CDCS Projects

Edinburgh’s current aspiration is to be a ‘data capital of Europe’ through the ‘Edinburgh City Region Deal’ – a £1.3bn investment in the area, grounded in a vision of economic prosperity brought about by data-driven innovation. The University of Edinburgh has positioned itself in a vanguard role, through the Data Driven Innovation (DDI) programme, which will receive £350,000,000 of City Region Deal funding over a ten-year period of research and development. Following from a panel about DDI during the 2019 Data Justice Week, Morgan Currie, Jeremy Knox and Callum McGregor undertook a research project that seeks to understand the policy origins and different values and goals driving DDI projects since the program began in 2019. Support from CDCS enabled them to hire a research assistant and begin an analysis of the origins, justifications, and aims of the DDI program.

CDCS provided funding for the VR in Mind project to buy a new headset and employ a short term research assistant. 

VRinMind is developing a virtual reality based mindfulness application to help people manage chronic pain. 60 million people suffer from chronic pain worldwide. Managing pain can be helped by practicing mindfulness, a self-directed at-home practice that uses gentle exercises and relaxation techniques. University of Edinburgh researchers are working on VRinMind, a project employing virtual reality (VR) to enhance mindfulness practice for those with chronic pain conditions through immersive 3D audio-visual experiences

We supported Prof James Crow and his RA Stefano Bordoni to create a 3D digital terrain model of the Topkapı Saray in Istanbul. Using data from available 1:1000 Turkish digital mapping they created  a DTM of the easternmost hill on the peninsula of Historic Istanbul, the first hill of the Byzantine city. Since the late 15th c. this was the palace of the Ottoman Sultans including the famous Harem. But within its four courts are the remains of the Byzantine First Hill and a unique sequence of large cisterns. The DTM including, the mapped archaeological features and historic buildings will make it possible to create new visualisations of the famous palace and its subsurface heritage for future public display and publications, revealing a new unrecognised aspect of the city’s long-term history and insights into past technological achievements.

A collection of unpublished short stories by the American writer Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson was recently discovered in her archives by Dr Robyn Pritzker. As the wife of Robert Louis Stevenson, Fanny Stevenson’s own literary work has been largely overlooked by scholars to date. Robyn has undertaken the digitisation of these stories, in collaboration with Dr Anouk Lang, in order to make them available to the public for the first time. The completed digital edition demonstrates the potential for using TEI markup to illuminate the previously overlooked importance of Stevenson’s work. This project explores what can be achieved with TEI-encoded text, creating the potential for analysis and putting Stevenson’s work back into conversation of nineteenth-century writers and literary-critical understandings of the period.

Led by Dr Natasa Pantic of Moray House School of Education, this project aims to develop a software that functions both as a research tool and a tool for research-informed professional development of teachers and other education professionals. It builds on a pilot project to improve the functionality of the on-line log for Teacher Reflection on their Agency for Change (TRAC) to enable taking to scale empirical study of the impact of teachers’ social networks. For professional development, the proposal exemplifies network learning based on visualisation of teachers’ and school social networks that can be used in professional development and school improvement. It will enable researchers and teachers anywhere to engage with the web-based log and receive feedback about their own networks. 

Professor Diana Paton has undertaken the Jamaica Manumissions Project, a study of deed book records held in the Jamaica Archives which detail the manumission, or release from slavery, of several hundred people in Jamaica between the 1740s and the 1830s. Each of 66 deed books contains copies of several hundred manumission deeds, recording details and demographic information of previously enslaved people. CDCS funded the development of an online database to facilitate collection of the data in eight volumes that have already been digitised and paid for data entry for a pilot study of one deed book.  This funding has enabled improved database efficiency and automation processes for further data collection, and has enabled the team to gain better insight into the technical requirements and resources needed for a larger scale project.

Dr Chisomo Kalinga aims to provide the first multidisciplinary archive on medical humanities in Malawi as part of her Wellcome Trust funded project 'Ulimbaso ‘You will be strong again’: How literary aesthetics and storytelling inform concepts of health and wellbeing in Malawi’. The digital archive is an open-source resource that features interactive maps, digital exhibitions, images, videos, games, original documents, which can be cited and exported. CDCS is supporting an upgrade to the digital archive enabling the site to be converted from a personal archive to an international open source data platform. It will provide a historical and modern resource for researchers, academics, health professionals, archivists, and others, allowing researchers to share data for collaborative fieldwork. It will also enable broader analysis that will identify trends in arts, humanities and social science-based approaches to health care, with the capacity to inform policy and research in Scotland, Malawi, and on an international scale.