The growing availability of large digital historical datasets, coupled with the emergence of new methodologies and computer algorithms has the potential to revolutionise research in the Arts and Humanities. The right Big Data tools and approaches will deliver the potential to conduct research on the scale of entire populations - addressing key research questions and offering new insights. Significant investment has already been sunk into the creation of large-scale digital resources. This investment is delivering historical big data of a variety, complexity and coverage that is beyond the scope of existing analytical tools and techniques. Yet these tools have not yet been the subject of large investment. Researchers in this field now require rapid innovation to extend the Big Data approaches pioneered for scientific and business applications, adapting and refining these to deliver practical analytical tools to support large-scale exploration of big historical datasets. This innovative, multi-disciplinary project will address this challenge, bringing together international research experience in the digital humanities, natural language processing, information science, data mining and linked data, with large, complex and diverse 'big data' spanning over 500 years of British history. The project's technical outputs will be a methodology and supporting toolkit that identify individuals within and across historical datasets, allowing people to be traced through the records and enabling their stories to emerge from the data. The tools will handle the 'fuzzy' nature of historical data, including aliases, incomplete information, spelling variations and the errors that are inevitably encountered in official records. The toolkit will be open and configurable, offering the flexibility to formulate and ask interesting questions of the data, exploring it in ways that were not imagined when the records were created. The open approach will create opportunities for further enhancement or re-use and offers the further potential to deliver the outputs as a service, extensible to new datasets as these become available. This brings the vision of 'bring your own data' closer, to find and link individuals in new combinations of datasets, from the widest range of historical sources. The project will benefit academic and leisure historians alike, across the whole spectrum of digital history: * It will assist historians seeking evidence of life-events through a collective study of individual biographies. * It will help genealogists find and trace the paths of their ancestors across the landscape of the official record. * It will help researchers by signposting routes between historical collections, enabling links between datasets at a deep level and creating opportunities for discovery. * For cultural organizations it will illuminate effective approaches to creation and curation of new digital datasets to optimise their potential for linking and re-use. * It will provide evidence to support policy making, helping balance the demands of Data Protection and information assurance with those of open data and Freedom of Information. * It will provide a methodology to underpin the creation of new tools and resources, supporting the digital economy. The project aims to extend the boundaries of current research in three important directions: to increase the extent and diversity of the data that can be handled; to improve support for inconsistent or fuzzy data; and to enable confidence measures to be tailored to fit specific research aims. These advances will extend the practical application of data linking techniques, enabling them to be applied to the large, diverse datasets that are continually emerging, to help answer historical research questions at a macro and micro scale. Our vision is to create a generic, extensible approach to tracing the lives of real people: through time and across the documentary evidence that survives them.

Public participation in heritage research has the potential to engage new audiences, to enlist the crowd in analysing and generating data at scale, and to invite new perspectives on our national collections. Key to releasing this potential is effective engagement of diverse audiences, and the development of workflows for the creation and re-use of data within collection discovery platforms, for training automated systems, and to give access to the citizens and researchers. We will identify ways of extending and deepening engagement across communities, proposing a best-practice framework for future citizen research projects with heritage data, informing their design and modelling. Citizen research and automation are two complementary methods for capturing and describing our increasing quantities of analogue, digital and digitised data. We propose articulating the synergies between them by developing workflows for the re-use of data beyond projects' initial focuses to provide current and future scholarship with the potential to address new research questions. Led by three IROs with significant experience of citizen research, Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh (RBGE), Royal Museums Greenwich (RMG) and The National Archives (TNA), and the world-leading citizen research expertise of the University of Oxford's Zooniverse with its distinctive free, open source infrastructure, community of 1.9 million volunteers worldwide, and technical expertise of having delivered over 190 crowdsourcing projects, this project is uniquely placed to research and prototype tools for deeper engagement with our collections through citizen research: to create a virtuous circle of increased and better informed public engagement that leads communities to create more collections data at scale. The project will convene expertise from across sectors to expand our citizen research community and to ensure the effective re-use of crowd-sourced data. This will be achieved by addressing the following questions: 1. How can we best engage volunteers across the nation's communities with citizen research projects, to further a shared understanding of our collections? What existing methods and data are the most successful for measuring that engagement? 2. How does the ability to navigate one's own path through the data of a citizen research project affect engagement with the project? 3. How can we verify, assess, present, and value the contributions of citizen research? 4. How can we enable the re-use of crowd-sourced data within collection discovery platforms, for training automated systems, and to give access to citizens and researchers that supports and encourages further engagement, re-use and analysis? 5. Does easy access to data created by citizen research projects affect engagement with projects? What other tools are necessary to enable meaningful access to this data?

The National Archives (TNA) are the official archive and publisher for the UK Government, and for England and Wales. Our mission is to collect and preserve the record of Government, to use our expertise and knowledge to connect people with history through our unrivalled collections, and to lead, partner and support archives at home and worldwide. Our on-site and off-site repositories house collections spanning over 1000 years of historical documentation on media ranging from parchment to film, paper to wax, and a continuously expanding corpus of digital collections (digitised and born digital). Alongside underpinning research for millions of people through access to our records, TNA has a strong commitment to innovative and sector-leading research in the conservation, documentation, technical, historical, and scientific understanding of physical and digital archival collections and practice. Our organisation's strategic vision is focused on breaking down barriers to access, participation, and understanding; creating new and inclusive spaces - virtual and physical - where diverse audiences can encounter, discover and explore our collections; generate interdisciplinary and disruptive research; and secure the future of the Government record by maintaining its physical and virtual integrity. Our heritage science research and our expanding digitisation programmes sit at the centre of these ambitions. With this application to the AHRC Capability for Collections fund, TNA is requesting funds for an urgent upgrade of core equipment for our digitisation programme and Heritage Science and Conservation Research (HSCR) laboratory. Since the start of the COVID-19 epidemic the 300% increase in online users and 1300% increase in digital document downloads of our collections has challenged our digitisation response to the limits of our current capacity. We are seeking to acquire two new scanning systems: an up-to-date scanner for our vast collection of records available only on microfilm and microfiche, and an automated sheet-fed scanner to speed up digitisation of some of our most popular collections. Records existing only in microform at TNA create significant challenges to access and long-term preservation and necessitate an upgrade of our obsolete microform scanning equipment. We can no longer provide researchers in our Reading Rooms with microform readers that allow for viewing only, and do not meet modern expectations of digital imaging. Digitisation of these collections is the only viable option. We are also in urgent need to acquire a sheet-fed scanner, which will quadruple imaging speed of stable items in our most popular collections, allow faster scanning of delicate collection items, and free up human resource for other digitisation initiatives. Our growing HSCR laboratory and team has seen a sixfold increase in analysis and advanced imaging requests from TNA staff, researchers in our Reading Rooms, and from external collaborators. Through recent investments in laboratory equipment and a strategic reframing of traditional conservation practice, our team has fostered a thriving programme of collaborative research projects that bring together conservators, preservation specialists, historians and curators, with heritage scientists and technologists to generate relevant and engaging outcomes for both the research and general publics. Our HSCR laboratory is a vital hub for this activity, and requires an urgent upgrade to our Multispectral Imaging system as well as one instrument to complete our portable, complementary suite of analytical instruments - an open-geometry Raman spectrometer. These purchases will ensure TNA remains at the forefront of archival and library heritage science research and innovation, and is able to continue providing analyses and imaging to archives and organisations that lack this capacity and access to expert staff.

This research cluster will bring together a team of key professionals, academic researchers representing AHRC/EPSRC disciplines as well as heritage practitioners to appraise the costs and risks of current environmental guidelines for cultural heritage in response to a changing climate. This theme has a national and international dimension since climate change, energy consumption, visitation and pressures for greater access to collections will continue to make considerable demand on cultural heritage in the 21st century globally. The scale and pace of these changes are posing unique challenges to managing the long-term preservation of material culture and are the focus of discussion amongst professional communities both nationally and internationally.This research cluster will inform this debate.\n\nCurrent environmental parameters and tolerances set out in national and international guidelines and standards as well as Governmental Sustainable Development Targets play a critical role in shaping practices in the cultural heritage sector such as building construction, and environmental management. This includes the control of temperature, moisture, light and pollution - the main factors affecting the conservation of material culture. Environmental guidelines impact significantly on how collections are stored, accessed, loaned and displayed. \n\nEqually, the cultural heritage sector is not immune from the challenges posed by global responsibility: reducing reliance on fossil fuels, changing behaviours in favour of re-use and alternative energy sources, for example. It is within this context the appropriateness of current environmental guidelines designed to meet an agreed standard for managing material culture change, enable visitors to access and experience collections to a seasonal standard of comfort, and provide access to collections both locally and internationally is being questioned as the 'costs' of this are being realised. Unfortunately, there are no easy or headline-grabbing answers to this problem: the risks need to be identified, the costs understood, the options appraised. \n\nEGOR will provide the necessary framework to develop thinking in this area in order to realise an intellectual step change in understanding the risks and uncertainties of current environmental guidelines, standards and targets in a changing climate. Consideration will be largely focused on indoor environments, collections and the people who engage with and work in the cultural heritage arena, and will build on foundations established by other research projects e.g. Noah's Ark (EU), Engineering our Futures (EPSRC), Living with Environmental Change (NERC) largely focused on climate impacts outdoors. This will be achieved through 5 sequential activities: \n1. An inaugural meeting of the steering group which includes professional leaders, and named investigators to shape thinking and initiate cross fertilisation of ideas and perspectives;\n2. 3 working group meetings comprising specialists in art history, engineering, material science and conservation for coherent discussion, and lively debate to understand the implication for current environmental guidelines in a changing climate for people, their values and history, buildings housing collections (often historic structures themselves) and collections. The implications will be considered against a background of global responsibility.\n3. A two-day residential event will conclude this investigative process; the three working groups will present their findings, areas of convergence and divergence will be further debated to determine the risks and uncertainties surrounding environmental guidelines and standards in a changing climate, and the outstanding research needed to fully inform this debate.\n\nA summary of the challenges and user-led research emerging within this theme will be reached at the end of the meeting and presented at the Programme conference in July 2009.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.