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. She is responsible for the Digital Humanities Programme at TORCH, the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities, and ran the 2015-16 TORCH Headline series Humanities and the Digital Age. She has been a Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College since 2015.

Kathryn’s 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. In 2014, Kathryn was appointed as the University of Oxford’s first Digital Humanities Champion, in which capacity she played a leading role in developing the cross-University Digital Humanities strategy, advocating for Digital Humanities within the University and externally. Building on the University’s strengths in Digital Humanities, Kathryn continues to develop and contribute to training provision for all career stages and facilitates the embedding of digital practices and methodologies into Humanities teaching and research.

Kathryn is currently the PI of the Cabinet project, which has developed an interactive, mobile-optimised digital platform to support and encourage object-based learning. This project is a collaboration between the OII and the Oxford University Museums (Ashmolean and Museum of the History of Science), the History Faculty, and the University’s IT Services. It builds on research developed during Kathryn’s AHRC Early Career Fellowship (2012-3), which examined the role and impact of crowdsourcing in the arts. In particular, 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.

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 project, she has collaborated with Dr Taha Yasseri to use topic modelling to understand how and where sexism is experienced, as well as the interplay between constructions of sexism in both public and private spheres.

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 and JISC, and by the University of Oxford’s IT Innovation Fund, John Fell 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, 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

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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

Conference papers

  • 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.
  • 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.T. and Eccles, K. (2016) 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 ‘Sensing Culture’ project, a collaboration between museums and the RNIB supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, to use 3D scanning and printing to improve the accessibility of objects from Oxford’s Pitt Rivers and Natural History collections for blind and partially sighted visitors.
  • In February 2018, the Cabinet Project will visit Cheney School’s ‘Iris Festival of Imagined Worlds’, to help schoolchildren discover why objects are important and how they help us study subjects such as History, Literature and Art.  The school is home to the groundbreaking Rumble Museum.
  • The Cabinet Project is helping to catalyse the digitisation of museum and library resources in Oxford to make them more accessible for research and teaching within the University, as well as for lifelong learning. Experiencing objects digitally has the potential to improve the ways in which the public can engage with collections at home, or on the go on a mobile device, enabling them to get closer to the museums and their collections.