Impact: Critical Practice Impact: Critical Practice Prof. Helen Small, University of Oxford The kinds of claim typically made for Humanities research impact  Generating new ways of thinking that influence creative practice.  Creating, inspiring and supporting new forms of artistic, literary, linguistic, social, economic, religious and other expression.  Contributing to economic prosperity via the creative sector including publishing, music, theatre, museums and galleries, film and television, fashion, tourism, and computer games.  Informing or influencing practice or policy as a result of research on the nature and extent of religious, sexual, ethnic or linguistic discrimination. Kinds of claim made …  Changing public understanding of x cultural object or practice, or of its significance  Bringing x cultural object/practices to new audiences  Preserving, conserving, and presenting cultural heritage  Helping professionals and/or organisations adapt to changing cultural conditions and/or values Kinds of claim made …  Influencing the content of curricula and syllabi in schools, other HEIs or other educational institutions [beyond the originating institution] for example through the widespread use of research publications, derived text books, new primary sources or an IT resource in education.  Enhancing delivery of educational curricula, or assisting development of pedagogical tools and practice.  Taking education beyond existing institutions in ways that assist lifelong learning, and/or the learning of individuals or groups not catered for by existing educational institutions. DH specific claims  Creating new forms of digital conservation and/or interpretation of cultural objects/practices  Establishing new standards for digital conservation and/or interpretation  Enhancing public access to, and engagement with, national (or private) cultural collections  Producing integrated virtual collections not otherwise able to be experienced as a whole Enhancing Public Understanding of Jane Austen and Curatorship of her Texts  Jane Austen has, since the late nineteenth century, occupied a powerful position within English- speaking culture, popular and canonical, accessible and complexly academic. Kathryn Sutherland's engagement with audiences beyond academia has improved public understanding of how Austen's works and life acquired the forms and significance they have had. Sutherland's research has enabled better-informed teaching of Austen at secondary school and university level, and assisted high quality educational programme-making for television. Her collaborative work on the digitization of Austen's working drafts has set new standards for the encoding of literary manuscripts, assisting literary curatorship and improving public accessibility to cultural heritage Underpinning research (sample)  An edited anthology of family-written biographies and recollections of Austen …brought together for the first time all the first-hand accounts of Austen's life written by those who knew her …. Sutherland used these original accounts to shine light on the Austen family's persistent management, censorship, and marketing of a particular version of Austen that has its latest manifestation in Deirdre Le Faye's `authoritative' biography Jane Austen: A Family Record (2004). The editorial apparatus and critical introduction to Sutherland's anthology considered the absence of a critical theory of biography that can help us address the reality and concept of the partial life (the life of a famous figure for whom only incomplete evidence survives). The academic impact (sample)  A significant aspect of Sutherland's impact has been the contribution made to providing new resources and forming new agendas for other academics engaged in studies of Austen. The anthology of Austen family biographies (A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections, 2002) has been adopted world-wide as a university course book (e.g. Colby College, the University of Delaware, Southern Illinois University) as well as having wide take-up by the general public (Austen commands levels of public interest probably second only to Shakespeare among Britain's classic writers). It is regularly reprinted, and has to date sold 4,440 copies and netted revenue of £12,735, for OUP. Textual Lives has directly shaped a burgeoning interest in reception studies of Austen at university level, serving as a model, for example, in recent publications including Juliet Wells, Everybody's Jane(2011) and Gillian Dow and Clare Hanson, eds, Uses of Jane (2012). Wells writes: `Kathryn Sutherland's Jane Austen's Textual Lives [...] has had a profound impact within Austen studies, including but not limited to reception history and the study of popular culture ... I take up where Sutherland leaves off' (pp. 14-15). It is a recommended teaching text at numerous universities, including the Open University, St Andrews, Exeter, and the University of Texas at Austin. It has sold 1,280 copies and netted revenue of £24,555 to date. Wider impact  Jane Austen's Fiction Manuscripts: A Digital Edition provoked huge academic and public interest when it went live in October 2010 (Ref. i). The edition offered the first chance to view Austen's fiction manuscripts as a reunified collection since their dispersal in 1845, and the first chance for any member of the general public to engage with them in high quality, free, digital form. The site has had 4,237,474 hits (113,204 unique visitors) between its launch and the end of the auditing period (Ref. ii). Between 23 October and 19 November 2010, 454 news articles (Radio, TV, newspapers) covered the story internationally; Sutherland was interviewed by many major British and North American papers and broadcasters. Her free online podcast lectures, `Jane Austen's Manuscripts Explored', in the Oxford University BODcasts series, had attracted 1386 downloads by the end of the audited period (Ref. iii). Wider impact (cont.)  [The digital resource has had] important technical implications for future work in manuscript conservation and curation. It provided a model for the use of digital media that admits public access to materials too delicate and too valuable to be open to easy view in a library or museum. Technically, the project set new standards for the digital encoding of working draft manuscripts (with the establishment of an international subcommittee for TEI-XML encoding of writers' revisions, chaired by Elena Pierazzo, Technical Researcher on the Austen Digital Edition). Immediate impact came with its inclusion in the British Library's major public exhibition, `Growing Knowledge: The Evolution of Research' (October 2010-July 2011), an interactive showcase of innovative projects from the arts, science, and medicine, inviting the general public to engage with the latest digital research. It also featured in `Oxford Impacts', an Oxford University publicity drive, showcasing its major research. In January 2013, Sutherland demonstrated the web-edition to the Right Hon. Vince Cable, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation, and Skills as an example of innovation in the Humanities. Open Educational Resources (OERs) in English: Enriching the School Curriculum and Supporting Transition from School to University  Great Writers Inspire (www.writersinspire.org) is a JISC funded project designed by Smith, Williams and Beasley in collaboration with IT services to expand the Oxford English Faculty's open educational resources on the web. Prompted by the success of Smith's Approaching Shakespeare podcast lectures (2010), GWI represents a systematic approach to creating, gathering and curating online research content targeted directly at students and teachers in secondary schools, further education, lifelong learning, and universities. Combining tailor-made podcasts, curated eBooks, audio talks, video files, and scholarly essays, GWI and AS have brought the Faculty's research to a global audience of over 740,000. http://www.writersinspire.org/ Digital Resource Example (cont).  `Approaching Shakespeare' and `Great Writers Inspire' have had significant impact on a range of beneficiaries outside Higher Education, including school students and their teachers and life-long learners. AS was and is the most successful of the Faculty's early experiments with the podcast lecture format. Downloaded 407,319 times by the end of the audit period, it is a recommended resource in schools across the UK. … Email feedback includes: `I came across [AS] last year on iTunes when writing on Othello, and found your lecture a fantastic help... as an introduction to ways of thinking about the play, and to how I might try to put together an argument about it' - from a 6th form student; and `As head of More Able and Talented at a large state school, I am constantly looking for resources to improve our teaching and your podcasts are giving us just that opportunity. Members of the English department are now using Wittgenstein's Dabbit illustration in the way you did and finding it to be a very effective approach and our more able students are being encouraged to listen to the podcasts both to improve their understanding of the plays and to encourage them to believe that Oxford ... operates at A-level they will find accessible' - from a teacher. Digital Resource Example (cont.)  Collecting existing materials together and enriching them with new resources has gained an audience for materials unlikely otherwise to attract notice at secondary school level. This process has taken place in part through a WordPress blog (http://writersinspire.wordpress.com/), launched June 2009, which captures new resources and academics' scholarly posts. Paid graduate student ambassadors contributed content, including blog entries and short essays (e.g. explanatory context for items in the Oxford Text Archive). All material goes into Apple's global publishing platform Apple iTunes U, and (in parallel) into the main university media website www.podcast.ox.ac.uk to enable more direct retrieval through Google. IT-Support have worked closely with Google, who already ranked the University of Oxford highly, using titles, keywords, and sheer volume of content to maximize GWI's ranking in their search engine. Type the word `lectures' and the name of a major British author or text into Google (e.g. `Shakespeare', `Dickens', `Beowulf'), and Oxford English Faculty material will generally be the first search finding. http://writersinspire.wordpress.com/ Problems/questions  - the language of case-study presentation (avoid the Soc Sci in-house diction)  - giving away one’s hard-won exceptionalism  - extracting the information from commercial organisations and (ironically) from public/govt bodies  - remaining honest about (not overselling) the indicative nature of *all* the data  - (for HE institutions), keeping the level appropriately high. Infrastructure challenges in impact reporting  finding the most efficient model of operation for administrative and infrastructural assistance - providing and sustaining paths for impact via libraries, innovation centres, clinics etc. without overwhelming core activity  finding effective, non-burdensome modes for obtaining and collating evidence of impact and reach, and keeping cognizant of changing requirements for impact reporting  maintaining the centrality of the underpinning research to the ’public value’ claims made