Recently published projects
| Project description | |
|---|---|
| Heritage in Hospitals: An investigation of the therapeutic and enrichment potential of object handling in hospitals and other healthcare organisations | How does museum object handling affect wellbeing and recovery? Are patients in healthcare environments an appropriate audience for museums? Can the impact of handling sessions on patient wellbeing be measured? UCL Museums & Collections and University College London Hospitals have set out to answer these questions in the research project Heritage in Hospitals. With project partners, we are conducting research which for the first time will investigate the effect of handling museum objects on hospital patients’ wellbeing. The project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and will continue until 2011. The research is taking place in a range of healthcare contexts including several wards in University College Hospital, partner hospitals (e.g. Prospect Park Psychiatric Hospital in reading), care homes and partner museums (including: The British Museum, Oxford University Museums Service, Reading Museums Service). Museum handling sessions are being carried out using a variety of objects, initially from the broad ranging UCL Collections and partner museum’s collections. The effect on patient wellbeing is measured and recorded using quantitative scales and qualitative research techniques in order to address the above research questions. An artist in residence is employed to explore the creative role of museum object handling with patients and will result in two sire specific installation at UCL Hospital and an on line exhibition in the form of a microsite. |
| Connecting Historical Authorities with Linked data, Indices Contexts and Entities | CHALICE seeks to build an RDF gazetteer of location entities extracted from the digitized selections of the volumes of the English Place Name Survey. CHALICE should be a fun challenge in an as yet under-explored research area of historic text mining – tuning grammar rules to do markup that can then be used to train machine learning recognisers, and comparing the results. Through their work with CDDA we hope to gain insight into the best balance between manual annotation and manually-corrected automatic annotation, in terms of cost of work, cost savings for others’ future work, and benefits of the different approaches to named entity recognition. |
| Greece and Rome at the Fitzwilliam Museum | The project is a collaboration between the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Department of Classics at Cambridge to redisplay the Greek and Roman collections in the light of new research findings and scholarly approaches to the study of objects. The display will incorporate labels, panels, a map and timeline; there will also be a series of hand-held information boards for use in the gallery, which will introduce some of the underlying themes that can be pursued in various areas of the room. All the information in the gallery will also be available on the website, along with further resources and links to follow. Public talks and publications will also result from the project. |
| The development of the Celtic Coin Index | The British Celtic Coin Index provides online access to all the records of archaeological finds from 1961 to 2001, allowing access to over 28,000 records and images of British Celtic coins. The original Celtic Coin Index at Oxford was organized by Celtic Coin Index number, a unique identification number indicating the year and order in which each specimen was catalogued. When Hooker & Perron built the Celtic Coin Index Online, they wanted the records to be easier to find, so they organized them within their own context. The coin records (within the broad divisions of British and Continental Celtic), are sorted Geographically by Region, then by Tribe within each region, then, in the British issues, by Van Arsdell numbers, which shows summaries of each coin, leading to individual detailed coin records. There are essentially two methods of accessing the information:by Region/Tribe, then Van Arsdell number, down to individual coin records -- done by using the button found on all pages, or by using search terms that will collect all relevant records for your search criteria. |
| Unlocking Historic Landscapes in the Eastern Mediterranean | This research will make a step towards unlocking the history of Mediterranean landscapes by the application of a proven methodology pioneered in British landscape studies. We will map and analyse the historic landscape of terraces, fields, lanes and rural settlements that are typical of the eastern Mediterranean, and attempt to understand them in their historical context. The long-term history of the eastern Mediterranean shows that there are many different ways similar landscapes and environments can be inhabited and structured. This project will make a detailed investigation of the historic landscape through comparative study of two differing rural landscapes. We will assess how shared or divergent traditions have emerged over the last 1500 years by examining the changing structure of the rural landscape in the medieval and post-medieval periods. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) provide a tool for combining and comparing diverse datasets such as orthorectified aerial photographs, satellite data, digital mapping, and data on settlement patterns. We will use Historic Landscape Characterisation, which provides a framework for integrated diachronic landscape histories that incorporate data from relevant historical and archaeological sources at a range of scales. |