Digital Cultural Heritage

The Enriching Exhibition Scholarship Project involves partners from the Universities of Edinburgh, Yale, Oxford, and the Ashmolean Museum and is funded by the AHRC/NEH. The work in enriching linked data records with information from museum exhibitions, mapping connections between art and museum objects across the world, creating information that will make arts knowledge more accessible and shareable for artists, scholars, and the public. This project will use advanced computational techniques, such as text mining and machine learning, to capture all sorts of exhibition data and allow museums to make it easily accessible and shareable to scholars and the public.

Living Histories of Sugar invites audiences across the Atlantic to be immersed in the sights and sounds of historical characters: from sugar barons and refinery owners, to enslaved and ‘free’ people, sugar refinery workers and their wives. This performance encourages Caribbean and Scottish audiences to contest, re-signify or otherwise rework the historical record.

Dr Niamh Moore is part of the Reanimating Data project team, working with a set of interviews with young women created in the wake of the aids crisis as part of a social research study conducted in 1988-90: the Women, Risk & AIDS project. Thirty years after the original study, the project team are revisiting and returning data to communities where the research was carried out, experimenting with how these interviews might be used by youth and community groups, students and academics.

Curious Edinburgh is a website and mobile phone app which tells stories behind the city's many historic buildings and places.  Showcasing the importance of Edinburgh in the history of science, technology and medicine, it tells a variety of stories about the city,  Edinburgh’s international connections and its vibrant local communities, paying attention to equality, diversity and civic action. Content is sourced from a wide variety of research projects across the University of Edinburgh and community archives, bringing diverse knowledge on Edinburgh together in one space, while making it accessible for students, staff as well as the general public.

The Gaelic Handwriting Recognition Project is converting 500k words of traditional narrative documents to digital text and training the first automatic handwriting recogniser for the Gaelic language, using the Transkribus platform. This will provide the foundation for an ambitious future research programme, which will develop novel language technologies for Gaelic and innovative ways of researching traditional narrative through these technologies. Once finalised, the Gaelic handwriting recogniser will be made available worldwide through Transkribus.

This is a ‘foundation’ project for a major AHRC programme - Towards a National Collection. It is exploring the possibilities of the International Interoperability Framework (IIIF) to support the dissemination of born digital and digitised heritage images for research and engagement. It aims to demonstrate the opportunities and benefits that IIIF offers to a wide audience of users, and help to define more robust use cases, as well as understand how IIIF can be used to present a National Collection. 

Hearing Histories brings the musical past to life, using the archaeological and historical record to reconstruct lost performance spaces and to hear them resounding, once again, with music. Using state-of-the-art Virtual Reality, we have reconstructed both the visuals and acoustics of Linlithgow Palace Chapel and St Cecilia's Hall and situated historical musical performances within them. Virtual performances on VR headsets have been organised in both venues, and the project has resulted in the release of the first commercial classical CD ever to be recorded and produced in VR using our reconstructed Linlithgow Palace Chapel acoustic. 

Analysing the digital pathways of visitors to Scottish museums and galleries’ websites during the recent pandemic lockdowns, this project aims to establish what attracts visitors, which pathways lead to engagement (Google Arts and Culture, Art UK etc), and how different stages of the pandemic affected interaction. The project is one of three Covid-19 Urgency projects that has recently been granted funding by the Towards a National Collection programme.