KAPTUR – commencing countdown…

This is our update for KAPTUR for December and January with just over two months of the project left to go!

WP1: Project Management

  • The project team met on the 11th December at Goldsmiths, University of London. This was the first team meeting with the new-in-post UAL Project Officer, Sarah Mahurter, Manager of the University Archives and Special Collections Centre.
  • Just before Christmas the KAPTUR project team were delighted to officially welcome Andrew Gray as the new Goldsmiths Project Officer. Andrew had been able to attend the meeting on 11th December as this was scheduled with his interview for the post. Andrew was previously Project Officer at the University of the Arts London working on the JISC Kultur (2007-09) project.
  • The KAPTUR Steering Group meeting was held on Tuesday 8th January and included interactive sessions on sustainability and benefits arising from the project. Presentations and the worksheets are available from: http://www.slideshare.net/kaptur_mrd/tag/steering-group
  • The project team will be meeting in London next week to review the development of the KAPTUR toolkits.

WP3: Technical Infrastructure

  • The Technical Manager has been in contact with Joss Winn, Project Manager of the University of Lincoln’s Orbital project about their work with CKAN. A meeting is scheduled for this month in Lincoln but may now have to be ‘virtual’ due to adverse weather conditions.
  • The Technical Manager has also been in contact with Mark Wainwright from the Open Knowledge Foundation regarding CKAN and a meeting was held in London on Tuesday 8th January.
  • The Technical Manager has received feedback from all the Project Officers regarding CKAN and along with previous feedback this will inform a case study on the technical aspects of the KAPTUR project.
  • The IT Costs document produced by Carlos is now publicly available (following testing at the four institutions): http://www.slideshare.net/kaptur_mrd/kaptur-it-costs-public
  • The Project Officers are currently in the process of uploading visual arts research data to the EPrints pilot system.

WP4: Modelling

  • As previously mentioned, the University of the Arts London policy is available here: http://www.arts.ac.uk/research/data-management/
  • Goldsmiths, University of London have had their policy approved; as senior management advised during the working group discussions, it is an amendment to their existing Records Management policy and is available from: http://www.gold.ac.uk/research-data/
  • The University for the Creative Arts policy requires academic board approval, however it has been made available to all staff via the following link: http://www.ucreative.ac.uk/research_governance
  • The Glasgow School of Art is expected to be approved at their Research and Knowledge Exchange Committee meeting in February.
  • The four policies will be made available through DCC in due course and will also be linked to from the KAPTUR Outputs page.

WP5: Training and Support

  • As mentioned previously, the UAL workshop has been completed – further details and a list of attendees is available here: http://ualrdm-eorg.eventbrite.co.uk/ Presentations are available online here: http://www.slideshare.net/kaptur_mrd/tag/ualrdmtraining
  • The University for the Creative Arts held their workshop last week, including a session looking at definitions of visual arts research data and another session on creating an AHRC Technical Plan. The presentations are available from: http://www.slideshare.net/kaptur_mrd/tag/ucardmtraining
  • The Glasgow School of Art training workshop will take place next week on 31st January with the assistance of Laura Molloy, JISCMRD Evidence Gatherer.
  • In late November, before the previous Goldsmiths Project Officer left, a session was held focusing on the Library’s role in Research, however the official training workshop has been rescheduled. The new Goldsmiths Project Officer, in post from January, will arrange this to take place in early February.
  • Benchmarking feedback is being gathered from participants to each workshop as well as from the Project Officers themselves, this will then lead to refinements of the KAPTUR training plan and also an online training version in the form of the KAPTUR toolkits.

WP6: Evaluation and Sustainability

  • The four case studies from the Project Officers are in draft stage.
  • Following feedback on the KAPTUR Benefit’s slide [produced for the JISCMRD Benefits programme event in Bristol, 29th-30th November] an additional case study will be completed by the Technical Manager. The project team commented that this had been a real benefit to the partner institutions as they wouldn’t have had the resources to do this work themselves without the KAPTUR project.

WP7: Dissemination


AHRC award VADS grant to develop researchers’ data skills

Visual Arts Data Skills for Researchers (VADS4R)

In partnership with University for the Creative Arts, The Glasgow School of Art and University College Falmouth, the Visual Arts Data Service has been awarded funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to promote good research data management practices within the visual arts. Research data is a valuable resource and, with appropriate curation and management, it has much to offer learning, teaching, research, knowledge transfer and consultancy across the higher education sector. However, in the arts, its complex and diverse nature presents numerous challenges to practitioners, researchers and research teams, and their institutions.

Building upon the work of the JISC funded KAPTUR partners (Goldsmiths, University of London; The Glasgow School of Art; University of the Arts London; University for the Creative Arts) VADS4R seeks to repurpose and extend our emerging knowledge to create a tailored programme of study to support the appropriate curation, management and preservation of research data. The 18 month programme will also consider aspects such as discoverability and the potential of reusing research data in the visual arts to increase value and impact. Learning outcomes focus on supporting and enabling researchers to understand the nature of research data; understand its value and potential for reuse; and embed the basic principles of appropriate curation, management and preservation of research data in the visual arts.

Leigh Garrett
Director, Visual Arts Data Service Research Centre
Principal Investigator, Visual Arts Data Skills for Researchers
Library and Student Services
University for the Creative Arts


Community-powered #digitaltrans in learning workshop

Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Digital Transformations Programme, I attended the Community-powered digital transformations in learning workshop at University College London (21 June 2012).

Collaborative Histories and Community Contributed Collections: Reappraising World War I

– Katharine Lindsay, University of Oxford

Part of the JISC World War One Commemoration Programmes, the University of Oxford is undertaking the JISC World War One (WW1) Open Educational Resources (OER) project titled:
World War One Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings.

Having heard about the use of Flickr to run the Great War Archive as part of the First World War Poetry Digital Archive project (JISC Look-Here! workshop, November 2010) it was really interesting to hear how this work is now spreading internationally. For example, a video is available on Irish national television about the project: http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0315/antiques.html#video

Knitting Off-piste: Online and Offline Opportunities for Learning

– Amy Twigger Holroyd, Keep and Share

Keep & Share is an umbrella name for the fashion, knitting and research activities of designer-maker Amy Twigger Holroyd

It was fascinating to hear about Amy’s PhD research. Her research also touches upon the concept of ‘open‬-knitting’ enabling reflexive learning; working with communities offline and online, such as Ravelry, a knitting community and digital platform.

copper knitted cardigan by Annie Ridd

Copper knitted cardigan by Annie Ridd, circa 2003. © Annie Ridd.
Available from: VADS

Find more ‘knitting’ images on VADS, including scanned PDFs of Victorian Knit books from the Winchester School of Art’s Knitting Collections, vintage patterns, and the London College of Fashion Woolmark Archive.

Because We’re Worth It: Sharing Digitally in Fashion and the Arts

– Dr Alison James, University of the Arts London

Some of the projects highlighted included:

And

process.arts.ac.uk, an open online resource sharing day-to-day arts practice and research of arts staff, students, alumni and practitioners

The relationship between ‘process’ and ‘research’ in the visual arts is particularly relevant for KAPTUR and we have been following this project with interest (Twitter: @ProcessArtsUAL).

Prior to the KAPTUR project VADS and UCA were also working with UAL on repositories for research outputs, customised for the specialised needs of artistic researchers (Kultur 2007-09; Kultivate 2010-11; eNova 2011). UAL Research Online uses the popular EPrints repository software.

Art Maps: Exploring Art and Place through Mobile Learning

– Dr Rebecca Sinker, Tate

Subsequent to involvement in the Google Art Project (February 2011), Tate is currently working on the Art Maps project (Jan-Dec 2012).

Rebecca showed us a really good video about the m-learning experience of their Art Maps app in use, but this is currently not available publicly (I will update this blog if made available in the future). Some of the points I noted down were:

  • The project was about using artworks in the Tate collections to inspire a journey.
  • Users were given the option to collaborate with others; when they did this it helped with their use of the technology.
  • One user (speaking on the video) commented that using voice recording exclusively on his mobile was good, as the journey then wasn’t interrupted by the technology.

Blog posts about themes covered in the video are available here:

Digital literacy versus digital expertise

Dr Caroline Bassett, University of Sussex

Dr Bassett’s presentation discussed the concepts of ‘digital native’ and ‘digital expertise’ and posed questions such as:

  • Technology is evolving so quickly that can any of us describe ourselves as digital natives?
  • Digital literacy is not enough for people to be creators online, what is needed, is digital expertise.

Dr Bassett also mentioned the JISC-funded project Visitors and Residents: What Motivates Engagement with the Digital Information Environment? (see also relevant blog posts).

The Bentham Project

Dr Melissa Terras, University College London

Dr Terras kindly stepped in at the last minute to replace Sam Strudwick (Amnesty International), and spoke about The Bentham Project at UCL.

The effort to set-up crowdsourcing of the transcriptions was definitely worth it. Dr Terras posed interesting questions about the nature of their particular digital community; the crowdsourcing maybe encouraged by competition between the transcribers (they have a leader board). Statistics have shown that one user has transcribed 32% of the texts so far and another three regular users have done a further 43% between them. She mentioned a useful article on Crowdsourcing in D-Lib (March 2010).

The transcription project uses the Open Source MediaWiki software; the UCL plugins for this are freely available here: http://code.google.com/p/tb-transcription-desk/

Another blog post about this #digitaltrans workshop is available here: Problemshares and other #digitaltrans formations