Recently published projects
| Project description | |
|---|---|
| A searchable, standards based catalogue of the Calum Maclean collection of Gaelic oral narrative | The Calum Maclean Collection Online Catalogue Project aims to make a major collection of material central to Scottish Ethnology available in digital form as an accessible and flexible research resource. The collection consists of over 13,000 manuscript pages of transcriptions of Gaelic folklore and song from the fieldwork of Calum Iain Maclean (1915-1960) carried out mainly in the Scottish Hebrides as well as in the Scottish Mainland Highlands. Primarily the collection consists of tale-texts together with full-length autobiographies from two major storytellers. The texts will be encoded in XML using TEI format and presented dynamically online via a website through a searchable XML database. This will not only provide a powerful and adaptable contemporary resource for folktale research but also a major Gaelic language corpus. |
| The Cairo Genizah manuscripts: Taylor-Schechter Old Series and the Mosseri Collection | The project aims to complete the cataloguing and detailed description of the Old Series of the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection and a substantial proportion of the Jacques Mosseri Genizah Collection. The T-S Collection consists of approx. 193,000 medieval (and early modern) Jewish manuscripts recovered from a storeroom (Genizah) in Old Cairo one hundred years ago, and is an unparalleled resource for the study of medieval Judaism, Islam and the history of the Mediterranean and Near East in the Middle Ages. The Old Series is the historical core of the Collection, and approx. 16,000 manuscripts (dating mostly from the 9th to the mid-13th c. CE) will be described in detail. The descriptions will be matched to high-quality digital images (produced by a parallel project), and will be made available online through the Library's web site. 1000 items from the Jacques Mosseri Genizah Collection - a collection of Genizah manuscripts made later than the T-S but originating, mostly, from the same source - will also be described and digitised, images and descriptions to go online. |
| Commissioning, production, content and audience reception of bicentenary events commemorating the abolition of the slave trade in the UK, 1807-2007 | The central aim of the 1807 Commemorated project was to both map and analyse the responses of museums and their audiences to the 2007 bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade act of 1807. |
| Designing for services in science and technology-based enterprises | Designing for Services in Science and Technology-Based Enterprises was an interdisciplinary research project initiated by Saïd Business School (SBS) at the University of Oxford. This one-year study (2006-2007) explored how academics, service designers, and science and technology entrepreneurs understand the designing of services in science and technology-based enterprises. Three case studies were set up in which one science-based service enterprise was paired with a design consultancy, working together for six days over several months. Five events held over a year at SBS brought together academics, service designers, the service design consultants and the science entrepreneurs in order to hear from the designer-enterprise pairs, reflect on these encounters and attempt to develop a cross-disciplinary understanding of service design in science and technology-based enterprises. Outputs included a publication drawing on several disciplinary perspectives and a short ethnographic film focussing on the material practices of the designers. The research is part of a larger conversation about what is involved in designing services, rather than products at a time when a new design practitioner has emerged, bringing arts-based design practices to service design, in contrast to the marketing and engineering based approaches that also exist. |
| Capturing the past, preserving the future: digitisation of the national review of live art video collection | The Capturing the Past, Preserving the Future project has the following aims: To preserve for posterity the unique research materials contained in the National Review of Live Art Video Archive by digitising and maintaining the entire collection; To create an interactive and searchable on-line catalogue, including selected copyright-cleared examples of its holdings; To promote the enhanced research facility amongst the UK higher education, national and international performance research and practitioner communities; Readiness for developing curated programmes. We are creating new archival masters to ensure the continuation of content beyond the life of the fragile carrier. Unlike photography, few standards or precedents exist for generating new audio-visual archival masters. Following recent research, we chose to store our data in uncompressed format, without the use of electronic compression algorithms which are often employed to reduce the amount of data storage required. As well as generating uncompressed archival video, the project also produces access copies in the form of DVD-videos. DVD-video is both familiar and economical, making the generation of replacements for damaged copies straightforward. It offers the possibility of adding artists' and programmers' commentaries and incorporating multiple camera angles. |