Building on the University of Oxford’s history of leadership in digital scholarship, its globally significant collections, and its diverse array of projects and practitioners, Digital Scholarship at Oxford (DiSc) is an initiative to explore, enhance, and enable work in this field. By building capacity, growing community, and enriching engagement with collections, the initiative will help to unlock the University’s latent potential to produce internationally significant, innovative and engaging digital research.
DiSc’s mission, therefore, encompasses
> building capacity for the adoption and adaption of digital methods to enhance research, ask new questions, and produce research outputs;
> increasing and enhancing the use of the University’s collections in digital research; and,
> fostering communities around approaches, software, and tools, emphasising training, developing and sharing, and collaboration with others.
To achieve these things, we are building a team of specialist research software engineers, working with other teams from around the University, providing networking and knowledge exchange events, supporting researchers in developing funding proposals, and providing funding for demonstrators and prototypes to help this process. Through these, we are leading national and international conversations, and establishing agile infrastructures for our researchers to build upon. We are pleased to be collaborating with our colleagues across the Digital Scholarship landscape: DiSc’s mission in transforming Digital Scholarship sits in the broader digital transformation programme across the institution, embracing culture and processes as well as the underpinning technologies. Looking ahead, DiSc is preparing to develop and sustain digital scholarship and engagement in the exciting context of the Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, opening in 2025.
