Announcing our Digital Residents!

You may recall that a few months ago the Living with Machines team put out an open call for ‘Digital Residencies’.

The aim was to get more people, beyond our immediate communities, engaged with the work we’ve been doing to develop new datasets and software. Simply put, we wanted to support people to play with our data and code in new and creative ways. The model follows the practice of libraries to fund academics to come and consult their collections. Since the pandemic we have seen more examples of such fellowships moving online, such as the National Library of Scotland’s fellowships in digital scholarship or JSTOR’s innovation fellowships.

We had a large and strong pool of applicants and were delighted to award small grants to the following people and teams:

Nicola Baldwin – to develop a dramatic response to our crowdsourced accidents data.
Nicolò Bonato – to develop an interactive web app to visualise the data contained in the Press Directories dataset about papers’s political leanings, and pair it with historical results for general elections.
Jennifer Hayward, Michelle Prain-Brice, and Leonor Riesco – to experiment with alto2txt and other project pipelines to work on The Anglophone Chile News Archive.
Yann Ryan – to update and expand his open access book R for Newspaper Data using a range of newly digitised newspapers and tools developed on Living with Machines.
Joanne Sheppard – to develop an interactive website aimed at rail enthusiasts using the StopsGB dataset.
Robert Sherman – to produce a visual poem, recreating the experience of rail travel using the StopsGB dataset.

We were grateful to receive proposals that saw opportunities to use our project outputs in ways we had not imagined or did not have the skills to take on ourselves. We are particularly pleased that we have been able to support projects proposed from individuals and teams with a range of backgrounds, including creatives and Research Software Engineers, and from people at different career stages.

The residents will be sharing blog posts here in due course about how their projects are going.

Watch this space!