In just a couple of months’ time, the Centre for Data, Culture & Society will celebrate its second birthday.  We’re now a team of five, surrounded by a network of affiliates and associates, affiliates, fellows, trainers, researchers and PhD students.  Here are some of the other ways in which we’ve grown over the last two years:

• Our training programme has expanded to support over 700 people per year.  This year we’ve welcomed a new Training Manager, run over 35 courses, and employed three new CDCS Training Fellows.

• Our audience has gone global.  We run regular research seminars and events, which are pitched primarily at our local community. Having very quickly pivoted these to online formats last Spring, our audience numbers have increased dramatically and we now regularly welcome  attendees from around the world and from a variety of sectors, most notably cultural heritage and the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries and Museums) sector.

• We now have five active Research Clusters aligned with the Centre, and will be launching our sixth very soon.  The clusters are a key part of what CDCS does, surfacing emerging research groups, projects and ideas.  Designed to be flexible and responsive to the needs of the group, the cluster format allows researchers to access support and some funding as they explore next steps. They are envisaged as a stepping stone towards more formal structures, and are expected to last only for a few years.  We therefore aim to be launching new clusters on a regular basis going forward.

• We’re developing our expertise in Text Mining, a strategic focus that aligns with research interests across the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and with the ambitions of our colleagues in the Library.  Last year we ran our first Text Mining Lab, which supported 9 projects in partnership with the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre.   This year’s Lab has just been announced.

• We’ve also now become a part of the EFI family. The Edinburgh Futures Institute is one of the hubs of the Data Driven Innovation programme which support the UK government’s City Region Deal for Edinburgh and South East Scotland.  We’re excited to be part of EFI, and to working alongside other Centres under their banner.

• Our ambitions are growing too!  After a great start and real expansion over these last two years, we’re looking forward to a period of consolidation and to setting our agenda for the longer term.  We’re developing partnerships with other digitally-focussed organisations nationally and internationally, deepening our expertise in key areas, and with our Training Manager on board, we’re exploring the possibility of future CDCS Summer Schools.

You can find about more about all our activities on our website: www.cdcs.ed.ac.uk 

(Credit: Ann Harrison)

(Credit: Ann Harrison)

Look how we’ve grown! / Data, Culture & Society by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0

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