Digital Research Creativity Fund 2024-25 – Skills Development and Knowledge Exchange

This is one post in a two-part series on last academic year’s Digital Research Creativity Fund applicants. This fund is open for applications for this academic year [UoL login required].

This post looks at how our funds helped researchers both build their skills and share them with the wider research community, at Leeds and beyond. This is a core focus of our activities, and particularly of our Digital Kickstarter fund.

Prof Nina Wardleworth (School of Languages, Cultures and Societies) attended a five-day school in Digital Humanities in Lyon, France. As part of this workshop, she developed her skills in mapping and social network analysis, which she intends to bring to an in-development research and community engagement project on colonial populations and the French Resistance. This will allow her to share her research with a wider audience and tell these stories through new digital methods, while also indicating new avenues of research based on geographical patterns in the data. We are excited to carry on working with Nina on this research, with two of our interns starting on this project soon!

Prof Kevin Linch (School of History) ran a workshop in DCCH in May 2025. His workshop brought together archivists from a range of institutions to experiment with handwritten text recognition technologies, particularly Transkribus. The aim here was to encourage sharing of knowledge between archives professionals and academic researchers on this developing technology. This provided a space for professional development for the archivists, as well as an opportunity for collaboration on developing workflows for future research projects and case studies. We’re looking forward to continuing to work with Kevin and external partners on these methods as their plans develop.

Prof Claire Eldridge (School of History) attended the Digital Humanities Summer School at Oxford in August 2025. Her main priority was to get an overview of Digital Humanities research methods for her own planned next major project, handling, analysing and presenting large-scale archival datasets. The School covered a wide range of Digital Humanities methods, debates and issues. In particular, sessions on data visualisation and data management proved the most useful for this next major project. We’re working with Claire on developing this project further and are eager to see how it progresses in future!

If you are a Leeds researcher in AHC and are interested in developing your Digital Humanities skills with a small grant, see our SharePoint [UoL login required] for more details.