Profile

Kathryn is Programme Director of the DPhil in Information, Communication and the Social Sciences at the Oxford Internet Institute, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute and Pembroke College. 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.

From 2018-20, Kathryn held a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship at TORCH where she led 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. This project inspired the GLAM Labs Playful Spaces project, which also used social media to map and better understand playful engagement with Oxford’s museums. Kathryn is a Research Affiliate at the Pitt Rivers Museum (2018-) where she led 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 built 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, her research has sought to understand how and where sexism is experienced, and to expose 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. Her work has been funded by the AHRC, Google, JISC, and by the University of Oxford’s IT Innovation Fund, GLAM Labs, 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, cultural heritage, museums, arts and cultural industries, crowdsourcing, education, impact, users, wellbeing, digital and public history, history, gender, sexism.

Positions held at the OII

  • Senior Research Fellow, December 2020 –
  • Research Fellow, January 2014 – December 2020
  • AHRC Research Fellow, October 2012 – December 2013
  • Research Fellow, July 2008 – December 2011

Doctoral students

Research

Past 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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., Çöltekin, A., Eccles, K., Hale, S. and Straumann, R.K. (2015) "Collaborative Visualizations for Wikipedia Critique and Activism", Proceedings of ICWSM. AAAI. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. 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. National Centre for e-Social Science.

Journal articles

Reports

  • Meyer, E.T. and Eccles, K. (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. Jisc.
  • 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)" In: Final Report, 20 July 2009 Usage and Impact Study of JISC‐funded Phase 1 Digitisation Projects  & the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources (TIDSR). Oxford Internet Institute.

Teaching

  • Cultural Analytics

    This course will give an overview of how computational tools have recently been used to study patterns of cultural change.

News

Events

Blog

Press

Integrity Statement

My work has been financially supported by UK taxpayers, by the AHRC, Google, JISC, and by the University of Oxford through its IT Innovation Fund, GLAM Labs, John Fell Fund, ESRC IAA Fund, Van Houten fund, and Returning Carers Scheme.

I conduct my research in line with the University's academic integrity code of practice.