King's College London Digital Humanities

Our research project “Our Data Ourselves” was an AHRC-funded grant being undertaken at King’s College London in 2013-15, to broadly consider the personal data generate in the everyday lives of young people, through their mediated, cultural and communicative practices. Our aims are to increase our understanding of the nature and role of the data that young people produce when they use platforms and applications on their smartphones.

By working with members of Young Rewired State, who are between the ages of 14 and 18, we will develop tools and applications to visualise components of the Big Social Data (BSD) that they generate. Part of this research will also highlight areas for policy development around privacy, given that the time that is spent participating within socially networked environments is only increasing. We produced an open environment for BSD research with tools, applications and an infrastructure predicated on an ethical framework for data sharing available for widespread community use.

King’s lead researchers: Tobias Blanke; Mark Cote; Jennifer Pybus

Associated organisations: Young Rewired State

This project considers how the ubiquity and specificity of digital culture come into dialogue with food culture (nb. Rousseau 2012).

In what ways do routine digital technologies – for instance, social media platforms, smartphone apps and algorithms – contribute to the ethical, political, economic and social registers of cooking and eating?
How do these technologies contribute to wider understandings of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ food?
How do digitised food practices map onto existing geographies of knowledge, power and cultural representation?
Is digital culture rewriting the narratives of authority, authenticity and access by which food cultures have traditionally been theorised?

This interdisciplinary project reflects on these and related questions.

King’s lead researcher: Zeena Feldman

Frontispiece to Charles Howard Hinton’s 1904 book The Fourth Dimension, illustrating the tesseract, the four-dimensional analog of the cube. Hinton’s spelling varied: also known, as here, “tessaract”.

In an 1880 article entitled “What is the Fourth Dimension?”, Hinton suggested that points moving around in three dimensions might be imagined as successive cross-sections of a static four-dimensional arrangement of lines passing through a three-dimensional plane, an idea that anticipated the notion of world lines. Hinton’s explorations of higher space had a moral basis:

Hinton argues that gaining an intuitive perception of higher space required that we rid ourselves of the ideas of right and left, up and down, that inheres in our position as observers in a three-dimensional world. Hinton calls the process “casting out the self”, equates it with the process of sympathizing with another person, and implies the two processes are mutually reinforcing.

Hinton created several new words to describe elements in the fourth dimension. According to the OED, he first used the word tesseract in 1888 in his book A New Era of Thought. He also invented the words kata (from the Greek for “down from”) and ana (from the Greek for “up toward”) to describe the additional two opposing fourth-dimensional directions (an additional 4th axis of motion analogous to left-right (x), up-down (y), and forwards-backwards (z)).

Hinton’s Scientific romances, including “What is the Fourth Dimension?” and “A Plane World”, were published as a series of nine pamphlets by Swan Sonnenschein & Co. during 1884–1886. In the introduction to “A Plane World”, Hinton referred to Abbott’s recent Flatland as having similar design but different intent. Abbott used the stories as “a setting wherein to place his satire and his lessons. But we wish in the first place to know the physical facts.” Hinton’s world existed along the perimeter of a circle rather than on an infinite flat plane.[15] He extended the connection to Abbott’s work with An Episode on Flatland: Or How a Plane Folk Discovered the Third Dimension (1907).

Source: Wikipedia

In a 2016 report on ‘Connecting Refugees’, the UNHCR argued that ‘a lack of connectivity constrains the capacity of refugee communities to organise and empower themselves, cutting off the path to self-reliance’. Connectivity thus articulates the simultaneous improvement of refugees’ lives and the transformation of humanitarianism by developing a new digital ecosystem for refugees. In fostering digital modes of refugee existence, humanitarian organisations, NGOs and corporations also produce and intensify new modes of algorithmic governmentality.

We explore the social and political consequences of these developments and how datafied and digital relations emerge both between refugees and humanitarian organisations, and between non-state and state actors involved in the digital ecosystems. We propose to conceptualise relations in a digital world as human/nonhuman entanglements, as digital connectivity can emerge through refugee practices on social media, but also through machine communications in the refugee ecosystems.

King’s lead researchers: Tobias Blanke; Claudia Aradau

King’s College Digital Humanities together with the Institute of Historical Research investigates ‘Born-digital data and methods for history and the humanities’. Partners in the Network are The National Archives, the British Library, Web Archives and the Universities of Cambridge, Sussex, Glasgow, Oxford, Goldsmiths, Sheffield, Leeds, Warwick and Waterloo (Ontario).

The project will be led by Professor Jane Winters (IHR) and Dr Tobias Blanke (King’s College London).

The Network brought together researchers and practitioners to discern if there is a genuine humanities approach to born-digital data, and to establish how this might inform, complement and draw on other disciplines and practices. Over the course of three workshops, one to be held at The National Archives in Kew, one at the University of London, and one at the University of Cambridge, the Network addressed the current state of the field; establish the most appropriate tools and methods for humanities researchers for whom born-digital material is an important primary source; discuss the ways in which researchers and archives can work together to facilitate big data research; identify the barriers to engagement with big data, particularly in relation to skills; and work to build an engaged and lasting community of interest.

King’s Project lead Tobias Blanke

Associated organisations: School of Advanced Studies

SoBigData proposes a Social Mining & Big Data Ecosystem for ethic-sensitive scientific discoveries and advanced applications of social data mining on the various dimensions of social life, as recorded by “big data”. SoBigData opens up new research avenues in multiple research fields, including mathematics, ICT, and human, social and economic sciences, by enabling easy comparison, re-use and integration of state-of-the-art big social data, methods, and services, into new research. It not only strengthens the existing clusters of excellence in social data mining research, but also create a pan-European, inter-disciplinary community of social data scientists, fostered by extensive training, networking, and innovation activities.

King’s lead researchers: Tobias Blanke; Mark Cote; Marco Braghieri

Associated organisations: CNR (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche), UNIPI (Università di Pisa), IMT (Scuola Istitutuzioni, Mercati, Tecnologia) and SNS (Scuola Normale Superiore) from Italy; USFD (University of Sheffield) from the United Kingdom; FRH (the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems and The Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research) and LUH (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Universitaet Hannover) from Germany; UT (Tartu Ulikool) from Estonia; AALTO (Aalto University) from Finland; ETHZ (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich) from Switzerland; TUDelft (Technische Universiteit Delft) from the Netherlands.

SoBigData is the European Research Infrastructure for Big Data and Social Mining, which is being built within the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. The project consortium features 12 research institutions based in seven different countries, including Italy, United Kingdom, Germany, Estonia, Finland, Netherlands and Switzerland. \n\nSoBigData proposes to create a Social Mining & Big Data Ecosystem, by building a research infrastructure based on an integrated ecosystem for ethic-sensitive scientific discoveries and advanced applications of social data mining on the various dimensions of social life, as recorded by ‘big data’. \n\nThe project aims to open up new research avenues by enabling easy comparison, re-use and integration of state-of-the-art big social data, methods, and services in multiple research fields, including mathematics, ICT, and human, social and economic sciences. Thus, SoBigData intends to sstrengthen the existing clusters of excellence in social data mining research, but also create a pan-European, inter-disciplinary community of social data scientists, fostered by extensive training, networking, and innovation activities.\n\nSoBigData, as an open research infrastructure, promotes repeatable and open science. The project Data is built around six thematic clusters which comprise text and social media mining; social network analysis; human mobility analytics; web analytics; visual analytics and social data. \nAlthough SoBigData is primarily aimed at serving researchers’ needs, the open available datasets and open-source methods and services will also impact other groups of stakeholders, such as industrial entities, government bodies, policy makers and non-profit organisations. Moreover, the project is contributing to create a community of data scientists, preparing them to exploit the opportunities of big data and to incorporate data-driven science and innovation in their research. SoBigData is the European Research Infrastructure for Big Data and Social Mining, which is being built within the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. The project consortium features 12 research institutions based in seven different countries, including Italy, United Kingdom, Germany, Estonia, Finland, Netherlands and Switzerland.

SoBigData proposes to create a Social Mining & Big Data Ecosystem, by building a research infrastructure based on an integrated ecosystem for ethic-sensitive scientific discoveries and advanced applications of social data mining on the various dimensions of social life, as recorded by ‘big data’.

The project aims to open up new research avenues by enabling easy comparison, re-use and integration of state-of-the-art big social data, methods, and services in multiple research fields, including mathematics, ICT, and human, social and economic sciences. Thus, SoBigData intends to sstrengthen the existing clusters of excellence in social data mining research, but also create a pan-European, inter-disciplinary community of social data scientists, fostered by extensive training, networking, and innovation activities.

SoBigData, as an open research infrastructure, promotes repeatable and open science. The project Data is built around six thematic clusters which comprise text and social media mining; social network analysis; human mobility analytics; web analytics; visual analytics and social data.

Although SoBigData is primarily aimed at serving researchers’ needs, the open available datasets and open-source methods and services will also impact other groups of stakeholders, such as industrial entities, government bodies, policy makers and non-profit organisations. Moreover, the project is contributing to create a community of data scientists, preparing them to exploit the opportunities of big data and to incorporate data-driven science and innovation in their research.

Language Acts and Worldmaking is a flagship project funded by the AHRC Open World Research Initiative, which aims to regenerate and transform modern language learning by foregrounding language’s power to shape how we live and make our worlds. The ‘Digital Mediations’ strand on the project explores interactions and tensions between digital culture and Modern Languages research.

We examine how digitally mediated culture—whether emerging as born digital artefacts or digitised remediations of pre-digital objects—is constructed, and ask what kinds of ‘translation’ are enacted as information enters and leaves the digital sphere. We research the interactions from multiple perspectives, reviewing methodologies for studying digital content from a multilingual perspective, while appraising the extent to which digital data, as a complex cultural product in its own right, represents a meaningful record accessible to Modern Languages research and learning.

King’s lead researchers: Paul Spence; Renata Brandao

Associated organisations: Queen Mary, University of London; Open University; University of Westminster

The project builds directly on our current AHRC project ‘Our Data Ourselves’ , which studies the content we generate on our mobile devices, what we call ‘big social data’ (BSD), and explores the possibilities of its ethical storage. We progress this research by engaging the cultural and technological elements entailed in the ethical sharing of that data. Our proposal addresses a basic research question: How do we transform BSD into open data, and in turn, empower the digital human and cultivate new data communities?

First, we developed an open linked data framework to effectively embed anonymised born digital cultural data. Our technological research developed proof-of-concept demonstrators that investigate the use of advanced anonymisation technologies for publishing cultural data. This was done in collaboration with Dr. Tom Heath, the head of research at the Open Data Institute. Second, we investigated what cultural research can still do with such an anonymised resource, making possible fundamental humanistic research and the investigation of (meta)data in the context of the material turn in cultural and media studies.

King’s lead researchers: Tobias Blanke; Mark Cote

Associated organisations: Open Data Institute