Information and Resources
These pages provide links to ICT-related activities and services in the UK related to those of the ICT Programme and funded either by the AHRC directly, or in partnership with other agencies.
The ICT Programme has worked closely with the former Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS), the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
The AHDS was jointly funded by the AHRC and JISC to support the creation, preservation, and dissemination of data. The ICT Programme's ICT Methods Network complemented the AHDS by promoting and supporting advanced methods of data use. The close collaboration between the two organizations reflected the interrelatedness of these two kinds of activity.
The ICT Programme has worked in partnership with JISC and the EPSRC to fund and develop the AHRC-EPSRC-JISC Arts and Humanities e-Science Initiative. JISC and EPSRC have both contributed substantially to the Research Grants scheme that forms part of the Initiative, and JISC has also funded the Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (AHESSC), which is jointly managed by the AHDS and the ICT Methods Network.
The JISC-funded ARIA project, which aimed to help arts and humanities postgraduates and staff develop research-relevant ICT skills, complemented the ICT Methods Network by concentrating on introductory rather than advanced resources. ARIA developed into the ICT Guides resource, based first in the AHDS and now in the King's College London Centre for e-Research, which collects together materials from ARIA, the AHDS and the ICT Methods Network to provide a single information-point about methods, projects, centres and training materials relating to ICT in arts and humanities research.
JISC has funded a number of other research and development projects of direct interest to the arts and humanities, including a major on-going Digitisation Programme, and the Virtual Research Environments programme.
About half of the research and resource-enhancement grants awarded by the AHRC, and previously AHRB, have involved some kind of digital output, including digital content resources and/or research findings belonging to specific subject-areas in the arts and humanities. A list of these is provided here. The ICT Programme has sought systematically to complement these activities by focussing on the creation of generic support services, the development of advanced technologies, tools and methods, and survey work relating to a wide range of disciplines.
The annual Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts (DRHA) conference provides an important point of contact for creators, users, distributors, and custodians of digital resources in the arts and humanities with the academic community. See the DRHA 2008 website for information about this year's conference.
Download our ICT Map for an overview of the different UK agencies that have supported the use of ICT for research in the arts and humanities.