London SMEs focused on creative digital, including Code First Girls link
The Department of Digital Humanities has worked with a range of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in London focused on the creative digital. They range from studios, production companies, training organisations, maker and hack spaces, product and interactions design, and architecture companies.
Our interest is in the ways our research in areas such as digital cultural heritage or digital marketing relates to the core business of these partners, and engaging their input in our research and curriculum.
London is amongst the most important hubs for creative digital innovation and our links enable Digital Humanities students from across our programmes to benefit in terms of a curriculum that reflects many of the sector’s needs (e.g. Big Data analytics, Virtual Reality or Artificial Intelligence), from the opportunities to undertake accredited internships with these partners, and from subsequent employment opportunities.
Museums, Libraries and Archives
We bring our practitioner-based research into the teaching experience of our students through guest speakers, case studies, visits, internships and dissertation topics.
Museums, Libraries and Archives aspire to preserve, organize and make available the cultural and intellectual records of their societies. They are often at the forefront of digital technologies and innovations and many of our researchers collaborate with practitioners in this sector. This includes, for instance, building digital strategy for the US National Gallery of Art, helping Europeana to develop an Impact Playbook or engaging in the sharing economy debate around concepts of Open Access to digital collections. Our researchers are opening up huge cultural sets of data working with the Getty Foundation and building massive infrastructures for digital research with libraries and archives worldwide. Ethical questions of state soft power, intellectual property, cultural appropriation and colonialism are also areas of focus.
These experiences are directly relevant to our students as we are able to explore both the underlying sophisticated technologies but the ways in which people use information and cultural objects.
Google/UpSkill Digital
In April 2018, one of Google’s partner organisations, UpSkill Digital—an organisation dedicated to digital training and skill development to help people embrace technological innovation in the workplace—did a workshop for our BA and MA students. The two key elements covered included, a hands-on training session about implementing practical social media skills that are tailored to business ideas. More specifically, this included skills on how to define goals, measure social media marketing efforts, how to harness the power of social media to promote your business, building communities and how to increase followers. The second part of the workshop provided a basic training overview of how to use Google’s analytics and audience insights by introducing students to their management and reporting tools.