King's College London

This Roadmap, authored by more than 40 contributors across the UK’s Arts & Humanities digital research ecosystem, emerged from workshops, task‑and‑finish groups, and community consultation. Led by The Alan Turing Institute Data/Culture project with input from multiple UK universities as well as other research organisations such as the National Archives, it ‘outlines a strategic plan to establish a national, people-centred A&H RSE Capability, ensuring that digital expertise is accessible and sustainable within A&H research.’

The roadmap highlights how KDL’s established model, ethos and expertise can directly inform and shape a future UK‑wide A&H RSE Capability.

The Roadmap praises KDL’s experimental approach, ability to turn ideas into prototypes, collaborative design ethos, sustainable software lifecycle management and support for multimodal humanities datasets: ‘Since its founding, the lab has embraced the value of experimental approaches to specific research questions and contexts. When coupled with seed funding, these collaborations have increased the chances of ambitious ideas and larger projects becoming viable and, crucially, leading to more robust products.’

KDL’s longstanding emphasis on prototyping, experimentation and responsible software development is highlighted as a model for how UK A&H research can innovate at scale. Case studies such as Sculpting Time with Computers are presented as evidence of KDL’s collaborative ability to transform exploratory ideas into fundable digital research outputs.

The Roadmap proposes that the national Capability should adopt King’s Digital Lab’s modular, flexible approach to software lifecycles, its open, sustainable, and responsible development ethos, and its capacity to support multimodal A&H datasets and collaborative design processes with domain experts.

This positions KDL as a potential strategic delivery partner in shaping future digital research infrastructure across the UK.

The Roadmap is available here.