Kathryn Eccles has research interests in the impact of new technologies on scholarly behaviour and research, particularly in the Humanities.

email: kathryn.eccles@oii.ox.ac.uk

tel: +44 (0)1865 612338

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Kathryn’s research interests lie primarily in the Digital Humanities. Her research is highly interdisciplinary, cutting across several thematic areas, ranging from the impact of the re-organisation of cultural heritage and higher education in the digital world to broader debates surrounding the human and social aspects of innovation and technological change. Her current research activities fall into four main areas: the impact of new technologies on public interactions with arts and cultural heritage; the potential and impact of new technologies to support behaviour change, social capital and enhanced wellbeing; understanding the scope, potential and impact of crowdsourcing; and the impact of new technologies on scholarly activity and behaviour.

She recently held an AHRC Early Career Fellowship, which she used to examine the role of crowdsourcing in the arts, in particular, the potential of new information and communication technologies to promote public engagement with and awareness of museum collections, and to elicit new information about users and usage. The research focused on a key case study, Your Paintings, an important collaboration between the Public Catalogue Foundation and the BBC.

Kathryn joined the OII in 2008 to work on the Digitised Resources: A Usage and Impact Study, a JISC-funded project that led to the creation of a free web resource, the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources. She subsequently completed research in the field of Digital Humanities for the Oxford e-Social Science (OeSS) project, and probed the role of e-Infrastructures in the creation of global virtual research communities as part of the eResearch2020 project.

Kathryn completed her DPhil in Modern History at the University of Oxford in 2007. Her historical research interests lie in Modern British social and cultural history, particularly around the themes of gender, identity and education, research methods and digital history.

Research interests

digital humanities, crowdsourcing, cultural heritage, arts and cultural industries, behaviour change, wellbeing, e-humanities, digital history, e-research, history, gender, education

Positions held at the OII

  • Research Fellow, January 2014 –
  • AHRC Research Fellow, October 2012 – December 2013
  • Research Fellow, July 2008 – December 2011

Current projects

Past projects

  • Semantic Map of Sexism: Topic Modelling of the Everyday Sexism Content

    Participants: Dr Kathryn Eccles, Dr Taha Yasseri, Sophie Melville

    In this project we take a Natural Language Processing approach to analyse the content of reports submitted to the Everyday Sexism project.

  • Between Text and Object: Digital Transformation of Teaching through Objects

    Participants: Dr Kathryn Eccles, Dr Giovanna Vitelli, Professor Howard Hotson, Dr Silke Ackermann

    This project will develop and test a digital platform to support the integration of museum and library collections into Oxford’s world-class teaching.

  • A Museum Without Walls: Realising the Potential of Crowdsourcing in the Arts

    Participants: Dr Kathryn Eccles

    This AHRC funded project will study the impact of an innovative crowdsourcing initiative on Your Paintings, an important new digital art collection hosted by the BBC.

  • Digital Impacts: A Synthesis Report and Workshop

    Participants: Professor Eric T. Meyer, Dr Kathryn Eccles

    This project was designed to synthesize the evidence about the impact that digital resources are having on various audiences, and how resource providers have stepped up efforts to embed resources into the practices of communities.

  • Humanities Information Practices

    Participants: Professor Ralph Schroeder, Dr Marina Jirotka, Dr Annamaria Carusi, Professor Eric T. Meyer, Dr Christine Madsen, Tim Davies, Dr Kathryn Eccles, Dr Monica Bulger, Grace de la Flor, Dr Tim Webmoor, Dr Claire Warwick, Dr Melissa Terras, Dr Sally Wyatt, Smiljana Antonijevic, Dr Anne Beaulieu

    Many humanities scholars are enthusiastic users of digital resources, however there is a potential mismatch between what (and how) resources are offered, and how scholars might use them. How should they be designed to ensure maximum use by scholars?

  • eResearch 2020

    Participants: Professor Ralph Schroeder, Professor Eric T. Meyer, Dr Kathryn Eccles

    Aiming to better understand the organizational, collaborative and technological developments in e-Infrastructures which are effective in supporting virtual research organizations in different fields.

  • Digitised Resources: A Usage and Impact Study

    Participants: Professor William H. Dutton, Professor Ralph Schroeder, Professor Mike Thelwall, Professor Eric T. Meyer, Dr Christine Madsen, Dr Kathryn Eccles

    This project combined quantitative and qualitative indicators to measure the impact of online scholarly resources and to develop a best practices toolkit that allows assessment of the impact of digitisation projects by researchers and funding bodies.

  • OeSS: The Oxford e-Social Science Project

    Participants: Professor William H. Dutton, Professor Paul Allan David, Professor Ralph Schroeder, Dr Marina Jirotka, Dr Annamaria Carusi, Dr Matthijs den Besten, Professor Eric T. Meyer, Dr Kathryn Eccles, Professor Christopher Millard, Professor Michael Parker, Dr Justine Pila, Professor Tina Piper, Dr Michael Spence, Professor David Vaver

    The Oxford e-Social Science project aims to understand how e-Research projects negotiate various social, ethical, legal and organizational forces and constraints, in order to help researchers avoid these problems when building scientific collaborations.

Conference papers

  • De Sabbata, S., Coltekin, A., Eccles, K., Hale, S. and Straumann, R. (2015) "Collaborative Visualizations for Wikipedia Critique and Activism", Proceedings of ICWSM. AAAI.
  • Eccles, K., Meyer, E., Schroeder, R., Kertcher, Z., Barjak, F., Huesing, T. and Robinson, S. (2009) "The future of e-research infrastructures", Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on e-Social Science.
  • Meyer, E., Eccles, K. and Madsen, C. (2009) "Digitisation as e-Research infrastructure: Access to materials and research capabilities in the Humanities", Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on e-Social Science. 5th International Conference on e-Social Science, Cologne, Germany, 24 – 26 June 2009.

Journal articles

  • De Sabbata, S., Eccles, K., Hale, S., Straumann, R. and Çoltekin, A. (2015) "Collaborative visualizations for Wikipedia critique and activism", AAAI Workshop - Technical Report. WS-15-19 11-16.
  • Barjak, F., Eccles, K., Meyer, E.T., Robinson, S. and Schroeder, R. (2013) "The Emerging Governance of E-Infrastructure", Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 18 (2) 1-24.
  • Eccles, K.E., Thelwall, M. and Meyer, E.T. (2012) "Measuring the web impact of digitised scholarly resources", Journal of Documentation. 68 (4) 512-526.
  • Bulger, M.E., Meyer, E.T., De la Flor, G., Terras, M., Wyatt, S., Jirotka, M., Eccles, K. and Madsen, C.M. (2011) Reinventing Research? Information Practices in the Humanities.

Reports

  • Bulger, M., Meyer, E., de la Flor, G., Terras, M., Wyatt, S., Jirotka, M., Eccles, K. and Madsen, C. (2011) Reinventing research? Information practices in the humanities. A report of the Research Information Network (RIN), April 2011..
  • Meyer, E., Hüsing, T., Robinson, S., Barjak, F., Bendel, O., Wiegand, G., Eccles, K., Schroeder, R., Kertcher, Z. and Coslor, E. (2010) The Role of e-Infrastructures in the Creation of Global Virtual Research Communities. Final Report for the eResearch2020 project.
  • Meyer, E., Eccles, K., Thelwall, M. and Madsen, C. (2009) Final Report to JISC on the Usage and Impact Study of JISC-funded Phase 1 Digitisation Projects and the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources (TIDSR).
  • Meyer, E. and Eccles "The Impacts of Digital Collections: Early English Books Online & House of Commons Parliamentary Papers" In: The Impacts of Digital Collections: Early English Books Online & House of Commons Parliamentary Papers.

  • Digital Impacts: Crowdsourcing in the Arts and Humanities

    9 April 2013 - 9 April 2013, 00:00:00 - 00:00:00

    This one-day workshop will showcase digital crowdsourcing projects in the Arts and Humanities, and discuss the impact of such initiatives.

  • Digital Impacts: How to Measure and Understand the Usage and Impact of Digital Content

    20 May 2011 - 20 May 2011, 09:30:00 - 16:00:00

    This workshop calls researchers, librarians, funding representatives and others interested in understanding the impact of distributing materials online.

  • e-History Doctoral Workshop

    3 September 2009 - 4 September 2009, 09:00:00 - 16:00:00

    A workshop for history doctoral students who are interested in using the Internet for research, covering identification of digital resources for history, operationalizing research questions using digital resources, and digital resource best practice.

  • Humanities on the Web: Is it working?

    19 March 2009 - 19 March 2009, 10:00:00 - 16:00:00

    The web now contains the results of many initiatives to digitise resources for the humanities but how successful are these initiatives and how much information has now been archived online?