2018 CAL PGTP Projects

Below are the details of the ten projects that will be running this summer. Each placement will last for 90 hours at a maximum of 15 hours a week and in order to undertake one you must be eligible to work in the UK and registered with Worklink.

  • Each project details the required skills for the placement.
  • Some placements have required dates when you must be available.
  • The schedule of work will be drawn up between the project lead and placement holder.
  • You can only apply to one project so make sure you choose the project you are most interested in! The closing date for applications is the 14 May.

In addition to the duties required as part of the placement there will also be an optional program of professional skills and training events across the summer to help support the placement holders and their development as researchers.

Projects in English, Drama, and American and Canadian Studies

RSC/ The Other Place & Shakespeare for D/deaf children

Project Proposer/s: Abigail Rokison-Woodall

School/Dept: The Shakespeare Institute

Project Title:

RSC/ The Other Place & Shakespeare for D/deaf children

Project Summary 

I am currently working on two linked research projects, which emerge from the University of Birmingham’s partnership with the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Other Place.

The first of these projects is a book about the history of Shakespeare productions in The Other Place theatre.  Currently only a very limited proportion of the The Other Place archive, held by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has been catalogued.  There are numerous files of correspondence/ memos/ production information which need to be looked through for specific details relating to Shakespeare productions at the theatre.  I am also carrying out a number of interviews with practitioners involved in the work of The Other Place, which require transcription.

The second project is focussed on teaching Shakespeare to D/deaf children and involves the adaptation of material in the RSC Toolkit in order to make it suitable for use with D/deaf children in a classroom.  We are holding a week of Research and Development work at The Other Place, and are then going to be trialling the exercises with groups from two schools for the D/deaf in the local area.

What the researcher will do 

The researcher will assist with both of these projects.

For the first project the researcher will be given small, dedicated research tasks to carry out in the RSC archives, looking through memos, letters and production files.  They will also be asked to transcribe taped interviews carried out as part of the research for the project. 

For the second project the researcher will act as a scribe for dedicated sessions in the week of Research and Development work, taking notes.  They will also be asked to collate impact-related data following the workshops with the school groups. 

Skills required by the Placement holder 

  • Experience in archives
  • Accurate typing skills
  • Good note-taking skills

How will your Project benefit the Placement holder?

This project offers an opportunity to:

  • Gain experience of archive research.
  • Learn more about the history of performances of Shakespeare and other plays at The Royal Shakespeare Company.
  • Learn more about the teaching of Shakespeare to D/deaf children.
  • Witness a Research and development project at the RSC, co-run with the RSC education department.
  • Learn about impact and how to gather impact data.

This project will require some the Placement work at a location other than the University of Birmingham. Precise details will be confirmed between the successful applicant and the academic.

Exploring different types of creativity in metaphor

Project Proposer/s:

Jeannette Littlemore (EDACS); John Barnden (Computer Science); Eirini Mavritsaki (BCU)

School/Dept:

EDACS/ELAL

Project Title:

Exploring different types of creativity in metaphor

Project Summary

This is a pilot project that aims to make initial steps towards uncovering differences in the way people respond to different types of (partially) creative metaphor by means of psycholinguistic experimentation.

Metaphor is the phenomenon of thinking, talking or otherwise communicating about something as if it were something else, as in the phrase “the plan [of action] is rigid”, viewing the plan as if it were a physical object, and in particular an inflexible one (Patterson, 2016). A metaphorical expression can be conventional and uncreative—as in that example, because plans and many other abstract things are often talked about as being physical objects with qualities such as rigidity. But a metaphorical expression can also be unconventional and creative in a variety of ways and to different degrees (Kovecses, 2010), and in particular as follows. 

One way of being creative, usually to a moderate degree, is illustrated by “the plan is made of hardened steel.” This relies on the same general metaphorical view as “the plan is rigid” does, but elaborates it with additional, uncommon detail (which in this case intensifies the rigidity of the plan). For convenience we can call this phenomenon novel elaboration [of a familiar view]. The degree of creativity is the more extreme the richer and more unusual the elaborations. But a qualitatively different and often extreme way of being creative would be illustrated by “the plan is violet,” which in a particular context might mean that the plan of action in question is a mixture of very different elements but still pleasing—just as violet might be considered a pleasing mix of red and blue. This sentence is only distantly related, if at all, to relevant, familiar metaphorical views that could apply to plans, and requires the establishment of a novel analogy. A convenient label for this phenomenon is novel view. (The two labels do not, however, imply a stark division between the phenomena.)

Two main research questions are (1) whether, and the extent to which, people have more difficulty in understanding the novel-view type of metaphor than the novel-elaboration type and (2) whether, and the extent to which, there is more variability in people’s interpretations in the novel-view case compared to the novel-elaboration case. We do expect there to be more difficulty and more variability. We expect greater difficulty to show up as extra time needed for understanding and an increased occurrence of failures to come up with an appropriate interpretation (Coney & Lange, 2006; Kovecses, 2010; Patterson, 2016).

The experiments will use a protocol and set of metaphor examples previously used in an earlier part of the same study, conducted in 2015. The study was separated in three parts. The first part used 4 levels of metaphoric expression comprised by two words that were self-paced read (Coney & Lange, 2006) and the time to read the expression was recorded. Then the participant was describing the expression. The last part of the experiment included a presentation of 4 pictures, one of them was selected to match the metaphorical meaning and a second one the literal meaning of the expression, the reaction times for identifying the picture that matched the meaning of expression presented and answers were recorded (Brownell et al., 1990). The preliminary results of this study showed it took longer for novel metaphor to be fully understood (Figure 1), that follows above predictions.

Participants in this previous study were 65 and over to match the patient group of 30 stroke victims. To be able to publish the outcomes of the first study we need to collect another 20 participants (65 and over). We are also taking the opportunity to extend the scope of the study by involving 30 student participants under age 65 and without stroke or similar pathology, drawn from EDACS and Computer Science at Birmingham and from Psychology at BCU. Therefore, there will be fifty participants in all.

Image for PG Research Placement in ELALA

What the researcher will do 

The researcher will run the above described experiment in which Reaction Time and answers will be recorded in the ELAL Psycholinguistics Lab in which participants have to identify meanings of metaphors with different levels of creativity as above. The tests will last approximately 40 minutes per participant.

The researcher will also help to organise the schedule of participants and to analyse the results. 

Skills required by the Placement holder

  • Strong interpersonal skills
  • An understanding of experimental methods.

How will your Project benefit the Placement holder?

This project offers an opportunity to:

  • Learn about how psycholinguistic experiments work and about some of the cognitive and linguistic issues they aim to address.
  • Learn about open research problems in figurative language understanding.
  • Work with a range of participants.
  • Develop experimental-result analysis skills.
  • Develop organisational and team skills.

Towards a new resource for teaching and learning English

Project Proposer/s:

Florent Perek

School/Dept:

EDACS / ELAL

Project Title:

Towards a new resource for teaching and learning English

Project Summary 

This work is part of a starting large-scale project that aims at creating a new resource for the learning, teaching, and general description of English grammar. It relies on the COBUILD grammar patterns, a database of sentence constructions for English verbs, nouns, and adjectives, compiled as part of the COBUILD lexicographic project. The aim of this new project is to improve the COBUILD patterns by pairing them with FrameNet (https://framenet.icsi.berkeley.edu ), another novel resource than describe and organise English words in terms of the general situations and scenarios that underlie their meaning. The project is expected to have multiple applications, both in itself and for further research, and to offer a new way to describe the grammatical constructions of English that is hoped to be helpful to both teachers and learners of English as a foreign language.

What the researcher will do

The PGT researcher will be asked to assist the research lead with various tasks that will support the writing of a grant application to launch this project on a wider scale. This will involve primarily data collection and annotation tasks. The project is based on an automatic matching of machine-readable version of the two resources by a computer program, but preliminary investigations have revealed that building the entire database will require a good deal of manual annotation to fully match the patterns with the FrameNet database. The PGT researcher will be asked to conduct a few case studies by performing such annotation, to gauge the amount of work involved in the overall project and provide some preliminary data that can be used to illustrate the grant proposal and show the potential of the new resource. Secondarily, the PGT researcher will also be asked to provide support on other aspects of the grant proposal if and when the need arises, such as searching for and assessing existing resources in the field, looking into alternative funding schemes and their requirements, and performing literature searches. 

Skills required by the Placement holder

  • Basic knowledge of standard computer tools, in particular spreadsheet software
  • Web searches and literature searches
  • Ability to work independently, take initiatives and come up with creative solutions

How will your Project benefit the Placement holder?

This project offers an opportunity to:

  • Familiarise yourself with tools and methods to manage and annotate linguistic data, which can be applied to other projects both in the industry and in academia
  • Learn about research grants and the application process, since the PGT researcher will be actively involved in putting together a grant proposal

Bell’s Legacy: Medieval Women and the Book

Project Proposer/s:

Dr Elizabeth L’Estrange and Dr Emily Wingfield

School/Dept:

Art History and English Literature

Project Title:

Bell’s Legacy: Medieval Women and the Book

Project Summary 

This PGT placement offers a student the opportunity to work with Dr Elizabeth L’Estrange and Dr Emily Wingfield as they develop an international networking bid to work on the legacy (in terms of teaching and research) of Susan Bell’s pioneering article ‘Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture’ (Signs, 7 (1982) 742-68). Bell’s work sought to establish the ‘special relationship’ that women had with books and their influence on lay piety in the Middle Ages and it stands directly behind a now burgeoning body of research on medieval women and the book, focused particularly on women from England, France and Burgundy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Our project aims to assess in more detail the legacy of Bell’s work and interrogate in further detail the implications of her conclusions.

This year we wish to investigate what use we might make of digital technologies both to conduct and disseminate the results of our research. We would like our assistant to make use of existing research strengths at the University of Birmingham (e.g. staff involved in the Digital Humanities Forum, such as Dr Matt Hayler in English Literature) and external contacts (including Professor Pamela Fletcher, Bowdoin College,and Philippe Gambette, George, le 2e texte ) to learn more about the resources available to us. They will investigate ways of visualising recent work on medieval women and the book using a variety of mapping and social network software, and use this to point up areas for further research. They will also set up and pilot a pioneering online website and bibliography of primary and secondary resources related to Women and the Book.

There will also be the opportunity to develop further the links that we established last year with the Cadbury Research Library with the possibility of doing some research on relevant primary material and presenting this digitally (e.g. an online exhibition). 

What the researcher will do 

  • Liaise with experts in digital humanities here at the University of Birmingham and with international contacts to explore ways in which we might make use of online mapping and network analysis software to visualise research on medieval women and the book
  • Establish a pilot online bibliography on a platform like Wordpress using particularly prominent case studies, and use Dr L’Estrange and Dr Wingfield’s existing research contacts to invite contributions from international scholars
  • Make contact with the custodians of Bell’s archive to investigate the nature of its contents and explore Bell’s wider body of published work
  • Assist Dr L’Estrange in completed a peer-reviewed journal article re-assessing Bell’s 1982 essay
  • Assist Dr L’Estrange and Dr Wingfield in planning a series of Birmingham-based workshops and conferences
  • Continue to maintain a Twitter account linked to the project and contribute articles to the project’s blog
  • Consider ways in which the work of the project can be brought to wider audiences through outreach work to museums, schools and collections (such as the Cadbury Research Library).  

Skills required by the Placement holder

Essential:

  • Current College of Arts and Law taught master’s student with an interest in medieval literature, history, art and digital humanities
  • Strong time management skills
  • Attention to detail
  • Capable of working well in a team
  • IT literate

Desirable:

  • Experience of web-editing
  • Experience of blogging
  • Experience of the use of social media in a professional context
  • Experience of producing reports and briefings
  • Experience of working in an office environment
  • Knowledge of or familiarity with one or more European languages (e.g. French, German, Spanish, Italian) 

How will your Project benefit the Placement holder?

This project offers an opportunity to:

  • Gain experience of working in an academic environment
  • Gain experience of a variety of research communications and administration
  • Take part in the establishment and consolidation of scholarly networks
  • Write material that will have immediate online publication and assist with the publication of a peer-reviewed journal article
  • Learn more about the ever-growing discipline of digital humanities

Iconoclasm in English churches during the long Reformation

Project Proposer/s:

Dr David Griffith

School/Dept:

EDACS / English Literature

Project Title:

Iconoclasm in English churches during the long Reformation

Project Summary 

This project will gather evidence for the defacement of later medieval inscriptional religious texts in England during the long Reformation, from the late Henrician period to the 1640s. It will support two REF outputs: a concluding chapter or coda for the monograph The Material Word: Vernacular Religious Inscriptions in Late Medieval England (Brepols, submission 2018 for publication 2019), and an 8000-word essay ‘Iconoclasm during the Long Reformation’ in The Monuments Man: Studies in Honour of Jerome Bertram, ed. Christian Steer (Shaun Tyas, submission spring 2019 for publication spring 2020, on the date of the recipient’s 75th birthday). 

Of the huge numbers of inscriptional texts (devotional, instructional, and epigraphic) that adorned later medieval ecclesiastical buildings many were ripped up, erased, defaced, or otherwise damaged by iconoclasts in the century following the break with Rome. In the early years of reform considerable numbers of inscriptions were wholly destroyed, especially in the dissolved monastic churches and in urban parishes, but others appear to have been largely tolerated, protected by family and community connections and conservative religious instincts. By the time of the second spike of iconoclastic activity, in the 1640s, the situation had very largely moved from disapproval of superstitious images to outright antagonism and systematic destruction by agents of the State. Scholars have long recognised this broad sweep of iconoclastic activity, and its close relation to the valorization of vernacular scripture (e.g. Whiting, Duffy, Simpson, Spraggon, Aston), but the particularities of the attacks, especially the symbolic erasure of elements of inscriptions and the overwriting or adaptation of others, is imperfectly understood. In a recent essay I coined the term ‘detexting’ to describe the kind of deliberate defacement of inscriptions that was designed to dishonour the Catholic belief system in which these kinds of texts were operative (‘Texts and Detexting on Late Medieval Church Screens’, 2017). This project will then provide vital research support for my current research into this aspect of the post-Reformation fate of the medieval inscriptional corpus.

What the researcher will do 

The researcher will assist me in completing this monograph and in scoping out this essay for The Monuments Man collection.  The researcher will be tasked with creating a database of damaged and detexted inscriptions drawing upon the large body of antiquarian and more recent scholarly resources. The database will collate evidence of various kinds and will require to scholar to:

  • Identify and record relevant inscriptional texts, recording date, place, and medium
  • Transcribe text and damage done
  • Identify visual records of the same, extant and lost (this may involve using my existing photographic records of late medieval epigraphical texts)
  • Create bibliography of existing scholarship

Skills required by the Placement holder

The holder will be a current CAL taught MA student with interests in late medieval artistic traditions and/or early Reformation history.

Essential:

  • Strong time management skills
  • Close attention to detail
  • Ability to work independently but to clearly defined targets

Desirable:

  • Familiarity with textual traditions of late medieval and early modern period, especially black letter texts
  • Knowledge of or familiarity with Middle English and Latin

How will your Project benefit the Placement holder?

This project offers the scholar an opportunity to:

  • Gain experience of academic research activity
  • Work with an academic on a clearly defined project with specific aims and goals
  • Gather data that will be used in significant peer-reviewed publications
  • Acquire specific disciplinary knowledge and appreciation of interdisciplinary methodologies

Projects in Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music

Translating Tourism: A multilingual corpus exploration of the language of promotion

Project Proposer/s:

Dr Sofia Malamatidou

School/Dept:

Languages, Cultures, Art History and Music/Modern Languages

Project Title:

Translating Tourism: A multilingual corpus exploration of the language of promotion

Project Summary 

This multilingual project examines the linguistic properties of tourism texts, which are directly related to their promotional function, and how they might differ cross-linguistically, as well as how these are treated in translation. Previous studies focusing on the language of tourism suggest that translators primarily rely on semantic equivalence, often ignoring its promotional function. This can result in tourism texts not achieving their aim, that is, turning readers into visitors. And yet, it would be unfair to blame translators for this state of affairs, when the amount of research around the promotional effect of tourism texts and how exactly it is achieved linguistically is surprisingly small. The current project aims to address this gap by offering a detailed account of the linguistic features of promotional language employed in different language versions of tourism websites.

Material from tourism websites will be collected with the aim of creating a corpus which will consist of approximately 1.5 million words and will include four languages - English, French, Greek, and Russian – with translated texts covering as many language combinations and directions as possible (e.g. French into English, English into French, Greek into French, etc.). The Placement holder will help me in the next phase of corpus-building, which involves expanding the corpus with the language pair of English/French, thus, making it a multilingual corpus. The aim is to compile two sub-corpora (i.e. electronic databases) - one bilingual and one monolingual – which will be added to the existing corpus of tourism texts. The first sub-corpus will consist of 300,000 words and include French texts taken from the France.fr, Paris.info, and Designed by Bourgogne websites and their translations into English. The second sub-corpus will consist of 150,000 words and include French translated texts taken from the Visit Scotland, Visit Wales, and Visit England websites (material in English from these websites is already included in the corpus).

What the researcher will do 

The researcher will help collect relevant material for the sub-corpora (i.e. translated texts from English into French and French into English, and non-translated French texts) and will be responsible for downloading texts and processing the data to make it ready for inclusion in the corpus. S/he will also assist in preparing the texts to be analysed with corpus tools, e.g. by making sure that they have been aligned correctly at sentence level by the software, and by applying (automatic) part-of-speech tagging. Finally, s/he will contribute to the analysis of the corpora and the examination of results by identifying similarities and differences across texts and languages. 

Skills required by the Placement holder 

  • Effective oral and written communication skills
  • Strong internet search skills
  • Good organisational and time management skills
  • Good knowledge of English and French (knowledge of Russian and/or Greek will be considered an advantage)
  • Interest in corpus linguistics and/or translation

How will your Project benefit the Placement holder?

This project offers an opportunity to gain training and experience in, among other things:

  • database search skills
  • text processing (converting text documents from a variety of formats to a single standardised text format)
  • recording meta information in a database
  • managing an extensive collection of corpus data, ensuring consistency
  • using corpus tools for the examination of monolingual and bilingual corpora
  • conducting comparative linguistic analysis 

Midlands Art Papers (MAP)

Project Proposer/s:

Dr Kate Nichols

School/Dept:

Art History, Curating and Visual Studies, LCAHM

Project Title:

Midlands Art Papers (MAP)

Project Summary

This placement offers an MA student the chance to apply the higher skills developed during the course of their postgraduate study to an exciting, and impactful co-produced project that engages with external partners and the wider public. In assisting me the successful placement holder will develop partnership building, curatorial, research and editorial skills, vital to a modern career in academia, curating, publishing and myriad other sectors of the digital and creative economy.      

Midlands Art Papers is a new online open access journal hosted by the University of Birmingham, under development as an impact case study for the Department of Art History, Curating, and Visual Studies. The project is underpinned by my own research into histories of collecting in the Midlands. 

The aims of the project are:

  • To develop a collaborative research culture between the Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies, and museums and art galleries in Birmingham and the Midlands
  • To enable and initiate new, collaborative research into the objects in these collections
  • To foreground and broaden access to the outstanding collections of fine and decorative arts in public museums in Birmingham and the Midlands

As project leader, I’ve established partnerships with Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Dudley Museum and Art Gallery, Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry, Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum, The New Art Gallery, Walsall, New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester, The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, Research and Cultural Collections, University of Birmingham, Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, and Wolverhampton Art Gallery.

The first issue of Midlands Art Papers was launched in October 2017, and is available at https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/map

This website disseminates the new research undertaken, brings together the diverse collections in the Midlands in one location, and broadens access to them (especially internationally). MAP is accompanied by a blog (set up and currently maintained by previous CAL UGRS student Mimi Buchanan): https://blog.bham.ac.uk/map/ . This keeps MAP ‘live’ and consists of exhibition reviews and news about art events in the region.

What the researcher will do

The researcher will have 3 interrelated roles. Taken together, these roles will offer invaluable insight into the connections between research and publishing which form a significant part of academic research:

  • In collaboration with a partner collection, identify and undertake archival research into an art object, to be written up as a contribution for the third (2019) issue of MAP.
  • They will act as an editorial assistant in the weeks leading up to the publication of the second (2018) edition. They will be responsible for proof-reading submissions, preparing manuscripts in house style, and corresponding with authors; acquiring image rights from museums.
  • In collaboration with the MAP Undergraduate Research Scholar, they will write content for the MAP blog, and promote MAP on social media.

Skills required by the Placement holder

  • Ability to conduct independent research, academic writing, and visual analysis
  • Attention to detail and precision
  • Blogging (e.g. exhibition reviews) and use of social media
  • An enthusiasm for art history, curating, and the history of collections

How will your Project benefit the Placement holder?

This project offers an opportunity to:

  • Learn about how academic publishing works from the perspectives of both researcher and editor
  • Undertake archival research in a museum context
  • network with curatorial staff in the Birmingham region
  • Develop new knowledge and skills concerning academic publishing on a digital platform, including editing, copyright procedures, proof reading (which will help with presentation of their own written work)
  • develop research, visual analysis, and written skills
  • develop digital communication skills. 

Projects in History and Cultures

Mapping Loss in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century London

Project Proposer/s:

Kate Smith

School/Dept:

School of History and Cultures, Department of History

Project Title:

Mapping Loss in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century London

Project Summary

Mapping Loss will contribute to a larger project currently underway, which seeks to track the emergence of modern lost property practices in London between 1695 and 1914 and is provisionally entitled Absent Objects: Lost Property and the Making of a Modern Metropolis, 1695--1914. This monograph begins by scoping out early forms of lost property practices devised by London goldsmiths in the seventeenth century. After losing a valuable item (through theft or misplacement) individuals would lodge notices with the Goldsmiths Company and these would be delivered to goldsmiths around the capital to ensure that if a lost item was presented to them they would claim it and return it to the victim. The emergence of daily newspapers after the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 dramatically changed these practices, allowing individuals to instead place notices in London newspapers, which they assumed would be read widely in people’s homes or London’s growing number of coffee shops. When placing these notices, victims listed where their possession had gone missing, what the possession was and who and where it could be returned to for a reward. Rather than returning property to the individual themselves, the notices normally stipulated that they should instead be returned to an intermediary. Following earlier practices, these intermediaries were often found in goldsmith shops, but they also included other premises such as coffee houses, public houses and watchmakers. 

Mapping London will use the data produced in these notices and will map the location of intermediaries in London’s streets. Ultimately, the clusters and patterns found in the analysis undertaken as part of Mapping Loss will be compared with other data about individuals in those areas, such as wealth and crime data available through the London Lives database. By mapping the site of intermediaries and how the distribution of such locations changed over time, the project  will contribute to Chapter Two of the monograph project and will be part of producing a new understanding of London’s geographies and the diverse practices upon which London retailers based  their wealth.

What the researcher will do

The student will work with the existing Excel database created by Kate Smith and the work of two previous UG Research Scholars. The database covers the period between 1700 and 1870 and contains samples at ten--‐year intervals (1700, 1710, 1720, 1730, 1740, 1752, 1760, 1771, 1782, 1790, 1800, 1810, 1820, 1830, 1840, 1850, 1860, 1870),with each sample covering the twelve months of that year where sources allow. Focusing particularly on the early years of the eighteenth century (1700, 1710,1720 – around 1,500 notices, already complete) the student will extract the  locations of intermediaries from these notices (normally given as shop  name, street name and area) and will map them onto an  electronic copy (Collage collection) of Richard Horwood’s map of London (devised 1791--‐1799).

While in many cases mapping the location onto a particular street will provide the level of accuracy required, in other cases involving long roads, some judgement will be required as to where to place the location (there were few house numbers in the early eighteenth century). The student will also need to consider the why and how of cluster formations as they begin to emerge, and engaging with secondary material about London and its eighteenth--‐century geography will enrich the process. At the end of the project, the student will have produced three maps, including the patterns of distribution for lost property intermediaries in early eighteenth--‐century London. 

Skills required by the Placement holder

Essential:

  • A good working knowledge of Excel.
  • Ability to work with electronic files (such as maps) and record data upon them.

Desirable:

  • An ability to think visually about geographical distribution, contributing to decisions about the best means of deciding how to represent data (e.g. should it just be dots on a page?)
  • Understanding of geo-referencing and ability to work with geo-referenced maps. Ideal: Knowledge of history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London. 

How will your Project benefit the Placement holder?

This project offers an opportunity to:

  • Learn more about working with databases and analysing the data contained within them.
  • Work with historic maps and record data upon them.
  • Learn more about the history of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century London.
  • Learn more about working with others on research to deliver specific goals.

The Landscape Architecture of Iron Age Marsh Forts

Project Proposer/s:

Henry Chapman

School/Dept:

School of History and Cultures, Department of Classics, Ancient History and Archaeology

Project Title:

The Landscape Architecture of Iron Age Marsh Forts

Project Summary

The name ‘marsh forts’ is given to a sub-category of later prehistory sites normally referred to as hill forts. As a group they are characterised by their architecture being relating to their landscape setting, commonly with areas of wetlands forming an element of their defences. To date, there has only been one complete excavation of a marsh fort – the example of Sutton Common in South Yorkshire (Van de Noort, Chapman and Collis 2007), which consisted of a complex architectural arrangement of two enclosures on opposing sides of an infilled river channel, connected by a causeway. One curious feature of the site is that the largest entrance appears to go nowhere, extending into the wetlands across a route which would probably have been impassable. 

More recently, excavations and other fieldwork carried out by the University of Birmingham at a similar site – the Berth, Shropshire – have revealed an alarmingly similar architecture of two enclosures within a wetland, connected by a causeway. As at Sutton Common, the largest entrance opens out into an area of impassable wetland, although here there is evidence for the deposition of prestigious metalwork within the wetland beyond the entrance. 

The commonalities between the only two significantly excavated marsh fort sites suggests that these features might represent a form and function that is very different compared with other hill fort sites. What is needed is a comprehensive desk-based assessment of all marsh fort sites in the country to see where similarities may lie. This is itself challenging as the two, independently constructed lists of the sites differ in terms of what is included and what is not included.

The aim of this placement is to generate detailed digital models and interpreted illustrations of each of the marsh forts in the UK from both lists to provide a foundation for comparison. This will be in support of a research paper and will provide a foundation for continued study of these sites in the future.

What the researcher will do

The focus of work will be desk-based, and principally using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) for collating data and for generating interpretative plots. Different types of data exist for each site, and so this will variously range from the use of modern mapping, historical mapping, geological mapping, lidar data, aerial photography (including Google Earth imagery), online heritage databases and published works. The vast majority of this data is available online in digital formats.

Each site will be addressed individually, collating GIS datasets and then using these, in combination with heritage databases and published work, to generate systematic GIS shapefiles that represent the architectural features of each site. The outputs will be the GIS files for each of the site, in addition to written notes/references associated with each one.

The researcher will be supervised throughout the project, but with great flexibility over their working conditions. A principal model for how these datasets will be generated has already been created, but there will be room for discussion and change to this approach as required.

Skills required by the Placement holder 

  • The placement holder will need to have knowledge and experience of using GIS, and a willingness to develop new skills through supervision and assistance from the supervisor.
  • Some knowledge of later prehistory, and ideally relating to hillforts or similar sites – this will be of benefit in relation to understanding the literature and making decisions about what features will be most useful to digitise.

For background information see: Van de Noort, R., H.P. Chapman and J.R. Collis 2007. Sutton Common: the excavation of an Iron Age ‘marsh-fort’. York: English Heritage and the Council for British Archaeology Research Report 154 

How will your Project benefit the Placement holder?

This project offers an opportunity to:

  • By the end of the placement, the researcher will have expertise in the use of GIS which is of considerable value as a skill, but also as a demonstration of its application.
  • The placement holder will also have a good knowledge of later prehistoric marsh forts sites as a category, and how these fit within wider debates.
  • This is a live research project that builds on a range of other pieces of research. In the short term, this forms the second half of a research paper that is being prepared following the excavations at the Berth which will focus on the landscape architecture of these sites.
  • The placement holder will also have the experience of working on a live research project that integrates a range of data types and approaches. 

Children born of war – the story told: Developing a website on Sino-Japanese children born of war (CBOW)

Project Proposer/s:

Sabine Lee, Kanako Kuramitsu

School/Dept:

SHaC/History

Project Title:

Children born of war – the story told: Developing a website on Sino-Japanese children born of war (CBOW)

Project Summary

The project builds upon an EU-funded research project exploring lived experiences of children born of Chinese mothers and Japanese fathers during and after the Second Sino-Japanese War. (Sino-Japanese CBOW) More specifically, Sino-Japanese CBOW focused in this study are born of consensual relationships and migrated to Japan after normalization of the Sino-Japanese relations in 1972. 

Research Fellow Kanako Kuramitsu, has conducted eight oral history interviews and is exploring how CBOW identity was formed through their experiences and policies of the Japanese and Chinese governments. Kanako currently works with Vivian Zhou, an animator based in Canada to develop one of the life stories into a short animation film which is will be completed by June 2018, when it will be premiered at the CHIBOW network conference.

The plan is to develop a website that could be used for effective dissemination of the research and the film. The website should provide information including what the project is about, the film making process, other participants’ stories, findings, reviews, links, etc.

(For reference, please find below the link to a website that features an animated documentary about the reality of the impact of the British government’s recent welfare reform. The research was originally conducted by Dr Ruth Patrick, a lecturer of sociology and social policy at the University of Leeds. https://doleanimators.wordpress.com/

The completed website will be linked to an existing website of Children Born of War network (https://www.chibow.org/ ) and will be used for further dissemination activities related to the CHBIOW impact case study.

What the researcher will do 

The main task will be the development of content for a website enhancing the educational use of an animated film produced as part of an impact case study around research relating to the Children Born of War doctoral training network. This will include scholarly materials as well as audio-visual material, 

As part of this, the researcher will

  • help in bibliographical research
  • conduct internet and other database searches
  • support the delivery of impact activity through collation of evaluation material
  • possibly engage in database/spreadsheet management
  • develop material for web communications and social media channel

Skills required by the Placement holder 

  • good IT skills
  • preferably some knowledge of webdesign
  • understanding of social media

How will your Project benefit the Placement holder?

This project offers an opportunity to:

  • learn about public engagement, outreach and impact
  • engage in activities that translate research for a wider public
  • collaborate with academics on dissemination activities
  • acquire/enhance skills related to developing and managing a website for research dissemination

Colleges

Professional Services