The Department of Digital Humanities has a significant and wide-ranging impact portfolio.
Our joint submission with The Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries, to the 2021 Research Excellence Framework saw 100 per cent of our research impact ranked as either 'world-leading' (4*) or 'internationally excellent' (3*).
Working with collaborators across a range of research disciplines and wider society, scholars in the Department work to inform and benefit society, influencing how individuals, companies, governments and civil society organisations are transformed across professional fields, such as the cultural heritage sector, journalism, digital management and digital policy. While they only represent a selection of our research, the following three research clusters serve as examples of the wide-ranging ways in which our work benefits the public and society worldwide:
● The transformation of public access to online cultural heritage materials, opening up collections of key importance for cultural memory and history to wider and more diverse publics, by advocating for and helping to implement unrestricted public use of digital heritage.
● The development of digital infrastructure and innovative tools for archives worldwide, as well as building local capacity in skills and expertise, enabling diverse public and scholarly engagement with vital, at risk or contested historical records of huge contemporary significance, including the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, archives of materials related to the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, and cultural heritage collections in Sudan.
● Responding to digital harms in a contested information age, by equipping journalists, civil society organisations and government policy makers with evidence and practical methods for investigating, understanding and combatting online misinformation in relation to pressing global concerns, including the COVID-19 virus and vaccines, antisemitism, and other conspiracy theories.