Check out our video from the Arts Digital Day, in October 2017, and then pop along to the demo sessions, or to King’s Meadow Campus. We like the look of the Manuscripts and Special Collections tour, followed by a talk on “Exploring the Past and Future” with Charlie Laughton (Science) and Jo Robinson (Arts) — but there’s three days of events left to choose from!

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Check the Digital Arts tag for more examples of our exciting digital research projects, and go along to the Digital Research Week events to see what researchers across the University of Nottingham have been up to! We recognise a few names from the Wednesday demo session…

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A View from the Arts is running a series on digital projects in the Faculty of Arts, in advance of the Digital Research Week, which will run from  the 23^rd to the 27^th of April, 2018.

The Gifting Engagement project brings together three research areas: how audiences understand being ‘engaged’ with stories, how we gift digital objects and inspiring creativity through digital objects. We have created a box that contains a digital story as a gift for the storytellers that we are sending the box to. Alongside this gift is a challenge for the storyteller to re-tell the most ‘captivating’ story they have ever created.

The frame of the project is the Institute of Digital Life and Ephemera (IDLE). A solar flare hits the world in 2020, and digital archives are taken off-line. Along with archives the world over, IDLE loses all of its data. In order to begin to rebuild the archive, it has created simple storytelling boxes, which it sends out to participating storytellers, asking them to participate in helping IDLE build its archive of stories.

“At the department of devices, we have been hard at work creating the Storytelling Box. Only few technical resources survived the solar flare. Among those was a single voice recorder, which happened to be stored in our document vault, shielded from the flare. This recorder contained the only surviving story fragment from our previous archive.

To enable the recording of new stories and to start building up our archive once more, the Storytelling Boxes are being sent to you storytellers across the world. The boxes contain a simple playback device made by the department of devices from available analogue parts and these can only hold one story. We have put the last remaining story from our archive on and hope that you will get inspired by this, telling your story.”

The aim of the project is to bring storytellers into a process of receiving and giving a digital gift and to help them reflect on how audiences see engagement as becoming captivated by content.

The project team is Liz Evans (Culture, Film and Media), Holger Schnadelbach (Mixed Reality Lab) & Hyosun Kwon (Mixed Reality Lab)

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A View from the Arts is running a series on digital projects in the Faculty of Arts, in advance of the Digital Research Week, which will run from  the 23^rd to the 27^th of April, 2018.

This is a guest post by Jon Henderson.

At present, the submerged cultural heritage of Egypt is intangible – and inaccessible – to non-diving public audiences. The British Council Newton Fund project ‘Presence in the Past’, a collaboration between Ain Shams University, Alexandria University, and the University of Nottingham, is making this important heritage more accessible to audiences through engaging digital recreations.

In July 2017 the SS Thistlegorm wreck was fully surveyed in 3D photorealistic detail as part of this project covering an area of 7.05 acres. In order to create a model of the SS Thistlegorm, tens of thousands of photographs of the wreck were taken and “stitched together” using cloud computing technologies. It took nearly 14 hours of dive time to gather all the data, from a challenging site 32m deep and subject to strong currents and changing visibility.

360 degree video (including a 360 video of a wreck tour) and interactive 3D models of the site, including surveys of the rooms inside the wreck, are available on the project website: http://thethistlegormproject.com/

A launch trailer of the project is visible below:

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A View from the Arts is running a series on digital projects in the Faculty of Arts, in advance of the Digital Research Week, which will run from  the 23^rd to the 27^th of April, 2018.

This interdisciplinary, international collaboration, led by Professor Lynda Pratt, School of English, is producing a digital edition of 7500 letters written by the poet, historian, biographer, travel-writer, translator and essayist Robert Southey (1774-1843), one of the most public and controversial figures in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Britain.

The Collected Letters is published online and free of access by Romantic Circles, the leading international experts in digital Romanticism. Parts 1-6 of the edition are completed and make available newly edited and annotated texts of 3773 letters, c. 80% of which are published for the first time. They can be accessed at: https://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/southey_letters

Work on Parts 7-12 of the edition is ongoing and expected to be completed by 2025.

The Collected Letters has benefited from external grants from the AHRC, the British Academy, the Modern Humanities Research Association and the Leverhulme Trust.

In her role as General Editor of the Collected Letters, Lynda Pratt is a participant in ARCScholar, a digital publishing cooperative. This is based at Texas A&M University, which has been awarded a NHPRC-Mellon Digital Edition Publishing Cooperatives Grant for $75,000. This grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will be used to plan the development of ARCScholar and to form its governance structure. ARCScholar will participate with other grant recipients in creating a system of cooperatives for publishing and sustaining digital editions.

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A View from the Arts is running a series on digital projects in the Faculty of Arts, in advance of the Digital Research Week, which will run from the 23^rd to the 27^th of April, 2018.

Guest blog by Chris King

Concealed inside a key building in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, researchers from The University of Nottingham have used the latest scanning technology to reveal in 3D a hiding-hole used by 17^th-Century Catholic priests escaping religious persecution.

Coughton Court in Warwickshire sits at the heart of an important group of Catholic country houses, and it has a secret priest-hole hidden in a turret of the main gatehouse, concealed between the floor levels. Researchers first visited the house in 2015 to make a laser scan of the double-level priest hole with the aim of digitally reproducing its location in a computer model.

In 2016 the team returned, thanks to generous funding from The National Trust, to complete a scan of the entire mansion, inside and out, in situ in its grounds. On completion, the comprehensive 3D model aims to help experts visualise more clearly how the priest-hole has been hidden within the structure, and to allow visitors to explore this hidden space online even if they cannot physically access it.

Researchers: Dr Chris King (School of Humanities); Dr Sean Ince and Dr Lukasz Bonenberg (Nottingham Geospatial Institute, School of Engineering)

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A View from the Arts is running a series on digital projects in the Faculty of Arts, in advance of the Digital Research Week, which will run from the 23^rd to the 27^th of April, 2018.

In 586 BCE, the city of Jerusalem fell to the Babylonian army and to its king, Nebuchadnezzar. Though Jerusalem was just one of many capital cities destroyed by the Babylonians, its destruction triggered significant changes in the intellectual, cultural, religious and political identities of the people associated with the city. The effects of these changes continue to reverberate in the modern Middle East and among the global Jewish, Muslim and Christian populations.

Together with Dr Jonathan Stökl from King’s College London, the Department of Theology and Religious Studies’ Dr Carly Crouch has launched a new virtual exhibition exploring the transformation of this small Iron Age city state into the world’s religious capital and an ethereal symbol of the imagination. Nottingham PhD student Cat Quine was a research assistant on the project.

‘The city of Jerusalem has held an unparalleled place in the imagination for more than two and a half millennia’, writes Crouch. ‘It has inspired countless authors and artists, as an object of mourning for the past but also as a focus of hope for the future. This exhibition seeks to illustrate for the viewer the reality of life in the ancient city and the trauma of its defeat, in order to illuminate the consequences of its destruction for the theological and artistic imaginations.’

Jerusalem: Fall of a City—Rise of a Vision is a project of the Society for Old Testament Study (SOTS), the society for the study of the Hebrew Bible / Old Testament in Britain and Ireland, and has been undertaken as part of the Society’s centenary celebrations in 2017.

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A View from the Arts is running a series on digital projects in the Faculty of Arts, in advance of the Digital Research Week, which will run from  the 23^rd to the 27^th of April, 2018.

This is a guest post by Will Bowden.

In 2015 a new interpretation scheme was launched for the Roman town of Venta Icenorum at Caistor St Edmund in Norfolk. Sponsored by Natural England, the scheme was created by a group comprising Will Bowden (UoN), the Norfolk Archaeological Trust (the site owners), and HDC International and JAM Creative (heritage interpretation specialists).

Using a free app (available for Apple and Android) visitors can access and explore augmented reality reconstructions of the site and collect virtual finds as they explore the town. Two friendly archaeological moles also pop up to tell children about being archaeologists. The content is triggered by code embedded in traditional static interpretation panels and so does not require a stable mobile signal or GPS connection.

The video below, courtesy of Jam Creative Studios, demonstrates the capabilities of the app.

We have recently won funding under the AHRC/EPSRC Next Generation of Immersive Experiences scheme to trial the development of a fully immersive 3D experience based around the Caistor model.

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A View from the Arts is running a series on digital projects in the Faculty of Arts, in advance of the Digital Research Week, which will run from  the 23^rd to the 27^th of April, 2018.

The Digital Tools for New Audiences (DTNA) project draws expertise from both Arts and Computer Science and offers training and consultancy for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. DTNA is a project on the Enabling Innovation programme which is a collaboration between Nottingham Trent University, the University of Derby and the University of Nottingham and part funded by the EU.

This project provides group workshops and tailored consultancy for SMEs in the regional heritage and leisure sectors keen to discover and implement cost-effective, sustainable digital technologies to create engaging visitor experiences.

Coming up in 2018:

On the 6^th of March, Make: Digital Tools for Building a Compelling Visitor Experience gives you hands-on experiences of connecting and customising new interactive technologies, and discusses the practicalities of scaling-up and maintaining digital visitor experiences.

On the 16^th of May, Make and Evaluate: Digital Tools for Building a Compelling Visitor Experience will run, focusing on uses of 3D in visitor engagement. Responding directly to requests from previous workshops, this workshop will introduce further technologies, including 3D capture (photogrammetry and scanning), 3D visualisation (augmented reality and virtual reality), and 3D printing. We will then demonstrate how to combine analytic technologies with observational research techniques to identify your success stories and areas of improvement

The DTNA team – Professor Katharina Lorenz (Digital Humanities Centre), Dr Ben Bedwell (Computer Science), Dr Laura Carletti (Horizon), Matt Davies (Digital Humanities Centre) – have already run three successful workshops since the project began in 2016, working with over 30 SMEs. Feedback from SME participants has included:

“It opened my mind to other methods to interact with visitors.”

“Examples given were low cost and achievable”

“Lots of ideas to take back to my venue and incorporate.”

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A View from the Arts is running a series on digital projects in the Faculty of Arts, in advance of the Digital Research Week, which will run from 23^rd to 27^th of April, 2018.

This is a guest post by Zoe Trodd.

Antislavery Usable Past is the first archive of contemporary antislavery, collecting the visual culture and narratives of the movement to end contemporary global slavery, and the memory projects that recall past antislavery campaigns. It includes the world’s first ever collection of antislavery murals, created by Hannah Jeffery (University of Nottingham PhD student), showing that these artworks have long been protest tools that tell forgotten antislavery stories for the purpose of galvanizing community activism.

The archive also holds the world’s first extensive collection of contemporary slave narratives, showing that now, as in the 19th century, the slave narrative is at the centre of abolitionism. More effectively than any other abolitionist writing in the 19th century, slave narratives detailed the brutality of slave life and highlighted the heroism of people who made their escape from bondage. Today, formerly enslaved people make themselves subjects of a story instead of objects for sale, and use narrative as a tool for ending slavery.

Four other collections in the archive will launch in 2017 and 2018. The archive is one of the outputs for the AHRC-funded Antislavery Usable Past project (£1.8m, 2014-19), led by the University of Nottingham (PI Kevin Bales, CI Zoe Trodd) with the University of Hull (CI John Oldfield).

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