Living with Machines Digital Residencies
What is a digital residency?
The Living with Machines project has recently announced a call for up to six digital residencies. So what are they? And are they for you?
What’s the idea?
Living with Machines has been spending a lot of time developing new datasets, as well as methods and digital tools to study historical collections data. We now want to engage the community more with this work, to see how they can make use of them. Simply put, we want 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 (see previous call here) or JSTOR’s innovation fellowships (see here). In our case, we would love to receive proposals from not only academics, but also people with a diverse range of backgrounds who would like to make use of our datasets and tools (see below).
What are the datasets and tools?
The data and tools we are proposing that people work with are as follows. Links take you to the data/code repo or to blog posts about them:
- Neural Language Models for Nineteenth-Century English
- Newly digitised Ordnance Survey Maps
- Diachronic word embeddings
- The crowdsourced accidents data from newspapers
- DeezyMatch
- alto2txt
- Press Directories
Who are these virtual residencies for?
We are open to highly experimental work, and creative applications. You don’t need to be an academic; you might have a background in history, in data science, in data visualisation, in digital humanities, in the creative arts, or something we haven’t thought of. You do not need to be employed. In fact, we would be delighted if we could support early career scholars and people in other precarious positions with income for a month or two to extend their CVs.
And you do not need to be based in the UK!
Great! How do I apply?
We want this system to be as lightweight as possible. We need a 600-word proposal, a CV, and costings. If you are at a HEI the costing process will need to go through your research office. But if you’re self-employed you just need to give us a quote for your time and any additional costs. Please use the templates provided as part of the call’s documents. We will need you to sign a research services agreement, which will require you to have a certain level and types of insurance. If you don’t have them or not at the required level, you can include your extra costs, for the time of the project, in your proposal. You can read the key terms and conditions attached to the call page and request the Research Services Agreement in advance of your application to check all the terms of the engagement.
Is that it? What’s the catch?
Yes, truly, we want to pay you to do cool research! We just need you to write us a very short report at the end, and to write a blog post about your outcomes. If you subsequently publish any of this work you’ll need to credit the project. But that’s all.
Anything else I need to know?
The residency needs to be completed by the end of our project date, 31 July 2023, so this is a very short term opportunity. Academic publications need to follow the UKRI Open Access policy and all other types of outputs need to be made publicly available. You need to make sure that any other resource you use to complete your project will not preclude you from making the results of your work openly accessible.
We really want you to apply. So if you have any questions, please contact us on lwmcalls@turing.ac.uk.
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