EHRI
The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure’s (EHRI) mission is to support the Holocaust research community by building a digital infrastructure and facilitating human networks. EHRI provides access to information about Holocaust-related sources through its Online Portal, and tools that enable researchers’ work with such sources. EHRI further facilitates a network of researchers and archivists to increase cohesion among practitioners. EHRI seeks to overcome the hallmark challenge of Holocaust research: the global dispersal of the archival sources, and the concomitant fragmentation of Holocaust historiography.
EHRI’s work is carried by a consortium of 24 partner institutions. The DDH team, led by Tobias Blanke and Reto Speck, is leading the development work on EHRI’s digital services.
EHRI has been running since 2010 with funding provided by the EU. The current phase of the project will come to an end in April 2019. EHRI is currently seeking to establish itself as a permanent European infrastructure.
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Zones of Data Translation
This research project, in partnership with Tactical Tech, will explore an interdisciplinary methodological approach to social and cultural dimensions of Big Data, thereby opening-up socio-political debates around digital security, privacy and the ethics of data. This collaboration has four core activities:
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We will make existing tools available for future and long-term impact.
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To challenge the conventional relationship and knowledge about personal data, we will organize two public workshop events, one of them linked to Tactical Tech’s Glass Room installation in a ‘deconstructed tech store’ gallery.
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We will practice and theorise new interdisciplinary methodological approaches to data in a symposium, which brings together academics and community practitioners.
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Finally, the project (which is financed by an AHRC follow-on impact grant and linked to the original Our Data Ourselves AHRC grant) will assist NGOs in the field through an Impact Report that will inform about best practices and provide an overview over all aforementioned activities.
Tactical Tech is a Berlin-based non-profit which works at the intersection of technology, human rights and civil liberties.
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SoBigData
SoBigData - European Research Infrastructure for Big Data and Social Mining (September 2015 – September 2019).
SoBigData.eu receives funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 654024.
Fosca Giannotti (CNR – Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche) is Project Coordinator, Tobias Blanke is PI, Mark Cote is CI. Marco Braghieri (King's PhD Student) also attached to the project.
SoBigData reseaches and develops a Social Mining and Big Data Ecosystem for ethically sensitive scientific discoveries and advanced applications in social data mining. The project aims to open up new research avenues by enabling easy comparison, re-use and integration of state-of-the-art big social data, methods, and services in multiple research fields, including mathematics, ICT, and human, social and economic sciences.
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Our Data Ourselves
 Our research project “Our Data Ourselves” was an AHRC-funded grant at King’s College London in 2013-15, to consider the personal data generate in the everyday lives of young people. Our aims were to increase our understanding of the nature and role of the data that young people produce when they use platforms and applications on their smartphones.
We co-researched this environment with members of Young Rewired State, who were between the ages of 14 and 18. Together with them, we produced an open environment for mobile big social data research with tools, applications and an infrastructure predicated on an ethical framework for data sharing available for widespread community use. The MobileMiner app allowed us to trace in- and out-going communications on mobile phones and identify, which data was leaked and to whom on the phone.
At the end of the project, we ran a series of master classes covering a range of topics in privacy and mobile phone usage as well as future possibilities for research.
King’s lead researchers: Tobias Blanke (PI); Mark Cote (CI); Jennifer Pybus.
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PERICLES
January 2013 – March 2017
PERICLES received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement No. 601138, as part od the Digital Preservation theme. Details of funding may be found here.
Project Coordinator and King’s PI: Mark Hedges, Department of Digital Humanities.
PERICLES addressed the challenge of ensuring that digital content remains accessible in an environment that is subject to continual change. The project took a model-based approach that involved capturing and maintaining information about digital objects, their environments, and the processes and policies to which they are subject. PERICLES produced a portfolio of modelling languages, and tools for populating and managing the resulting models, as well as a range of examples, guidelines and best practice. The approaches were trialled in two domains: digital media artworks, and experimental scientific data from the International Space Station.
The project culminated in an international conference in London, organised jointly with the Digital Preservation Coalition, ‘Acting on Change: New Approaches and Future Practices in Long-term Digital Preservation’. The project created a working group addressing at the complex issues and challenges involved in preserving software-based artworks, which resulted in a report . Another result of the collaboration between King’s and Tate in this area was as an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership, for which King’s student Tom Ensom is producing a thesis on ‘Technical Narratives: Analysis, Description and Representation in the Conservation of Software-based Art’.
 
Image by: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, "Subtitled Public", 2005. Sala de Arte Publico Siqueiros, Mexico City, Mexico. Photo by: Alex Dorfsman (right) Courtesy of NASA (left).
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Read the Department of Digital Humanities full list of past projects