Current Projects

The following is a list of current projects led or supported by the HRI's technology development service HRI Digital, along with links to further information.

Archive of Exile

HRI Digital is providing an online presence for this project, led by the Dept of Geography in partnership with the Department of English at Sheffield. The project involves exploring notions of exile and archive with creative arts practitioners.

Augmenting Participation: an Augmented Participation Service for the Courtauld Gallery

The Courtauld Gallery is working with the University's Department of Sociological Studies and Humanities Research Institute to explore how augmented participation techniques can be used to improve people's understanding of art within the context of the gallery or museum space.

Bess of Hardwick

HRI Digital is providing the technical expertise to enable this project, based at the University of Glasgow, to create a fully searchable, online edition of the letters of Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury (known as Bess of Hardwick).

The Norman Blake Editions of the Canterbury Tales

The Norman Blake Editions will be a series of online editions which present full diplomatic transcriptions of seven manuscripts of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, to be made available to the public for free.

The British Academy John Foxe Project

This 'Category One Research Project' of the British Academy is producing a new, definitive edition of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments of the English Martyrs, based on a textual reconstruction of the four editions published in Foxe's lifetime.

Cause Papers in the Diocesan Courts of the Archbishopric of York 1300-1858

HRI Digital is providing the technical expertise to enable this project, based at the University of York´s Borthwick Institute, to create a searchable database of all the 13,669 cause papers of the Diocese of York from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, providing more information about the cases than the present printed and manuscript finding aids allow.

Connected Histories: Sources for Building British History, 1500-1900

This JISC-funded project will create a federated search facility, 'Connected Histories', which will enable structured searching across fourteen major datasets on the subject of early modern and nineteenth-century British history.

Crime in the Community: Enhancing User Engagement for Teaching & Research with
the Old Bailey Online

Funded by the JISC, Crime in the Community will assess the ways in which the Old Bailey Proceedings Online website is currently used, and generate a series of new tools and online facilities that will allow educationalists and researchers to make more effective use of the site.

Culture and the Mind (Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies)

This AHRC-funded interdisciplinary project investigates the philosophical consequences of the impact of culture on the mind and the cognitive and evolutionary foundations of culture.

Data Mining with Criminal Intent

Funded by the JISC, NEH and SSHRC as part of the 'Digging into Data' programme, this international project will illustrate how the tools of digital humanities can be used to wrest new knowledge from one of the largest humanities data sets currently available: the Old Bailey Online. HRI Digital will be developing a Web API which allows other web services to interact with the dataset.

Dialect in British Fiction 1800-1836

This project will develop a database as a tool for describing and analysing the representation of dialect in novels, and will record the representation of dialect in 100-120 novels published between 1800 and 1836.

Digging into Image Data to Answer Authorship Related Questions

This project has been funded by the joint JISC-NEH-NSF-SSHRC Digging into Data competition and collaborates with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, and Michigan State University, USA. The aim of the project is to jointly explore authorship across three distinct image datasets: collection of digitised 15th-century manuscripts, a collection of 17th- and 18th-century digitized maps and a collection of 19th- and 20th-century digitized quilts.

Exhibitor

The Exhibitor project is a HEIF-4-funded project that aims to: (1) work with external partners in the field of innovative multi-touch displays to further enhance a new interactive software called Kiosque with the latest technology, to help support its ongoing development; and (2) engage in outreach activities using this technology, which will include taking it into schools, museums, libraries etc., which might have an interest in jointly developing content packages as a means of a learning/teaching aid/tool.

Kinecting up the Past

Kinecting up the Past is exploring the research benefits, use, and disruptive nature of cheap consumer-grade technology to capture environments and artefacts in 3-dimensions using Microsoft’s Kinect controller.

Kiosque

Kiosque is the name given to the software development that arose from a Knowledge Transfer Partnership involving the University of Sheffield´s French Department and e-Learning specialists Tribal (Sheffield).

Locating London's Past: A Geo-Referencing Tool for Mapping Historical and Archaeological Evidence, 1660-1800

Locating London's Past will create an intuitive GIS interface that will enable researchers to map and visualize textual and artefactual data relating to seventeenth and eighteenth-century London against a fully rasterised version of John Rocque's 1746 map of London and the first accurate modern OS map (1869-80).

The Manor Lodge Project

HRI Digital is working with the York Archaeological Trust on behalf of the Dept of Archaeology to deliver interactive 3D reconstructions of the the medieval and sixteenth-century hunting lodge of Sheffield. HRI Digital will develop the interface for YAT's visualisations.

The Medieval Scribes Project

HRI Digital is providing the technical expertise to enable this project, based at the University of York, to compile an online catalogue of all scribal hands (identified or unidentified) which appear in Middle English, literary manuscripts. The catalogue will include a complete palaeographical and dialectal profile for each scribe.

Mozart in Italy

HRI Digital has been commissioned by the EU-funded Mozart and Italy Project to develop an intuitive interface for the project's forthcoming edition of Mozart's letters.

Networks of Book Makers, Owners and Users in Late Medieval England

Ola Nordmann Goes West

A Norwegian journey to the Promised Land

The Olive Schreiner Letters

The feminist and socialist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) was one of the most important - and radical - social commentators of her day. The ESRC-funded Olive Schreiner Letters Project will transcribe, analyse and publish the complete extant Olive Schreiner letters, numbering approximately 7000, presently in archival locations world-wide.

The Online Froissart

Froissart's Chronicles of the Hundred Years´ War are one of the most influential works of late medieval French literature, and remain a prime source for historians of society, politics, culture and narrative. This online edition will offer scholars worldwide a freely available online tool for textual, palaeographical and iconographic research on Froissart´s Chronicles.

Personal Signage through Augmented Reality

Imagine having a private tour-guide that would give you personalised directions to a meeting room, office or lecture theatre as you are navigating around and inside an unfamiliar series of buildings on campus, for example. Moreover, the information is tailored for students, visitors and staff, taking into account different access preferences (i.e. stairs, lifts, disabled access points, etc). Not only could point-to-point directions be given, but whole tours and journeys constructed. Using the latest augmented reality for mobile devices, that is exactly what this project will deliver as a pilot study.

Renaissance Cultural Crossroads

HRI Digital is providing the technical expertise to enable this project, based at the University of Warwick, to create a fully searchable online catalogue of translations into English.of important Renaissance works.

The Taxatio

The detailed records of the assessment (known as a taxatio) of English and Welsh ecclesiastical wealth undertaken in 1291-2 on the orders of Pope Nicholas IV have long been recognised as an essential source for the study of the late medieval Church. The aim of the Taxatio project is to provide a comprehensive new edition of the listing and valuation of the ecclesiastical benefices of England and Wales which comprise the 'spiritualities' sections of the assessment.