The Digital Encyclopaedia of European Sociability (DIGITENS) project will produce the first open-access digital encyclopaedia and anthology of sociability in Europe throughout the long-eighteenth century. The purpose of the DIGITENS project is to build an original framework for understanding the interactions, tensions, limits and paradoxes underlying European models of sociability and to reflect on the following question: Can the emergence and formation of European models of sociability be traced throughout the long eighteenth century (1650-1850)? Drawing upon the expertise of international members from different disciplines and national traditions, the project will create a toplevel interdisciplinary network and facilitate intersectoral communication between its academic and non-academic partners. The nine international universities will work together with the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Musée Cognacq-Jay in France, and The National Archives in Great Britain, allowing members to explore how understandings of sociability might be enhanced through dialogue, international collaboration, and digital technology, developing a broader contextualisation of the research into European sociability. As the first digital encyclopaedia of its kind, the expected impact of the resource will not only benefit researchers, but anyone interested in the history of European models of sociability. The project is not, however, of purely historical or academic interest. Through the implementation of outreach events, workshops and the production of the accessible digital platforms, the DIGITENS team will promote a wide investigation of the value of eighteenth century principles in twenty-first-century private and public lives throughout Europe. The interdisciplinary and international aspects of the DIGITENS project, and coherent methodology, are innovative, and the scope broad and ambitious.

This project aims to explore the history of the languages of the Basque Country (French, Castilian, Basque) through the study of ego-documents. It has two main objectives: (i) to establish a large corpus of ego-documents from the Basque linguistic area from Bilbao to Bayonne and covering the period 1680-1780; (ii) to provide an analysis of the ego-documents (French, Castilian, Basque) through the prism of the history of writing and historical linguistics and sociolinguistics. The research axes structuring the project are as follows: (i) the distribution of communicative and writing functions between French and Basque, and Castilian and Basque; (ii) the writing process in Basque, French and Castilian; (iii) the use and circulation of these ego-documents in their archival and institutional context as legal evidence, procedural documents or information tools; The working hypotheses are as follows: (i) the development of "an ordinary practice of writing" in eighteenth-century France (Roche 1985) also benefited the Basque language at a time when it was still spoken across different social classes. In the Spanish Basque Country, where the elite abandoned the use of Basque in the 18th century, ordinary Basque writing is less developed; (ii) the Basque language employed in these letters varies according to the profile of the writer, his geographical origin, his social background and his experience with Basque writing; (iii) the local French language spoken in Basque-speaking areas is clearly influenced by the Basque language, whatever the social background of the speakers; (iv) The Castilian used in these ego-documents has particular features attributable to its contact with Basque. This is most evident in the texts of less literate writers from lower ranks.

The EPSRC Collaborative Doctoral Training Centre in Science and Engineering in Arts, Heritage and Archaeology (CDT SEAHA) will create a sustainable world-leading training hub producing leaders in the cutting-edge domains of measurement and sensing, materials characterisation, interaction technologies, digital technologies and new ventures. The graduates from the programs will not only create new scientific and engineering knowledge and fill skills gaps in these domains but have a deep understanding of the ethical, practical, economic and social imperatives of the deployment of this knowledge in the arts, Heritage and Archaeological sectors. University College London, University of Oxford and University of Brighton will work as a team bringing together highly complementary supervisory capacities in order to fill the skills gap in the cycle of data creation, data to knowledge and knowledge to enterprise by pushing the state-of-the-art in metrology, sensing, spectroscopy, materials characterisation, modelling, big data mining, crowd engagement, new interaction technologies, digital technology and business skills. Partnering with globally renowned (national and international) heritage organisations representing a world class, broad range of forms of heritage and the arts, the student cohorts will be trained and developed in fully engaged cross-disciplinary environments, challenged by research questions addressing complex materials and environments. The most advanced scientific tools and approaches, some to be developed in collaboration with the Diamond Light Source and the National Physical Laboratory, will be deployed to answer questions on its origin, date, creation, conservation and composition of objects and materials. In addition to the fundamental physical science approach, the students will, in an innovative cohort approach to training and development, explore ways of engaging with presentation and visualisation methods, using pervasive mobile, digital and creative technologies, and with qualitative and participatory methods. This approach will engage the sensors and instrumentation industrial domain, as well as creative industries, both high added value industries and major contributors to the UK economy. The CDT will have a transformative effect on public institutions concerned with heritage interpretation, conservation and management, generating substantial tourism income. Without the CDT, some of the most dynamic UK sectors will lose their competitive edge in the global arts and heritage market. The CDT was created with the close involvement of a number of stakeholders crucially contributing to the development of the training programme based on the cohort teaching approach. The added value of this approach is in that creativity is unleashed through the promotion of excellence in a series of cohort activities, in which the Partner institutions intensively collaborate in teaching, placements, supervision, networking and organisation of public engagement events. The particular added value of this CDT is the high potential for engagement of the general public with science and engineering, while promoting responsible innovation conscious of ethical and social dimensions of arts, heritage and archaeology. The CDT SEAHA builds on the highly successful AHRC/EPSRC Science and Heritage Programme at UCL which mobilised the UK heritage science sector and repositioned it at the forefront of global development. The CDT will represent a step-change in capacity building; it will propel a young generation of cross-disciplinary scientists and engineers into highly challenging but hugely interesting and rewarding careers in the heritage sector, in SMEs, and public institutions and equip them with translational and transferrable skills that will enable them to thrive in the most complex research and entrepreneurial environments.

This research cluster will bring together a team of key professionals, academic researchers representing AHRC/EPSRC disciplines as well as heritage practitioners to appraise the costs and risks of current environmental guidelines for cultural heritage in response to a changing climate. This theme has a national and international dimension since climate change, energy consumption, visitation and pressures for greater access to collections will continue to make considerable demand on cultural heritage in the 21st century globally. The scale and pace of these changes are posing unique challenges to managing the long-term preservation of material culture and are the focus of discussion amongst professional communities both nationally and internationally.This research cluster will inform this debate.\n\nCurrent environmental parameters and tolerances set out in national and international guidelines and standards as well as Governmental Sustainable Development Targets play a critical role in shaping practices in the cultural heritage sector such as building construction, and environmental management. This includes the control of temperature, moisture, light and pollution - the main factors affecting the conservation of material culture. Environmental guidelines impact significantly on how collections are stored, accessed, loaned and displayed. \n\nEqually, the cultural heritage sector is not immune from the challenges posed by global responsibility: reducing reliance on fossil fuels, changing behaviours in favour of re-use and alternative energy sources, for example. It is within this context the appropriateness of current environmental guidelines designed to meet an agreed standard for managing material culture change, enable visitors to access and experience collections to a seasonal standard of comfort, and provide access to collections both locally and internationally is being questioned as the 'costs' of this are being realised. Unfortunately, there are no easy or headline-grabbing answers to this problem: the risks need to be identified, the costs understood, the options appraised. \n\nEGOR will provide the necessary framework to develop thinking in this area in order to realise an intellectual step change in understanding the risks and uncertainties of current environmental guidelines, standards and targets in a changing climate. Consideration will be largely focused on indoor environments, collections and the people who engage with and work in the cultural heritage arena, and will build on foundations established by other research projects e.g. Noah's Ark (EU), Engineering our Futures (EPSRC), Living with Environmental Change (NERC) largely focused on climate impacts outdoors. This will be achieved through 5 sequential activities: \n1. An inaugural meeting of the steering group which includes professional leaders, and named investigators to shape thinking and initiate cross fertilisation of ideas and perspectives;\n2. 3 working group meetings comprising specialists in art history, engineering, material science and conservation for coherent discussion, and lively debate to understand the implication for current environmental guidelines in a changing climate for people, their values and history, buildings housing collections (often historic structures themselves) and collections. The implications will be considered against a background of global responsibility.\n3. A two-day residential event will conclude this investigative process; the three working groups will present their findings, areas of convergence and divergence will be further debated to determine the risks and uncertainties surrounding environmental guidelines and standards in a changing climate, and the outstanding research needed to fully inform this debate.\n\nA summary of the challenges and user-led research emerging within this theme will be reached at the end of the meeting and presented at the Programme conference in July 2009.

Scholars and members of the public rely on records (eg birth/death certificates, census and court records) as the evidence base for research. So too do those making policy or conducting inquiries. All require access to original, authentic records. They do so in the understanding that archivists and records managers have a base of theory and practice that enables the retention of records that are original, authentic, trusted, within context and useable. However, a major issue facing society is the extent to which the digital evidence base is at risk because the concept of the digital record has been challenged. In the digital world the container, i.e. the file, is no longer the record. The record comprises the granular objects that are scattered yet linked, e.g. chains of emails or tweets. Traditional ideas about a record, that it is fixed and unique, are under threat, replaced by uncertainty, mutability and the notion of liquidity. However, records have a 'DNA string', a term coined by Lomas and McLeod to represent the idea that records comprise individual elements, from the body of information and metadata through to software and hardware components, that link globally to create the presentation of a complete object. This DNA can change, degrade or break over time, or it can be maintained via migrations or combined and strengthened through mashups, linked data and blockchain technologies. In the digital world "the record, not the remix, is the anomaly today. The remix is the very nature of the digital."1 Concepts commonly accepted as defining a fixed original record are conflicted in the digital world where systems automatically generate multiple copies of documents (e.g. copies of emails held by both sender and recipient) across networks. Other complex issues surround the interrogation of evidential records. For example in the Hillsborough inquiry it was possible to review typescript statements and determine whether or not there had been alterations. This can be far harder with digital statements where many copies may exist with unclear authorship or the definitive original may disappear into a seemingly infinite cyberspace. If there are no 'original' records in the digital space what does this mean for the future evidence base? In the Hutton Inquiry emails proved critical to the evidence base. In this instance the emails interrogated were still available on the systems and servers in which they had been created. However, had the Inquiry been later and the emails been managed through time then the evidential status of these emails would have been subject to questions surrounding their integrity and authenticity. Since our future evidence base will be digital and multi-media, the reliability, authenticity and usability are crucial if we are to avoid losing our ability to interrogate records through time. The proposed novel international multidisciplinary research network is led by internationally recognised researchers in records management with The National Archives (TNA), UK government's official archive. The aim is to bring together practitioners, academics and others to explore how the digital has put the traditional concept of the record at risk and work towards a new concept of the digital record; to identify the key issues and challenges of ensuring the future usability of digital records (the evidence base) by all stakeholders through time; to propose a research agenda to address the challenges, and to facilitate effective collaboration to progress digital records research in theory and practice. The network will engage expertise in information, law, digital humanities and computer forensics and a wide range of communities (e.g. the public, historians) to provide perspectives to feed into research and ultimately good practice solutions. Using social media tools, participants from any community will be able to contribute to the network. 1 Keen, A. (2007). The cult of the amateur. Nicholas Brealey. p 23-4.