Dr Kathryn Eccles

Kathryn Eccles has research interests in the impact of new technologies on Humanities scholarship, and the re-organisation of cultural heritage and higher education in the digital world.

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

Tel: +44 (0)1865 612338

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Kathryn has been a Research Fellow in Digital Humanities at the Oxford Internet Institute since 2008, and a Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College since 2015. Her research interests lie primarily in the Digital Humanities, ranging from the re-organisation of cultural heritage and higher education in the digital world and the impact of new technologies on Humanities scholarship and scholarly communication, to broader debates surrounding the human and social aspects of innovation and technological change. As the University’s first Digital Humanities Champion, Kathryn was responsible for the Digital Humanities Programme at The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH) from 2014-7, including the 2015-16 TORCH Headline series Humanities and the Digital Age.  Her current work focuses on the ways in which museums and cultural heritage organisations can implement new tools and technologies to enhance visitor engagement, and to better understand how visitors engage with collections.

Kathryn currently holds a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship at TORCH (2018-19) where she leads the Hashtag Heritage project, working with English Heritage to pilot the use of social media data to understand engagement with free-to-access heritage sites. She is PI of the Playful Spaces project, which also uses social media to map and better understand playful engagement with Oxford’s museums. Kathryn is also a Research Affiliate at the Pitt Rivers Museum (2018-) where she leads the Open Cabinet project, exploring the use of augmented reality to engage visitors and students with objects in the collections. This work builds on the Cabinet project, which Kathryn has led since 2015, developing an interactive, mobile-optimised digital platform to support and encourage object-based learning. The Cabinet project is a collaboration between the OII, the Oxford University Museums and the University’s IT Services with support from the GLAM Digital Strategy Group. Cabinet builds on research developed during Kathryn’s AHRC Early Career Fellowship (2012-3), which examined the role and impact of crowdsourcing in the arts. This research project focused on 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, including formal and informal learning.

Kathryn has longstanding interests in gender, identity and social change, the subject of her doctoral work in modern British history. As part of the Semantic Map of Sexism  and Offensive Internet projects, she has collaborated with Dr Taha Yasseri to understand how and where sexism is experienced, the interplay between constructions of sexism in both public and private spaces, and how cultures of offensive speech proliferate online.

Kathryn joined the OII in 2008 to work on the Digitised Resources: A Usage and Impact Study with Professor Eric Meyer, the first of a series of JISC-funded projects on usage and impact, leading 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. Her work has been funded by the AHRC, Google, JISC, and by the University of Oxford’s IT Innovation Fund, John Fell Fund, ESRC IAA Fund, Van Houten fund, and Returning Carers Scheme.

Kathryn completed her DPhil in Modern History at the University of Oxford in 2007.

Research interests: digital humanities, crowdsourcing, cultural heritage, museums, arts and cultural industries, education, impact, users, wellbeing, digital history, history, gender, sexism,

Positions held at the OII

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

Latest blog posts

Current projects

  • Mapping Playful Spaces in the Museum

    Participants: Dr Kathryn Eccles, Dr Chico Camargo

    This project seeks to use social media data to enhance our understanding of ‘playful’ behaviour across Oxford’s gardens, libraries, and museums, looking for new types of visitor engagement.

Past projects

  • 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.

  • Cabinet: Digital Transformation of Teaching through Objects

    Participants: Dr Kathryn Eccles, Dr Sarah Griffin, Jamie Cameron, Professor Howard Hotson, Ted Koterwas

    Cabinet is an award-winning online platform designed to encourage the use of museum collections in education.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • Measuring What Matters

    Participants: Dr Kathryn Eccles, Dr Alice Purkiss

    Measuring What Matters is a knowledge exchange partnership to discuss ways of understanding and measuring impact in different ways and for different audiences and outcomes in the cultural and heritage sector.

  • 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.

  • Open Cabinet: AR access to Oxford’s collections

    Participants: Dr Kathryn Eccles, Jamie Cameron, Susan Griffiths, Ted Koterwas, Dr Xavier Laurent, Dr Christopher Morton

    The Open Cabinet project is exploring the potential of augmented reality (AR) technology to enhance the student and public visitor experience in the University’s museums.

  • 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.

  • The “Offensive Internet”? Examining Cultures of Hate and Prejudice Online

    Participants: Dr Taha Yasseri, Dr Kathryn Eccles, Dr Vicki Nash, Lucas Wright

    This project examines the cultures of offensive speech online. It aims to learn about how offensive material is created, about the actors who produce and disseminate it, and the ways in which it is challenged.

Chapters

  • Eccles, K. and Greg, A. (2014) "Your Paintings Tagger: Crowdsourcing Descriptive Metadata for a National Virtual Collection" In: Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage Ridge, M. (eds.)Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities. Surrey, England: Ashgate. 185-208.

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. WS-15-19 11-16. (Source info: In Proceedings of ICWSM. AAAI, Forthcoming)
  • 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

  • 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

  • Meyer, E. and Eccles (2016) "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.
  • 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).
  • The Cabinet team has been working with the ‘<a href=