Hot Source! Targeted Digital Skills Development, from Artefact to Analytics

'Hot Source! Targeted Digital Skills Development, from Artefact to Analytics' will lay the groundwork for a regional and national centre for digital skills training in the Southwest that fully meets the occupational requirements of Arts & Humanities (A&H) researchers and associated sectors.

This pilot project takes place in the context of the iDAH programme, set up by the AHRC in 2021, and committed to establishing three to five national centres to develop and embed the use of digital tools and methods across the arts and humanities user community. While formal and informal opportunities to acquire digital skills have been available for many years, it is clear that structural issues, including the persistent canalization of STEMM and HASS disciplines within UK education, and the many competing demands of academic careers, have significantly reduced uptake.

The success of the programme will consequently require substantive engagement with A&H researchers to determine both the skills and delivery modes that will provide the maximum return on time and financial investment. This will be essential if digital skills are to become sufficiently common among A&H researchers for them to be understood as a core component of 21st century literacy, rather than a niche specialism.

The University of Exeter has a been an international leader in applying digital methods to A&H research since the creation of its £1.2M Digital Humanities Lab in 2017. Building on this investment and our extensive experience of developing and delivering skills training to A&H researchers and students, the project's objectives are to:

1. Clarify the requirements landscape for A&H researchers in the Southwest. In particular we will establish which skills A&H researchers see as most essential for their work, and what kinds of delivery formats can best be integrated with the complex demands of an academic career.

2. Develop and deliver four new training courses as both the core of a wider programme focussed on the digitization and analysis of primary source materials, but also a mechanism for trialling and refining varying modes of delivery. These courses will span a range of levels of expertise and have relevance to a broad array of disciplines.

Two of them will focus on methods for producing digital texts from analogue materials, including capturing and presenting human-readable 2D, 2.5D and/or 3D visualizations of physical resources and extracting text from images using OCR and HTR-based approaches. The other two will allow researchers to make enhanced use of digital texts, including issues of dataset creation, cleaning and management and introduce participants to programmatic analysis of texts using Python.

3. Engage closely with course participants in the establishment of a wider skills programme, and a community of digitally-capable A&H research practitioners in the Southwest. This will include those with a professional or personal interest in A&H research in FE, the cultural sector and the general public.

The benefits of the pilot will extend to multiple stakeholder groups. Most directly, it will provide 80 researchers with key digital skills that will expand their capabilities when working with primary sources. We will work together with this network to catalyse broader changes in practice across universities and other research organisations.

Those institutions in turn will benefit from Exeter's significant prior investment in expertise and facilities to provide training that may be unaffordable to provide otherwise. This will allow Arts & Humanities departments across the broader Southwest to benefit from increasing awareness of, and capability in, methods that allow them to make best use of the ever-expanding array of digital sources and tools available to the 21st century arts & humanities researcher.