Research project
SPARKLE: Sustaining Practice Assets for Research, Knowledge, Learning and Engagement
- Start date: 10 January 2022
- End date: 9 July 2022
- Funder: Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
- Primary investigator: Dr Scott Mclaughlin
- Co-investigators: Dr Tom Jackson, Claire Knowles
- External co-investigators: Rachael Kotarski (British Library)
Value
£4,783.58
Partners and collaborators
British Library, EDINA
Postgraduate students
Alex De Little, Matthew Warren
Description
‘Sustaining Practice Assets for Research, Knowledge, Learning and Engagement’ (SPARKLE) will be a national infrastructure for the storage, discovery, access, analysis, and preservation of practice research assets: which may include text, but also image/video/audio/software, and other less common mediums.
Practice research is a broad community that cuts across disciplines (creative arts, humanities, healthcare, and others) that is not well-served by current text-focussed repositories, needing a more considered approach to a wider range of mediums. Equally, the current repository focus on single outputs is a poor fit for the processual and interconnected nature of practice research.
SPARKLE will address these issues and fill in a significant gap in the interconnected trusted repositories landscape, as the current institutional/subject repositories lack capabilities in the management of complex, multipart, interconnected assets. It will provide an integrated technology infrastructure for innovative design and practice research, along with economies of scale through a cloud-based data service, encompassing critical FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles.
As a holistic service to support practice research for now and the future, SPARKLE will include capabilities for analysing quantitative, thick, and big data, and learning resources to support documenting, accessing, and reusing practice assets. This project will produce an initial scoping of the required data infrastructure and community training needs.
Impact
This project will scope a solution to various issues around the preservation and dissemination of practice research, and will have impact nationally, and hopefully also internationally.