The role will allow her to be part of a UKRI-wide programme to enhance national digital research infrastructure for all UKRI communities. Dr Melodee Beals is a Senior Lecturer in Digital History in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University and in 2021 was appointed Open Research Lead for the school. Her most recent project, The Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata, is an open access online report and dataset on the development and potential uses of digitised newspaper databases around the world.
The UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure Committee plans to develop new services including a family of linked and interoperable trusted data repositories and upgraded large-scale computing provision. Dr Beals will work with the team to establish how existing capabilities can be enhanced to meet the needs of the whole UKRI research community, including arts and humanities work, to assist in the development of a national digital skills programme and to identify future collaborative research and development opportunities which this investment would enable.
Dr Beals said: “As we move into an ever more open research environment, it is vital that the arts and humanities are afforded robust and tailored support to both integrated, digital humanities data and the high-performance computing capabilities to process and analyse it in ways impossible through traditional methodologies. I see it as a great privilege to work to provide arts and humanities scholars with an infrastructure that will truly serve their needs and build upon the millennia of tradition and experience that make these disciplines so vital to our present and future society.”
The fellowship will run from January to June 2022.