Jan. 20-21, 2020: UK-US CAS Partnership Hosts a Final Symposium at the Alan Turing Institute at the British Library

The AHRC-funded UK-US Partnerships hosted a final Symposium at the The Alan Turing Institute at the British Library on January 20, 2020.

The UK-US Network

King’s College London’s Department of Digital Humanities, together with the University of Maryland iSchool (US), the Maryland State Archives (US), and The National Archives (UK), concluded their 1-year Research Networking award for UK-US Collaborations in Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions, running from February 1, 2019 to January 31, 2020. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this transatlantic program responded to the technological shift taking place in cultural organizations and explored how collections can be made available in digital form for large-scale computational research. The goal was to open new research frontiers and questions and advance collections-based research methods for the 21st century.

The Exploration of Computational Archival Science (CAS) and the Contextualization of Records

The large-scale digitization of analog archives, the emerging diverse forms of born-digital archives, and the new ways in which researchers across disciplines (as well as the public) wish to engage with archival material, are disrupting traditional archival practices, and are presenting challenges for practitioners and researchers who work with archival material. They also offer enhanced possibilities for scholarship, through the application of computational methods and tools to the archival problem space, and, more fundamentally, through the integration of ‘computational thinking’ with ‘archival thinking’. This collaboration leveraged four years of developments on Computational Archival Science (CAS).

The Network specifically addressed the application of computational methods to the contextualization of records within archival collections, both digitized and born-digital, transforming disconnected records into annotated ‘knowledge graphs’ that integrate historical context and connections.

Network Events

The Network hosted a series of interconnected events:

• Research Symposium at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, and  the University of Maryland (US), April 4-5, 2019
• Datathon at The National Archives (UK), June 21-22, 2019
• Datathon at the Maryland State Archives (US), October 28-29, 2019
• Research Symposium at The Alan Turing Institute (UK), January 20-21, 2020

Network Partners

The award supported the development of an international network of researchers and practitioners across the UK and US focused on the development of digital scholarship in cultural institutions in both countries. The network partners included:

• UK:

• • King’s College London, Department of Digital Humanities (KCL):
    • Dr. Mark Hedges, Senior Lecturer (PI)
  • The National Archives (TNA):
    • Dr. Eirini Goudarouli, Head of Digital Research Programmes (Co-I)
    • Pip Wilcox, Head of Research
    • Mark Bell, Big Data Researcher
    • Paul Young, Digital Preservation Specialist / Researcher
    • Sonia Ranade, Head of Digital Archiving

• US:

• • University of Maryland iSchool:
    • Dr. Richard Marciano, Professor (Co-I)
    • Dr. Bill Underwood, Research Scientist
    • Greg Jansen, Research Software Architect
  • Archival and Records Management Research Consultants: 
    • Dr. Michael Kurtz
    • Mark Conrad
  • Maryland State Archives (MSA):
    • Chris Haley, Director of the Study of Legacy of Slavery in Maryland
    • Maya Davis, Research Archivist
  • Drexel University:
    • Dr. Jane Greenberg, Professor and Director of the Metadata Research Center (MRC)
  • UNC Chapel Hill:
    • Dr. Lyneise Williams, Associate Professor and Founder of the VERA Collaborative

Further Information: Computational Archives AHRC Research Network