Projects

Current Projects

The following is a list of current projects led or supported by the HRI's technology development service HRI Digital, along with links to further information.

Bakhtin: The Contexts Project

A long-term project examining the intellectual affiliations of the Russian philosopher and cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin and the Bakhtin Circle.

Bess of Hardwick

HRI Digital is providing the technical expertise to enable this project, based at the University of Glasgow, to create a fully searchable, online edition of the letters of Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury (known as Bess of Hardwick).

The British Academy John Foxe Project

This 'Category One Research Project' of the British Academy is producing a new, definitive edition of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments of the English Martyrs, based on a textual reconstruction of the four editions published in Foxe's lifetime.

Cause Papers in the Diocesan Courts of the Archbishopric of York 1300-1858

HRI Digital is providing the technical expertise to enable this project, based at the University of York´s Borthwick Institute, to create a searchable database of all the 13,669 cause papers of the Diocese of York from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, providing more information about the cases than the present printed and manuscript finding aids allow.

Connected Histories: Sources for Building British History, 1500-1900

This JISC-funded project will create a federated search facility, 'Connected Histories', which will enable structured searching across fourteen major datasets on the subject of early modern and nineteenth-century British history.

Culture and the Mind (Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies)

This AHRC-funded interdisciplinary project investigates the philosophical consequences of the impact of culture on the mind and the cognitive and evolutionary foundations of culture.

Data Mining with Criminal Intent

Funded by the JISC, NEH and SSHRC as part of the 'Digging into Data' programme, this international project will illustrate how the tools of digital humanities can be used to wrest new knowledge from one of the largest humanities data sets currently available: the Old Bailey Online. HRI Digital will be developing a Web API which allows other web services to interact with the dataset.

Dialect in British Fiction 1800-1836

This project will develop a database as a tool for describing and analysing the representation of dialect in novels, and will record the representation of dialect in 100-120 novels published between 1800 and 1836.

Digging into Image Data to Answer Authorship Related Questions

This project has been funded by the joint JISC-NEH-NSF-SSHRC Digging into Data competition and collaborates with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, and Michigan State University, USA. The aim of the project is to jointly explore authorship across three distinct image datasets: collection of digitised 15th-century manuscripts, a collection of 17th- and 18th-century digitized maps and a collection of 19th- and 20th-century digitized quilts.

HumBox

The HRI is a partner with eleven other institutions and the Higher Education Academy on this JISC-funded project to publish excellent teaching and learning resources openly on the web.

John Ruskin and the Idea of the Museum

Now held at Sheffield's 'Ruskin Gallery', the collection of the Guild of St George was originally established by Ruskin at Walkley in the 1870s. This project will develop an online, virtual reconstruction of the Walkley Museum using contemporary evidence (original photographs).

Kiosque

Kiosque is the name given to the software development that arose from a Knowledge Transfer Partnership involving the University of Sheffield´s French Department and e-Learning specialists Tribal (Sheffield).

The Medieval Scribes Project

HRI Digital is providing the technical expertise to enable this project, based at the University of York, to compile an online catalogue of all scribal hands (identified or unidentified) which appear in Middle English, literary manuscripts. The catalogue will include a complete palaeographical and dialectal profile for each scribe.

The Olive Schreiner Letters

The feminist and socialist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) was one of the most important - and radical - social commentators of her day. The ESRC-funded Olive Schreiner Letters Project will transcribe, analyse and publish the complete extant Olive Schreiner letters, numbering approximately 7000, presently in archival locations world-wide.

The Online Froissart

Froissart´s Chronicles of the Hundred Years´ War are one of the most influential works of late medieval French literature, and remain a prime source for historians of society, politics, culture and narrative. This online edition will offer scholars worldwide a freely available online tool for textual, palaeographical and iconographic research on Froissart´s Chronicles.

The Origins of Early Modern Literature

This project aims to redress the scholarly neglect of mid-Tudor writing, a period which saw the Reformation, the consolidation of the Tudor state, and the rise of English as a national language.

Pegasus

Pegasus will develop a grid-enabled interface using Storage Resource Broker clientware designed at the University of California San Diego to establish a program for sharing and displaying in real-time selected virtual reality exhibition materials.

The Pérez Galdós Editions

Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-1920), a master of European realism, is widely regarded as being Spain's greatest novelist after Cervantes. The project is producing new critical editions of his four Torquemada novels in hard copy and online.

Plebeian Lives and the Making of Modern London

This project will use recent technical advances in the creation and analysis of multiple digital resources to create a comprehensive electronic edition of primary sources on criminal justice and the provision of poor relief and medical care in eighteenth-century London.

Renaissance Cultural Crossroads

HRI Digital is providing the technical expertise to enable this project, based at the University of Warwick, to create a fully searchable online catalogue of translations into English.of important Renaissance works.

Richard Brome Online

This project will create an online edition of the Collected Works of the Caroline dramatist, Richard Brome, making innovative use of video materials to combine dramatic textual scholarship with theatre practice.

Scrutiny: A Firefox Extension for Entity Recognition within Research Data

Funded by the JISC's Rapid Innovation Programme, HRI Digital and the Univ. of Hertfordshire will develop a Firefox extension called Scrutiny, which will be able to scan web pages selected by individual users and highlight entities that it thinks will interest them.

The Sheffield Corpus of Chinese

The aim of this project is to provide an extensive digital resource for marked-up historical Chinese texts covering different text types and genres and arranged in different time periods to facilitate study of the development and varieties of the language.

The Taxatio

The detailed records of the assessment (known as a taxatio) of English and Welsh ecclesiastical wealth undertaken in 1291-2 on the orders of Pope Nicholas IV have long been recognised as an essential source for the study of the late medieval Church. The aim of the Taxatio project is to provide a comprehensive new edition of the listing and valuation of the ecclesiastical benefices of England and Wales which comprise the 'spiritualities' sections of the assessment.

Humanities Research Institute