Data/Culture. Building sustainable communities around Arts and Humanities datasets and software

The UK is in a unique position to define and contribute to world leading data-driven arts and humanities research. Previous investments have created numerous datasets, methods, tools and pipelines. However, due to the nature of the current project-focused funding landscape, these are rarely leveraged by those outside the originating projects, meaning that return on investment is poor.

The reasons for this are manifold, but a key factor is the lack of infrastructure to support outputs and their uptake beyond the end date of projects in terms of hosting, maintenance, or human expertise. The effect is a repeated cycle of wasted labour. Even with the best due diligence, new projects often reinvent the wheel, building new datasets, tools and pipelines, because they do not know, or cannot access research infrastructure components that already exist elsewhere.

If those components could be made more generalisable, if they were well packaged and documented, if communities of users and maintainers were actively built around them, and if skills to exploit them were embedded, we could create the basic components of a modular digital research infrastructure that would help accelerate research innovation.

This pilot project proposes to test this hypothesis on the data and software outputs of two previously funded projects: Living with Machines (LwM), and Seshat: Global History Databank. At the centre of this vision is The Turing Institute, which by convening the data science and AI community in the UK, seeks to advance world-class research and apply it to real-world problems, and to build skills for the future. We will leverage the Turing's convening power in order to deliver three core tasks:

* Drive excellence in the development of data and software, developing LwM and Seshat project assets into sustainable architectures that have utility beyond these projects; * Accelerate research innovation, by leveraging these data and software components; * Create sustainable communities of practice that maintain and develop these outputs in new directions.