlight work across CAHSS. As they point out, the theme's research is crucial at a time when "the questions around digital and data are also broad public issues . . . of bias, discrimination, power, surveillance," which "the social sciences and the arts and humanities are actively answering."
Over the past five years, we have worked with the School of History, Classics and Archaeology to support their digital research community. As well as participating in welcome week this year, we provided their postgraduates with a deep dive into digital methods, showing them the kinds of research made possible with data-led and computational methods.
This year, we worked with our colleagues Kasia Banas and Pawel Orzechowski from the Usher Institute to deliver a Winter School for methods in Teaching Programming to Non-Programmers. Sessions during the one-day event focused on pair and peer programming, code as peer assessment, teaching R, balancing theory with programming, and integrating pedagogy and practice. Olivia Guest and Sam Forbes delivered the event's keynote, 'Inclusivity in teaching programming'. Participants were keen to continue the conversation, which led to discussion of potential future activities and publications.
The 2024 Digital Humanities & Research Software Engineering Summer School was hosted by CDCS in July, with invaluable funding support from The Alan Turing Institute and the Society of RSE.
22 attendees from Scotland, the rest of the UK, and even further afield gathered for four days of talks, discussions, workshops and social activities. The programme was aimed at people interested in a career in the growing field of RSE within the humanities and social sciences. Sessions were led by professionals working in RSE at universities around the UK.
The first day was led by the Centre, with practical sessions focusing on principles of data visualisation using R and D3. The next day, Cambridge Digital Humanities presented a day of talks and activities about writing sustainable code. On day three, King's Digital Lab covered the challenges of digital creativity and creating impact while working effectively with collaborators and clients. The final day, the Alan Turing Institute focused on strategies for collaborating on code, highlighting Git as a key tool for doing so.
Thank you so much for organising an amazing and insightful day.
We have continued to play a key role in the work of the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition (DHCC), a Community Interest Group of the UK-Ireland DH Association. Hosting monthly meetups, we have supported the growth of the DHCC community and shared the toolkit with new audiences. Our Director, Lisa Otty, delivered a keynote address at the University of Salford titled 'Parallel Paths: Supporting Open and Sustainable Research with the Digital Humanities Climate Coalition Toolkit', which focused on intersections between sustainability and open research. She also led a workshop at the UK-Ireland DH Association Conference at the University of Cork that focused on materials for teaching with the DHCC toolkit, an area which we hope to expand and grow over the coming year.
We were delighted to see the new volume Data-Driven Innovation in the Creative Industries come out in April. This book is the work of our collaborators at the Creative Informatics programme, a major investment from the AHRC which has delivered fantastic outcomes over the last five years. The book "examines how the creative industries can be best supported to make use of data-driven innovation and digital technology opportunities", sharing the insights and knowledge developed across the programme. The chapter on 'Digital and Data Literacy: models for data training and upskilling for the future creative industries' was co-authored by our CDCS Training Manager, Lucia Michielin.
