Hot Source! Targeted Digital Skills Development, from Artefact to Analytics lays the groundwork for a regional and national centre for digital skills training at the University of Exeter that fully meets the occupational requirements of Arts & Humanities (A&H) researchers and associated sectors.
It is part of the iDAH programme, set up by the AHRC in 2021, and committed to establishing a network of national centres to develop and embed the use of digital tools and methods across the arts and humanities user community. While formal and informal opportunities to acquire digital skills have been available for many years, structural issues, including the persistent canalization of STEMM and HASS disciplines within UK education, and the many competing demands of academic careers, have significantly reduced uptake. iDAH’s success will consequently require substantive engagement with A&H researchers to determine both the skills and delivery modes that will provide the maximum return on time and financial investment. This will be essential if digital skills are to become sufficiently common among A&H researchers for them to be understood as a core component of 21st century literacy, rather than a niche specialism.
The University of Exeter is an international leader in applying digital methods to A&H research. Building on our extensive experience of developing and delivering skills training to A&H researchers and students, the project’s objectives are to:
1. Clarify the requirements landscape for A&H researchers in the Southwest. In particular it is establishing which skills A&H researchers see as most essential for their work, and what kinds of delivery formats can best be integrated with the complex demands of an academic career.
2. Develop and deliver a series of new training courses as both the core of a wider programme focussed on the digitization and analysis of primary source materials, but also a mechanism for trialling and refining varying modes of delivery. These courses span a range of levels of expertise and have relevance to a broad array of disciplines. Some focus on methods for producing digital texts from analogue materials, including capturing and presenting human-readable 2D, 2.5D and/or 3D visualizations of physical resources and extracting text from images using OCR and HTR-based approaches. Others allow researchers to make enhanced use of digital texts, including issues of dataset creation, cleaning and management and introduce participants to programmatic analysis of texts using Python.
3. Engage with course participants in the establishment of a wider skills programme, and a community of digitally-capable A&H research practitioners, especially in the Southwest. We will work together with this network to catalyse broader changes in practice across universities and other research organisations.