Digital Humanities

Open Arts Archive
The Open Arts Archive is a major website and archive, hosted by the Art History Department at the Open University, which provides open access to a wealth of artistic, cultural and educational resources, featuring work from the ancient to the modern period. These resources include seminars, study days, artist interviews, research projects and archives produced by the Open University and a wide national network of collaborating museums and galleries. The Open Arts Archive is funded by The Open University and The Museums Libraries and Archives Council.

Pelagios: Enable Linked Ancient Geodata In Open Systems.

Pelagios is an international consortium of projects leading research into the ancient world who have teamed up to trial ways of linking open data (LOD) that will enable scholars and enthusiasts alike to discover, visualize and make use of references to ancient places in online material. Pelagios is an international consortium of projects and research groups which includes GAP, Arachne (Cologne), Perseus (Tufts), Pleiades (Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, NYU), DME (Austrian Institute of Technology), LUCERO (OU), SPQR (KCL), nomisma.org, The Ptolemy Machine. Our three primary outcomes are:

1. to define a core ontology for place references (COPR);
2. to trial this ontology on different document types (texts, maps, databases, etc) which contain information about ancient world research; and
3. to create prototype tools and services, which are easily consumable by learners, educators, researchers and the public, in order both to explore some of the uses to which this resource can be put and to demonstrate the value of a LOD approach.

HESTIA: Herodotus Encoded Space-Text-Imaging Archive
HESTIA employs the latest open-source ICT to develop an innovative methodology to the study of spatial data in the fifth-century BCE Greek historian, Herodotus. Involving the collaboration of academics from the disciplines of Classics, Geography, and Archaeological Computing, HESTIA has the twin aim of investigating the ‘deep’ topological networks in the text and introducing new audiences to the world of Herodotus via GoogleEarth and a GoogleMap Timeline.

Google Ancient Places (GAP)

Due to Google’s digitization programme, the information now available is unprecedented: but what exactly is there, and how can it be used? The Google Ancient Places (GAP) project investigates a means of facilitating the discovery of data that is of interest to scholars working on the ancient world, and experiments with ways of making use of the results. So, for example, with GAP you’ll be able to discover all references in the Google Books corpus to a particular ancient place, and then visualize the results in GoogleEarth to gain a snapshot of the geographic spread of the references. Or, alternatively, you’ll be able to discover all ancient places mentioned in a specific book, and visualize them in GoogleMaps as and when they are mentioned alongside the actual text. In the first instance you know the place and want to find the books; in the second, you have the book and want to discover the places. And you’ll be able to do this either as a scholar whose research has a historical or geographical basis, or as a member of the public visiting, for instance, an ancient location and wanting to download information related to it on your iPhone―a case of literally putting knowledge into people’s hands. Pricipal Investigator Dr Elton Barker (OU); other team members are Leif Isaksen (Southampton), Eric Kansa (Berkeley), Kate Byrne (Edinburgh), Nick Rabinowitz (independent consultant).

Reception of classical texts online database
This project aims to document and analyse the theatrical and literary surge of interest in Greek texts and drama as a phenomenon of the late twentieth century. The project supports a wide range of activities and publication, and a major feature is its online database of modern performance of ancient Greek texts.

The Reading Experience Database 1450 – 1945
RED was launched in 1996 with the mission to accumulate as much data as possible about the reading experiences of readers of all nationalities in Britain and those of British subjects abroad from 1450 to 1945. Its online database currently contains more than 25,000 records.

Making Britain: South Asian Visions of Home and Abroad 1870-1950
Led by the Open University, in collaboration with the University of Oxford and King’s College London, the AHRC-funded Making Britain is an inter-disciplinary venture examining the formative South Asian contribution to Britain’s literary, political and cultural life in the period 1870–1950. The project is concerned with how South Asians were positioning themselves within British society and culture, and with their impact upon various aspects of British life. It aims to trace some of the key links between South Asians and Britons, while also exploring the tensions that arose from their encounters.

Cultures of Brass
The Cultures of Brass Instruments project aims to increase understanding of the nature of brass musical instruments and the way they are or have been used, particularly in the research fields of repertoire, performance and reception. Its website provides a range of resources that are freely available for all users.

Building on History: The Church in London
The project aims to make the religious history of the Diocese of London accessible by providing engaging academic speakers to give seminars and consultative workshops, and hosting a website to providing an online resource guide to the historical archives within the Diocese, especially Lambeth Palace Library.

The Old Bailey Proceedings Online makes available a fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913, and of the Ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts, 1679 to 1772. It allows access to over 197,000 trials and biographical details of approximately 2,500 men and women executed at Tyburn, free of charge for non-commercial use.

Research Partners

The Faculty of Arts is working with a range of partners on research relating to digital technologies. These include:

Project Bamboo is a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, and inter-organizational effort that brings together researchers in arts and humanities, computer scientists, information scientists, librarians, and campus information technologists to tackle the question:
How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?

eScholar is a pan European team, which includes the OU, convened by The European Library to bid for FP7 funding on digital technologies projects.

The OU collaborated with the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET ) University of Cambridge on the JISC-funded project investigating the use of digital technologies by early career researchers.
JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee), which supports UK university research by providing leadership in the use of ICT, is currently running an e-Content Programme 2009-2011, whose aim is not only to create more digital content, but also to help sustain and deliver existing content in a more effective way.  Follow this link for a handy summary of (and links to) the various projects.