Linking and searching community-generated digital content to develop the people’s national collection

A virtual collection of Community-Generated Digital Content opening UK heritage to the world.

The ‘Our Heritage, Our Stories’ Discovery Research Project is part of the ‘Towards a National Collection’ programme, and is a collaborative, multidisciplinary project, with a team of academics from the Universities of Glasgow and Manchester, with world-leading archive and digital infrastructure development at The National Archives (TNA).

The intellectual and economic investment in community-generated digital content (CGDC) is immense and its rich and diverse content is one of the UK’s prime cultural assets, but it is critically endangered due to technological and organisational barriers.

‘Our Heritage, Our Stories’ responds to this urgent challenge by using cutting-edge approaches from cultural heritage, humanities and computer science to dissolve existing barriers and develop scalable linking and discoverability across CGDC, such as co-designing and building sophisticated automated tools to make them searchable and connected.

This creative R&D Showcase is presented by Creative Manchester, one of The University of Manchester’s four Research Platforms.

Contact

Prof John McAuliffe

Lead organisation

The University of Manchester

Team

Professor Lorna Hughes, Principal Investigator 
Professor of Digital Humanities and Dean for Europe, University of Glasgow

Professor Marc Alexander, Co-Investigator
Professor of English Linguistics and Director of the Historical Thesaurus of English, University of Glasgow

Professor Hannah Barker, Co-Investigator
Professor of British History, University of Manchester, Director of the John Rylands Research Institute

Dr Riza Batista-Navarro, Co-Investigator 
Senior Lecturer in Text Mining, University of Manchester

Professor Goran Nenandic, Co-Investigator
Professor of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute