
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.
Dr Kathryn Eccles
Research Fellow
- kathryn.eccles@oii.ox.ac.uk
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Profile
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
Research
Current projects
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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
- (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
- (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)
- (2009) "The future of e-research infrastructures", Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on e-Social Science.
- (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
- (2013) "The Emerging Governance of E-Infrastructure", Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 18 (2) 1-24.
- (2012) "Measuring the web impact of digitised scholarly resources", Journal of Documentation. 68 (4) 512-526.
- (2011) Reinventing Research? Information Practices in the Humanities.
Reports
- (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.
- (2011) Reinventing research? Information practices in the humanities. A report of the Research Information Network (RIN), April 2011..
- (2010) The Role of e-Infrastructures in the Creation of Global Virtual Research Communities. Final Report for the eResearch2020 project.
- (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=
Videos
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Tools for Measuring the Impact of Digitised Resources
Recorded: 20 May 2011
Duration: 00:40:03
Eric Meyer and Kathryn Eccles present the "Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources" and discuss methods for analysing online impact.
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The Impact of Digital Content (Roundtable Discussion)
Recorded: 20 May 2011
Duration: 00:38:33
A panel session to facilitate discussion about the future of digital content, the role that measuring impact will play, and how the value of digital content can be demonstrated.
News
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Prizes for OII staff and students at Oxford’s OxTalent awards
22 June 2017
The OII picked up prizes at Oxford's 2017 OxTALENT awards, which recognise members of the University who have made innovative use of digital technology.
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The OII’s Kathryn Eccles Appointed as “Digital Humanities Champion” for the University of Oxford
22 September 2014
The University of Oxford's Humanities Division is delighted to announce the appointment from 1 October 2014 of Dr Kathryn Eccles of the Oxford Internet Institute as Digital Humanities Champion.
Events
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OxCrowd: From Tags to Tools: Using crowdsourcing to understand and encourage engagement with cultural heritage
6 June 2017
The Oxford Internet Institute is excited to have Kathryn Eccles and Jamie Cameron give the second OxCrowd talk of the term 'From Tags to Tools: Using crowdsourcing to understand and encourage engagement with cultural heritage'.
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Everyday Sexism Datahack
24 November 2016
A Creative Exploration of the Sexism We Experience in Our Daily Lives
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Digital Impacts: Crowdsourcing in the Arts and Humanities
9 April 2013
This one-day workshop will showcase digital crowdsourcing projects in the Arts and Humanities, and discuss the impact of such initiatives.
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Digital Impacts: How to Measure and Understand the Usage and Impact of Digital Content
20 May 2011
This workshop calls researchers, librarians, funding representatives and others interested in understanding the impact of distributing materials online.
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e-History Doctoral Workshop
Thursday 03 - Friday 04 September 2009
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.
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Humanities on the Web: Is it working?
19 March 2009
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?
Blog
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Introducing the 2019 MSc Thesis Prize Winners
21 November 2019
Author: Sara Spinks
Congratulations to all our winners of the 2019 OII MSC thesis prize. It gives us great pleasure to announce the winners of the 2019 ... Read More Introducing the 2019 MSc Thesis Prize Winners
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Medieval Manuscripts, IIIF and the History of Medicine on Cabinet
7 May 2019
Author: Sarah Griffin
Cabinet is well known across Oxford for the three-dimensional models of museum objects that we create to promote teaching with material culture. While these ... Read More Medieval Manuscripts, IIIF and the History of Medicine on Cabinet
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Mystery Objects at Cheney School
10 February 2018
Author: Kathryn Eccles
The Cabinet project was delighted to take part in Cheney School’s Iris Festival of Imagined Worlds, held on Friday 9th February. The Festival celebrated novels ... Read More Mystery Objects at Cheney School
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Cabinet at the UMAC 2017 Conference in Helsinki
10 September 2017
Author: Kathryn Eccles
Dr Kathryn Eccles gave a short talk about Cabinet to the 17th Annual University Museums and Collections conference, hosted by the University of Helsinki ... Read More Cabinet at the UMAC 2017 Conference in Helsinki
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Everything you need to know about Cabinet in under six minutes…
20 June 2017
Author: Kathryn Eccles
Last week, the Oxford University Museums Partnership in collaboration with the Digital Learning Network put on a fantastic event on Digital Learning in Museums. ... Read More Everything you need to know about Cabinet in under six minutes…
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Live tagging art works at the Ashmolean Museum’s LiveFriday event
2 July 2015
Author: Kathryn Eccles
How does crowdsourcing work? Who gets involved and why? Can non-experts provide useful and high quality tags for important art works? These are some of ... Read More Live tagging art works at the Ashmolean Museum’s LiveFriday event
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The Object Apothecary at the Ashmolean Museum’s Live Friday event
7 June 2015
Author: Kathryn Eccles
Our third event at the Ashmolean‘s LiveFriday event in May was an Object Apothecary, dispensing prescriptions for events and experiences in the Museum to ... Read More The Object Apothecary at the Ashmolean Museum’s Live Friday event
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The Digital Wonder Cabinet at the Ashmolean Museum’s LiveFriday event
31 May 2015
Author: Kathryn Eccles
How far back do our modern day practices of collecting, curating and displaying information go? Choosing a Facebook profile picture, creating a gallery of holiday ... Read More The Digital Wonder Cabinet at the Ashmolean Museum’s LiveFriday event
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The future of Digital Humanities
21 May 2014
Author: Kathryn Eccles
As Glen Worthy pointed out the week before last, there are a lot of terrible things written about the Digital Humanities. As his commentary was ... Read More The future of Digital Humanities
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What will George Do?
20 January 2014
Author: Kathryn Eccles
I’m having so much fun working with colleagues at the Wales Centre for Behaviour Change at Bangor University, an interdisciplinary group with particular strengths ... Read More What will George Do?
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Research with Impact
29 July 2013
Author: Kathryn Eccles
Academics spend an awful lot of time thinking about impact, what it means and how to make sure our work has sufficient of it, ... Read More Research with Impact
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Do as I say, not as I do…
1 June 2013
Author: Kathryn Eccles
One of my resolutions when I started my AHRC fellowship was to blog more. I’m a huge convert to Twitter, and now read lots ... Read More Do as I say, not as I do…
Press
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These Computer Scientists Are Making a ‘Global Map of Sexism’
9 October 2015 VICE Motherboard
In an innovative project, physicist Taha Yasser and fellow OII humanities based researchers are using data from the Every Day Sexism project to produce the first data-driven map charting global sexism
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Will Technology Kill Universities?
18 March 2015 Time.com
Technology is transforming universities, not least through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) but will it render traditional universities obsolete? Kathryn Eccles is one of several experts who say no.
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Early career researchers making their own luck – with help from the Internet
15 January 2013 The Guardian
Kathryn Eccles opens the Guardian series for early career academics with an article on how her career went from part-time history teaching to digital humanist after she worked on a research project at the OII.
Integrity Statement
I conduct my research in line with the University's academic integrity code of practice.