The opportunity aims to support a diverse range of projects that advance digital scholarship in line with the following themes:
i) Organising, creating, and interrogating all collection types
In what ways can digital collections become richer and more user-friendly through existing methods such as optical character recognition, text extraction and parsing, linked open data, and network analysis?
How can artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning be leveraged to help organise, search, and understand digital collections?
What sorts of new and emerging methods will enable breakthroughs in working with digital collections?
How can digital technologies unlock new data, uncover hidden or under-researched histories, and facilitate discovery research?
ii) Evolving institutions to face the twenty-first century
What innovative training programs can be developed to address leadership and digital skills gaps in cultural institutions and how can these programs build capacity for smaller institutions?
What challenges do AI and machine learning methods present in terms of privacy, ethics, research integrity, copyright, reproducibility, and bias?
How can digital innovation be harnessed to inform and advance the process of decolonisation across the sector, such as in collections, acquisitions, storytelling, programming, staffing, visitor participation, and physical spaces?
How can digital tools help to improve visitor-facing experiences, enhance accessibility and inclusion, and better interpret visitor needs and interests?
iii) Fostering digitally-enabled equitable participation
In what ways can digital scholarship and tools enhance access and create more equitable and inclusive approaches to community engagement, including for people of colour and others who have been historically underserved, marginalised, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality?
How can existing methods such as crowd-sourcing and co-creation be used to broaden participation or increase engagement across cultures or borders?
How can digital technology help to interrogate and address issues relating to representation across cultural institution staff and volunteers, for example in terms of diversity and precarity in the sector?
This opportunity can support activities, such as:
- planning and preliminary work for future, larger-scale projects, including conferences, workshops, and working group meetings to bring together individuals with complementary skill sets to outline future research, plan publications, or develop best practices
- small-scale collaborative projects, such as case studies, experiments, and exploratory or developmental research
- outreach to disseminate project findings, methods, software, and tools.
You should choose the funding level appropriate to the scope and maturity of your proposed project.
Projects must begin by 1 February 2022.
