By Professor Jane Winters Humanities researchers disseminate their work in a wide range of venues and formats, depending on an ever-shifting combination of factors. These include disciplinary norms, the demands of particular career stages and assessment cycles, intended audience, personal preference, and other (sometimes overlapping) considerations. Digital Humanities pushes the publishing boundaries further than many disciplines, as a research project might result in the production of code, software, datasets, data visualisations and complex databases as well as the more familiar journal arti ..read more

Professor Claire Langhamer, Director of the IHR History today is challenging, complex, and creative; it is collaborative, energetic and purposeful. In a world that stumbles from crisis to crisis, historical analysis is more critical than ever before. Only by understanding the past can we make sense of the present or have any hope of shaping a better future. History matters. As the submissions to REF2021 vividly demonstrate, historians across the country, and in diverse institutions, are mobilising their research to change understandings, improve policy and enhance well-being. Historians work c ..read more

By Professor Catherine Clarke, Director of the IHR’s Centre for the History of People, Place and Community Understanding our places – their past, present and possible futures – has never been more firmly on the political agenda than today. The so-called ‘Place Agenda’ is here to stay, encompassing debate and policy around regional development, local renewal, and sustainable regeneration. The rhetoric of ‘Levelling Up’ points to inequalities and regions missing out on their full potential, while the language of ‘left behind’ places speaks of uneven social and economic conditions, but also the c ..read more

The broad field of arts and humanities still possesses this capacity to take us away from what is known By Professor Ruth Livesey It would be exaggerating to say rereading a novel by Anthony Trollope saved my professional life in summer 2021. But there was a moment of such unexpected shared experience in the pages of his Barchester Towers (1857) that I laughed about my job and at myself for the first time in a long, long while. And the laughter – with its recognition of 130 years of shared experience of what it is to be stuck in the middle of organisational change whether in a nineteenth-centu ..read more

Ethical issues are at the forefront of experimental humanities. By Professor Ophelia Deroy Maja is cruising in a new self-driving car. In the back is her baby son, singing and giggling. An overhead, electric cable has fallen on the side of the road, and the car will connect with it unless it swerves. Surely, one would hope that the car will swerve and that it should. But what if swerving means it will hit three pedestrians walking on the side of the road? What should the car be programmed to do? Save the three on the pavement from harm at the cost of the two inside? Questions about whether it ..read more

How should vaccines be distributed between countries? By Professor Jo Wolff A funny thing happened around March 2020. Anyone who had worked on the ethics of healthcare resource allocation, bioethics, or global health ethics was suddenly treated as a holder of important sources of knowledge and judgement. Who should get the scarce ventilators? What duties does one person have to protect others? How should vaccines be distributed between countries? What was previously a group of academic sub-disciplines struggling to have an influence on policy became something close to ready-made resource for p ..read more

Understanding the complex science of environmental change is one of the most crucial tasks our generation faces By Professor Joanna Page In New York’s Union Square, the Climate Clock counts down to the deadline at which zero emissions need to be reached to keep global warming below the critical threshold of 1.5°C. The clock, replicated in Berlin, Seoul and other major cities around the world, computes the destiny of the planet in a single, homogenized, universal time. Yet climate change is not a linear phenomenon; nor is it being experienced evenly across the world. Indeed, the future tense of ..read more

We can do better in providing a clear conception of projects in the humanities By Professor Barry C Smith It is often said by funders keen to encourage more successful applications from the humanities that they wish to see bold and ambitious proposals. Too often in funding rounds where researchers from any discipline can apply, the humanities proposals look less ambitious in scale than those from technology, medicine or the sciences. At the same time, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) are encouraging interdisciplinary research and would like to fund cross-council bids led by the arts and human ..read more

If digital technologies are inclusive, why would 45 million Yoruba speakers be excluded from machine translation services, asks Dr Emmanuel Ngue Um, associate professor of linguistics and digital humanities at the University of Yaoundé. Be wary of the ‘big tech behemoths’, he warns. In the context of Africa, perhaps as much as elsewhere, the emerging discipline of digital humanities has not only inspired new forms of knowledge production, it has also provoked anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist responses. Against this backdrop, there seems to be a principled view among many African humanists ..read more

Dr Christopher Ohge, considers whether minimal computing, ‘a set of practices that aim to reduce barriers to access and engagement’, may help to reduce the impact of global digital access on the environment. And a sustainable toolkit is on the way. Last year I visited the Waste Age exhibit at the Design Museum in London. I will never forget my immediate sorrow at seeing a massive bottle-top chain made with collected waste from beaches in Cornwall in only a few weeks in winter 2015 by the Cornish Plastic Pollution Coalition, alongside the various small exhibitions of what the curators deemed ou ..read more