Tobias Blanke, Mark Hedges & Stuart Dunn: Grassroots research in Arts & Humanities e-Science in the UK

Use networks to connect resources. e-science agenda was driven by the Grid, to bridge across administrative domains. In e-humanities, books need to talk to each other.

Challenges: ongoing growth of corpora; digital recording of current human developments; computational methods to deal with inconsistent data; reluctance by humanities scholars to collaborate in research.

Engage researchers by giving them money and letting them do something at grass-roots level, though with some coordination.

• Virtual workbench. Virtual Vellum project, Sheffield, on top of digitisation of Froissart chronicles: generic collaboration tool over images.
  
• Arts & music: AMUC motion capture, musicSpace, Purcell Plus. Music has advantage in that music is already digitised.
  
• Mediaeval Warfare on the Grid (Agent-Based simulation of the Battle of Manzikert);
  
• ArchaeoTools (data mining from sources, incl. text).

DARIAH: Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts & Humanities, European project to facilitate long-term access and use of cultural heritage digital information --- connecting the national data centres. Fedora demonstrator, flat texts across Grid; Arena demonstrator: database integration with web services.

AHRC ICT Methods Network.