The King's Digital Lab (KDL) is a Research Software Engineering (RSE) team based in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at King’s College London.

A little over ten years ago, KDL was split off from Department of Digital Humanities (DDH), founded in 2011, to become the inheritor of much of the research software engineering production of both DDH and its predecessor, the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH), founded in 1996, with over 100 projects to care for, alongside collaborating with researchers to design and develop new digital research across the Faculty of Arts and Humanities domains.

In operation since 2015 and officially launched in November 2016, KDL partners with researchers from across King’s, as well as from other institutions, cultural heritage organisations and the creative industries to create new forms of digital scholarship.

Over this time, KDL evolved, adapting and changing as technology, funding and digital humanities changed.

KDL developed an approach that involves close collaboration with partners and focuses on understanding their research goals and developing solutions to achieve those. The team approaches research outputs holistically, considering the research goals, potential impact, likely users of these outputs, long-term sustainability and support needs.

With a responsibility to its unprecedented legacy of digital scholarly outputs, KDL strives to provide access to standards-compliant data and to produce maintainable and sustainable technical solutions.

On the 10^th anniversary of King’s Digital Lab, we look back at ten of the lab’s highly impactful projects.

ISSA: Intelligent Systems for Screen Archives

• Project link
• A&H department: Digital Humanities
• Project dates: 2025-2027

Working in partnership with moving image archives in the UK, ISSA aims to develop sector-wide understanding about AI technologies in film and television archives, including the knowledge, skills and tools required to rethink and reshape large audiovisual collections from a computational perspective.

The project falls within KDL’s Machine Learning and AI research theme, exploring ways to effectively use this technology with humanities research. A significant challenge of using AI in moving image archives is the lack of domain-specific systems that exemplify, end-to-end, how to go from collections to interactions. KDL research software engineers (RSEs) have built prototype frameworks and interfaces which use machine learning methods and tools, including video language models, to discover, access and exploit digital video content. One prototype analyses video files and breaks them into meaningful segments with descriptive metadata. Another searches for instances where named places are either mentioned or identifiably appear in a video. The partner archives on the project all have numerous items in their collections which are sparsely catalogued and the contents largely unknown, so these kinds of discovery aids will be immensely beneficial to them and their users.

From a user perspective and building on the preceding work, KDL is thinking about creative ways that users can exploit video content that has been surfaced, identified and made manipulable. From a score of different sources which have been semantically searched and segmented, for example, an interface could help a user put together their own story about the place they live in, the work they do, the hobby they love.

NCSE: Nineteenth Century Serial Editions

• Project link
• A&H department: English
• Project dates: 2008 (under CCH), 2017-2018, 2023-2024

Nineteenth Century Serial Editions is an interesting example of a project that KDL (in present and previous incarnations) has worked on at three distinct stages of its life cycle.

This online edition of six nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers comprises two main components: a repository of full-page facsimiles and textual transcripts generated through Optical Character Recognition; and an index of semantic keywords and person, place and institution names, generated using data mining and natural language processing techniques. Both components of the system are fully searchable and include rich, bibliographic metadata attached to titles, volumes, issues, departments and articles within the edition. These components were developed in the first version of the resource, and multiple interconnections were provided between them so that users could discover content, including images, via different pathways.

In a second major phase (2017-18) KDL repurposed software it had produced for another project and created a new facsimile component with a data-forward design through which users could browse and view the periodical facsimiles by publication, year, issue, and page/article. Using some of the staff 10 per cent exploratory time and falling within KDL’s Data Visualisation  research theme, visualisations of the statistics of the periodicals were tested with project partners and integrated into the design.

With the most recent work on the project, KDL applied lessons learned from the Archiving and Sustainability  approach the Lab has developed over the last ten years and furthered this research into sustainability for digital resources. This phase has seen KDL exporting data from both components of the project into King’s College London’s research data management system to preserve it, as well as to maintain its accessibility in the face of technological change and the need to adapt to reduced funding for maintaining the full current version of the resource.

Mao Era in Objects

• Project link
• A&H department: History (moved to Oxford partway through the project – KDL collaboration remained when the rest of the project moved)
• Project dates: 2018-2019

This project offered users an unusual window on the Mao era in China (1949-76) through a website built around a set of 'biographies' of iconic objects associated with that period, ranging from common, prosaic types – washbasins, bricks, badges – to the particular or unusual, such as the Beijing International Club, and the Chinese character typewriter. Each biography centres on a capsule essay written by an academic with experience working with that object.

The project was conceived with secondary level students studying Chinese history in mind and KDL worked closely with Dr Altehenger to create a design and structure that would spark curiosity, draw users into the biographies and facilitate exploration within and among the objects.

To this end, the home page ‘opens’ the site with an eye-catching grid of images which displays the scope of the collection whilst inviting exploration of individual objects. The design goal for each aspect of the site was to blend visual and content appeal to the target audience with scholarly rigour.

KDL built in different levels of navigation and different means of presenting information supplied by the scholars to cater for different types of users with different needs. This user-centric approach to the site design aims to maximise the research impact for a wide range of individuals and groups. However, the pedagogical imperative is always observed with sidebar menus which foreground sources and further reading and a special section for educators which explains how the website features – some initially developed by a team of educators working at UK schools and universities and UK exam boards representatives – are designed to be of particular help to educators looking to make use of the site materials in their classes.

The Community of the Realm in Scotland, 1249-1424

• Project link
• A&H department: History
• Project dates: 2017-2021

The scholars behind The Community of the Realm in Scotland  wanted to show how new ways of representing medieval texts in digital media can yield new understandings of medieval political communities and their written manifestations.

The short but historically significant document they chose as a basis for a proof-of-concept – the Declaration of Arbroath from 1320 – became a locus of textual change as it was circulated and copied in Scotland in the central Middle Ages. While variation is commonplace in early textual transmission, the scholars were particularly interested in identifying locations of ‘unsettled’ text, where the difference between what is found in one manuscript and another would be likely to alter the way a word is read or understood.

Initial work on the project involved KDL and the scholars discussing and refining the definitions of core concepts from abstractions to material manifestations. From these discussions, KDL created a data model that would guide the scholars’ editorial work and provide the foundation for the design and development team to plan for how the textual data would be processed, stored and then presented in the public-facing website.

With multiple manuscript witnesses organised into six version groups, the challenge was to make all the editorial information available to users without overwhelming them and without losing sight of the overall goal of showing the most ‘unsettled’ areas. The developer and the UI/UX specialist worked closely together on a text viewer interface which uses colour-coding and symbols to indicate the presence of unsettled text and show commonalities and differences among the different manuscripts. An early strand of the approaches that come under KDL’s Data Visualisation research theme, interactive visualisations such as a heatmap and a region viewer were included in the site to help users navigate the complexity of the data.

SHARC: Shakespeare Holdings in the Royal Collection 

• Project link
• A&H department: English
• Project dates: 2018-2022

Focusing on the Shakespeare-related holdings in the Royal Collection and Royal Archives, the project assesses what they tell us, individually and collectively, about the relationship between the cultural afterlife of Shakespeare’s works and the royal family from 1714 (the accession of George I) to the present.

Because data collection had already been going on before the start of the project, the first imperative for KDL was to work with the researchers to design a standards-based data model which would account for the detailed metadata the researchers were gathering and also represent the structure of possible associations that could hold between an object and Shakespeare both as an iconic author figure and as an individual.

Based on that data model, KDL built a customised backend for creating, editing and storing object records. Data collected earlier in spreadsheet format was converted and imported into this backend framework, and subsequently, the researchers entered data directly into it. The backend data framework underpins the frontend which showcases the metadata together with images provided by the Royal Collection, and it also provides for exporting the object metadata as EAD3 XML. The frontend website was designed to offer users multiple ways of exploring the object dataset and trace the many connections among the objects as well as the many people associated with creating, giving and acquiring them.

The combination of the visual design and the finding aids, together with a section of the site telling the stories of two groups of objects, move the site away from being just a window into a database and help the user see the overall collection in terms of the political and ideological context which the project team wanted to bring out.

'As well as developing a search and filter function deploying tags and themes devised by the ShaRC team – including 'associated names’, an object’s provenance, and (most thornily) the nature of an object’s relationship to Shakespeare – KDL also created a series of object pages for the public presentation of our research. The fields provided here, which we developed in consultation, provided a framework for researching and writing about the objects we found and making that research available to the public. Similarly, the challenge of breaking down a very large amount of information and presenting it to a general audience in bite-sized form – as with the timeline and the 'stories' section of the site – offered a valuable way of thinking about, and indeed developing, the offline research outputs (a series of publications). We are proud of, and grateful for, the work KDL did for us – advising, designing, collaborating, fixing, sustaining – and we feel the website is a fitting legacy for the project as a whole,' says Professor Gordon McMullan.

Sudan Memory: A Partnership for Conserving and Promoting Sudanese Cultural and Documentary Heritage

• Project link
• A&H department: Digital Humanities
• Project dates: 2022-2026

The Sudan Memory project seeks to conserve and promote valuable cultural materials from and about Sudan through digitisation and via an online platform. Throughout the country, many interesting and rich archives are at risk for a number of reasons: extreme weather conditions, lack of appropriate storage conditions, neglect and conflict. Many public and private collections are also locked away and not easily accessible.

The Sudan Memory project mission is to help preserve these archives and their stories, so that current and future generations can benefit from this precious and important heritage. This work falls within KDL’s Indigenous Digital Humanities Research Theme.

KDL's involvement is principally through advising the project team to support the development of the Sudan Memory digital resource, providing targeted expertise in specific areas where the needs of the project meant that website development was best handled by other teams. The Lab also takes part in broader discussions around the sustainability of the Sudan Memory website and future projects that are being developed from the work already undertaken to capture and preserve Sudanese heritage. This kind of low-level, targeted support for major projects allows partners to access KDL’s expertise on projects which don’t require more extensive involvement from the Lab.

KDL’s contribution around archiving and sustainability, as well as data sovereignty, has helped focus discussions on these topics, especially in these times of conflict. These discussions are also central to the related Unhousing Restitution (UNREST)  project in which KDL is collaborating with Prof Erica Carter, in the Film department, to again provide expertise for a major project.

GLoW3: Global Leadership of Women in Web 3.0 

• Project link
• A&H department: CMCI
• Project dates: 2023-2024

GLoW3 (Global Leadership of Women in Web 3.0) was a project and exhibition celebrating and highlighting the contributions of women, trans and non-binary innovators in emerging digital media. A recurring feature of the many professional stories in this space is the extent to which groundbreaking work has been freely appropriated when a commercial potential is identified, leaving innovators feeling disenfranchised, marginalised, and obscuring the instrumental roles they have played during formative periods of technological change.

Launched on 11 March 2024 in Bush House Arcade, the GLoW3 exhibition showcased both new artworks and legacy pieces which map key points in the history of digital immersive media over the last four decades. The exhibition was complemented by events and panels during its run and was organised and curated by Professor Sarah Atkinson as part of a fellowship award.

KDL supported this initiative in several ways, most directly through working as Creative Technologists for the four artist residencies funded through the project, supporting them in work with real-time engines, WebXR (A-Frame) Augmented Reality (AR) and 3D modelling. This project comes under the Lab’s long-running Digital Creativity research theme, which has grown out of some of our oldest projects like 2018’s Digital Ghost Hunt. 'The chance to flex our creative muscles in the service of an important project like GLoW3 was a wonderful opportunity,' says the KDL team.

Some of the 3D and animation work KDL participated in can be found in this Sketchfab collection.

IRT: Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania 

• Project link
• A&H department: Classics
• Project dates: 2009, 2021

The Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania project had multiple versions, building on each other to provide a richly documented collection of published inscriptions.

The first corpus of Roman inscriptions from Tripolitania (today Western Libya) was published by Joyce Reynolds in 1952. In 2009, she worked with Gabriel Bodard, Tom Elliott, Charlotte Roueché and Hafed Walda to republish that volume – with some 20 more texts – in digital form, with translations and full illustration. The digital edition was one of the early ones to follow the EpiDoc guidelines for encoding scholarly and educational editions of ancient documents using a subset of the widely adopted Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines for textual markup. King's Digital Lab archived that site and still hosts it in static form.

In 2021, Bodard and Roueché, with Caroline Barron and Irene Vagionakis, worked to enhance that publication by adding all the inscriptions from the area published since 1952, drawing from a variety of sources.

In 2020, KDL archived and converted the 2009 digital edition of Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania (IRT) to a static site with limited functionalities and created an IRT2021 EFES (EpiDoc Front End Services) instance with associated environments.

EFES is a publication solution designed to assist researchers and editors who have produced EpiDoc-encoded texts but do not necessarily have access to Research Software Engineering support. It is based on the Kiln platform developed for the publication of TEI XML projects at the Department of Digital Humanities and King’s Digital Lab.

IRT is an example of good practices in terms of archiving and sustainability. A variety of data assets (including inscriptions photographs) are archived on King's institutional repository, while both the 2009 static edition remains accessible for citation purposes, even if replaced by a modernised 2021 edition with a nimbler software architecture served via KDL code repository.

STEP-UP: a Strategic TEchnical Platform for University technical Professionals

• Project link
• A&H department: King’s Digital Lab
• Project dates: 2024-2027

The STEP-UP platform is an EPSRC project to develop and support digital Research Technical Professionals (RTPs) and their ecosystem.

'Digital infrastructure' – enabling computational modelling, processing of larger datasets, creation of advanced research facilities, sharing results openly – is the foundation of an increasing number of research domains, including the arts, humanities and cultural studies and research.

STEP-UP starting point is that a trained, motivated 'people infrastructure' of expert technical talent – such as research software engineers, research data stewards and compute infrastructure managers – along with the career opportunities to support them, is critical to meet new and increasing demands on institutional and national research digital infrastructures.

Led by Imperial College London in collaboration with University College London, University of Westminster and indeed King’s College London (via both e-Research and King’s Digital Lab), STEP-UP project team builds on the Research Software London (RSLondon) community to support and train digital RTPs across software development, data management and processing, and computational infrastructure domains.

King’s Digital Lab, via the co-lead role of its Director and expert contribution from other members of the team, is addressing these challenges in research technical careers and recognition head-on. The platform provides short-term funding to develop a robust model for sharing technical talent within and across institutions, and for increasing awareness of its importance with researchers and institutional governance also in the disciplines KDL works the most in, starting from good practices at PhD level (via the STEP-UP Champions scheme) to peer support (mentorship scheme), training programmes and advanced research workflows.

KDL has committed to define the roles of people and their career pathways in research digital infrastructures since its inception, sharing reflections and establishing frameworks around the Lab’s structure, contributing to community engagement (including the recent national RSE capability in the arts and humanities roadmap led by the Data/Culture project) and attracting other funding such as DARIAH-DESIR and more recently DiscouRSE.

Image caption: Potential decades when the word ‘car’ changed meaning with two change points represented by the vertical lines (penalty decreased to 22)

Living with Machines

• Project link
• A&H department: Digital Humanities
• Project dates: 2023-2024

A multidisciplinary research collaboration between the British Library and the Alan Turing Institute with King's College London, the Universities of Cambridge, East Anglia, Exeter, and London (QMUL), the Living with Machines project aimed to investigate how the introduction of machines into the workplace and landscape changed the lives of ordinary people in the nineteenth century. It had several research strands , and KDL’s contribution related to our Machine Learning and AI and Data Visualisation research themes.

King's Digital Lab worked in collaboration with members of the project team to produce three products in the form of computational notebooks:

1. to produce visualisations of various tasks on the Zooniverse crowdsourcing platform to provide insight into the overall activity of annotation across workflows to make the code used for this project reproducible, so that others can use or adapt it to visualise data from their own crowdsourcing projects;
2. to visualise crowdsourced data from the original digitised newspaper articles, contemporary press directories that described individual newspapers, and classifications by Zooniverse volunteers;
3. to analyse words that changed meaning during the 19th century, examining their connection to the process of mechanisation in British society, specifically focused on terms used to describe vehicles.

This collaboration led to two co-authored publications: a data paper and a forthcoming chapter book reflecting on the analysis of language enabled by KDL data processing and visualisations work.