e-Science grant successes

The Department is home to two recent research grant successes in the emerging field of e-Science applied to the Arts and Humanities.

Peter Ainsworth and Mike Meredith have been awarded funding from the prestigious "Digging into Data" programme jointly sponsored by the JISC (UK), National Science Foundation (USA) and National Endowment for the Humanities (USA). The award funds speculative research on high-resolution manuscript facsimile images, and on similar images of 17th-18th century maps and 19th-20th century quilts. Project partners are the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Michigan State University. The project began in January 2010 and runs for 15 months.

Mike Meredith has also been awarded HEIF4 funding to develop a new front end for the interactive "Kiosque" and "Virtual Vellum" exhibition and manuscript-viewing software developed by him with Peter Ainsworth. The Research Assistant to the project is Keira Borrill who recently worked with Mike and Peter on the AHRC-funded Online Froissart project. The new project begins on 1 May 2010 for a year.

Readers may be interested to know that the Virtual Vellum software developed by Mike and Peter was selected by the Chief Executive Officer of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council as the exemplar project for the Arts and Humanities to be showcased during the recent international review of UK e-Science (Imperial College London and Oxford, Dec 2009 to Jan 2010).