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.

From 1851 onwards the decennial British census returns contain vast amounts of comparable information on every household and individual in the country, and are the basis of much of our knowledge of changing social and economic structures in the period. Traditionally, however, the analysis of these sources was time-consuming, involving inputting data from the manuscript census returns into computer systems for analysis. For many years this limited the geographical scale and time periods of the research that could be undertaken using individual-level census materials, constrained the sorts of questions that could be asked, and added to the costs of research, while also severely limiting the opportunities offered for teaching. The 2009-2013 ESRC-funded Integrated Census Microdata (I-CeM) project, led by Schürer, completely transformed this situation by bringing together computerised versions of the censuses of Great Britain for the period 1851 to 1911. The underlying data for that project had been created via a public/private partnership, mainly for genealogical purposes, at a cost of c.£9 million, but were made available to Schürer to generate a new version of the census data for academic use. In order to maximise the quality, comparability, and usefulness of these digitised census returns, the earlier I-CeM project undertook a number of key tasks, including reformatting, checking and cleaning the data; developing standard coding schemes for occupational and other data; coding the data; standardising administrative boundaries for the periods covered; and the creation of a range of derived variables mainly focused on household membership, structure and composition. In addition, parish-level GIS files were created to enable the resulting census data to be mapped. The data files created as a result of the earlier I-CeM project have subsequently been curated and disseminated by the UKDS via two platforms developed under the provisions of the initial ESRC funding. One is, essentially, an online interactive download tool and the other an online data tabulation tool. The data were further supported by the creation of a dedicated project website providing researchers with a comprehensive 280-page user guide and a range of associated meta-data. The existing I-CeM data collection has already generated numerous research publications across a wide range of disciplines, including, demography, geography, history, economics, sociology, management and health studies - as well as supporting numerous Ph.D., Masters and undergraduate dissertations. In addition, reaching beyond academia, the data can be tabulated online using a version of the Nesstar system allowing family and local historians, school children and others to generate bespoke tables from the underlying raw data. Importantly, because the I-CeM datasets are complete censuses rather than samples, in addition to enabling multiple detailed small scale local studies, the release of I-CeM has allowed research on new subjects and on a scale not previously possible, in turn leading to a number of major UKRI-funded projects. This project will add the recently-released 1921 censuses to I-CeM - an additional 42.8 million individual records. As in the earlier I-CeM project, the 1921 transcriptions will be reformatted, checked, cleaned and importantly enhanced with a series of standardised codes and derived variables, without which the data are largely unusable for research purposes. The new data, together with an enhanced and up-dated version of the existing data for 1851 to 1911 will then be transferred to the UKDS for curation and future access. An important element of this project will be to upgrade and improve the existing data dissemination platforms, which are now some 10 years old. The data access will be supported by the creation of a new User Guide and associated metadata, made available via an upgraded I-CeM project website.

Britain's longstanding colonial relationship with the Caribbean means that there is an important need for education about this aspect of our history, recognized in the National Curriculum for England. However, few research-led resources exist for teaching Caribbean history, especially for topics other than slavery. This project will work with teachers and Theatre-in-Education practitioners to create resources to stimulate teaching and learning about wider aspects of Caribbean history, as well as broader questions related to the diversity of religious practice historically and today. It draws on a previous AHRC research fellowship (Spiritual Politics in Caribbean History) which led to the publication of a monograph, The Cultural Politics of Obeah (Cambridge University Press, 2015). As part of the research for the book Diana Paton collected evidence about hundreds of cases of prosecution for religious crimes in the Caribbean. These crimes included obeah (a form of spiritual healing often referred to as witchcraft) and contravention of Trinidad's Shouter Prohibition Ordinance, which prohibited the worship of those affiliated with the Spiritual Baptist Church. Paton analysed the case records collected as part of the project in her monograph; they will now be made available to a wider audience, along with rich material contained in the records that could not be included in the book. The case records include many human stories that reveal aspects of Caribbean history, society and culture that are rarely accessible to teachers, students, or the wider interested public. This project will use the methods of Theatre-in-Education to make them accessible to students across the secondary curriculum, especially in drama, citizenship, religious education, English, geography, and history. The project will organize workshops in four state secondary schools, all of whom are interested in expanding their teaching relating to the Caribbean and to religious diversity, whether or not their student body includes substantial numbers of children from Caribbean-heritage backgrounds. It will involve eight teachers and at least 120 students. The schools, in Newcastle upon Tyne, Peterlee (County Durham), Leeds, and London are diverse in the social and ethnic background of their pupils. Two have ethnically mixed student bodies including a substantial proportion of Caribbean descent, while two are predominantly white and working class in intake. At each, professionals from Talawa Theatre Company will work with key stage 3 pupils (ages 11-14) to explore themes raised by the case material, enabling them to respond creatively to concepts, questions, and topics it raises. Educational consultant and former teacher Carol Dixon will develop written materials and provide support to implement lesson plans in preparation for the workshops. Different schools will use the material in different settings, including an extra-curricular drama club and timetabled history and drama lessons, providing a variety of experiences that will be recorded in written reports and a film designed to stimulate and assist with ongoing use of the material beyond the lifetime of the project. The workshops will be supported by a website which will provide a permanent resource for teachers, community educators, and Theatre-in-Education professionals to use with students and for young people to access directly themselves. The website will provide contextual materials, including lesson plans, narrative biographies, images, and the project film, alongside a database of primary sources. These materials will enable the development of unanticipated uses of the research material beyond the formal curriculum for creative and informal purposes by wider publics. The teachers and schools involved in the project will connect through a 'virtual' meet-up before the workshops begin, and at a final project event where students will present their work to a community audience and each other.