Introducing Ben, a familiar face in a new role
September 7, 2018
After over a month on the job as Digital Research Specialist for the Faculty of Science, I have just enough time to introduce myself. I am not a new face at the University: you may recognise me from such roles as student, teaching assistant, guest lecturer, student supervisor and co-lead of the Heritage & Digital …
Research Tool Review: Learning to Loathe the Livescribe Echo – and Why You Might Love It
August 13, 2018
My difficulties with the Livescribe Echo begin before I’ve even started writing: what, I find myself wondering, am I supposed to do with the cap? Full disclosure: I have repeatedly demonstrated the Echo to staff across the University of Nottingham, and urged them to give it a try. And yet somehow, the problem of the …
NHS Hack Days: Big Data on the Frontlines
August 3, 2018
“The future” William Gibson famously declared, “is here. It’s just unevenly distributed.” Nowhere does this feel more evident than in the NHS. In one part of the building where I’m writing this – the Queen’s Medical Centre – research oncologists are experimenting with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques to diagnose cancer from …
Digital Research Team Receive Best Paper Award at ICISO 2018
July 20, 2018
This week I attended the 18th International Conference on Informatics and Semiotics in Organisations, held at the University of Reading. The theme for this year’s conference was Digitalisation, Innovation and Transformation, and over three days we got to hear a wide-range of talks on Business Intelligence, Data Visualisation, Technology Acceptance, Strategy Lifecycles, Digital Games and …
Fear and Loathing on the Pokémon Go Trail. Also, Some Cautious Optimism: An Afternoon at the ODI
July 16, 2018
It’s 2 o’clock on a sultry summer afternoon; outside, London is still dreaming of a win against Croatia in the match that night. But here at the Open Data Institute Data Ethics seminar in EC2, things are going deep, fast. I’m thinking out loud about medical records: patient data, researcher data. On my right, a …
Virtual Reality Yoga Trainer: Challenging Computer Science students with disruptive technologies
May 25, 2018
One of the areas the Digital Research Team (DRT) are actively seeking to have impact is inspiring the next generation of researchers. In addition to recently running a hackathon with students during of digital research week, we have also directly been engaging with students as a part of their undergraduate courses. As a part of …
Heads I Win, Tails Don’t Count: Negative Results, Open Data, and the Curious World of Research Publication
May 14, 2018
In Tom Stoppard’s famous absurdist drama Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (well, famous, at any rate, to people who like absurdist drama) the first act opens with the title characters betting on a coin toss. Rosencrantz is quite happy with how this has been going: he is betting on heads, and the toss has indeed …
DRHack: The results of our Digital Research Hackathon
May 8, 2018
On the afternoon of Friday 27 April, at the same time as the Digital Research Week’s closing ceremony, DRHack kicked off. We co-hosted this event with HackSoc, a student society dedicated to hacking. We invited students to come and try their hand at designing and creating new ways of engaging with research data. Hackathon participants …
First Month on the Job: Small Problems. Big Questions. Tiny Salamanders
May 4, 2018
Four weeks on the job already, and this is only my first blog post as a member of the Digital Research team. I haven’t even got my staff profile set up yet: LinkedIn will have to do for the moment. Apologies for that: there just hasn’t been the time. I joined the team on April …
Arts Digital Impact: Crowdsourcing Place-Names in Staffordshire
April 18, 2018
This is a guest blog by Jayne Carroll. Place-names are short texts – they can tell us all sorts of things about the people, landscape, and languages of the past. In England, most place-names are very old. Many of them were given by Anglo-Saxons as descriptive labels more than a thousand years ago. We …
