8 April 2019
PARTHENOS International relations: The PARTHENOS project has collected information about existing collaboration relations between partners and persons/institutions outside the project. The information is available in a table at the website.
In addition to this, we have conducted a small number of interviews in order to give examples of the purposes and the outcomes of such collaboration.
From left to right: Mark Hedges, Richard Marciano, Victoria Lemieux at IEEE Big Data 2018
The second interview in the series is with Mark Hedges, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, who is leading the PARTHENOS work on foresight studies.
Why do you collaborate with persons outside of the project?
MH: Foresight studies cover a very broad area of activity, so this could not be accomplished by one person or institution alone.
How did you get in contact with relevant collaborators?
MH: One of the collaborators, Richard Marciano, I knew from a previous (although unrelated) activity when he was at another institution. We had initial discussions about collaborating when we met at a conference, and this current collaboration was kicked off in April 2016, when we co-organised at the University of Maryland’s Digital Curation Innovation Center (DCIC) a 3-day symposium entitled “Finding New Knowledge: Archival Records in the Age of Big Data”.
What came out of it?
MH: This collaboration has had several beneficial effects, such as:
- Events
We have since then co-organised several workshops and other events, some of them attached to conferences and others stand-alone, for example a workshop series at the IEEE Big Data conference, a session at the Society of American Archivists conference, and a workshop at The National Archives (in the UK).
- Working group and publication
We have extended our collaboration to establish an informal working group addressing the field that grew out of this initial workshop, which we term computational archival science. Among other activities, the group has collectively produced a book chapter Archival records and training in the age of big data.
- Network grant
We also recently obtained a UK-US international network grant (IRCN-CAS)from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council.
- Memorandum of Understanding
My collaboration with the DCIC has led directly to an MoU being signed between King’s College London and the University of Maryland.