Digital Humanities at Oxford refers to a wide range of disciplines and research areas. As well as those covered by the faculties of the Humanities Division, research and technical expertise also reside in the Bodleian Library (which holds several large Andrew W. Mellon Foundation DH grants), the University museums (which are digitising their significant collections), and IT Services, as well as within other academic divisions – Social Sciences (Oxford Internet Institute, Anthropology, Archaeology Geography and Environment, and Politics and International Relations); and the sciences (Oxford e-Research Centre and Zooniverse/Physics).
Oxford University has a long track-record of external funding success in Digital Humanities across the Arts and Humanities Research Council, major trusts and foundations, and the European Research Council. Projects have also been funded through the internal John Fell Fund.
The collaborative benefits are felt by a broad network of researchers and research in interdisciplinary areas across Oxford. Digital Humanities also helps to project Oxford’s international presence through building collaborative multi-national research communities and by maintaining and developing widely used reference resources that are openly available and frequently used for research. Many of its most significant and long-standing projects are research reference points that are global in their reach and significance for humanities disciplines.
We have created an inclusive, vibrant Digital Humanities community. We embrace and celebrate our centres and services that cross boundaries: TORCH, the Oxford e-Research Centre, the Oxford Internet Institute, the Centre for Digital Scholarship, the Bodleian Libraries, the Museums and University collections, IT Services Research Support, colleges, OUP—the list is growing.
Our vision embraces the digital and the social: we are talking about scholarship at scale, but not just the scale of big data—it is social sense-making, co-creating insights, innovating in methods, engaging citizens, and building interdisciplinary scholarly capacity. Underpinning this emerging post-disciplinary scholarship is a growing computational and data infrastructure, from the engines of Advanced Research Computing to the archives of ORA-Data—and unrivalled collections, set to be unlocked through context-rich resource discovery.
The Humanities Division’s academic strategy has identified Digital Humanities as an area for growth and investment. A significant number of impact case studies for REF2021 include a digital element, and many of the key datasets are widely used internationally and seen as flagship disciplinary projects. The continued support of the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School (a collaborative venture with the Bodleian Library and the Oxford e-Research Centre) as a showcase for Oxford's research is also very much part of this strategy.
