Case Study: Making the Case

The Department of Russian at the University of Bristol has long enjoyed a reputation among students and academics as one of the UK’s top Russian departments, rating third in the Independent's Complete University Guide in 2011 and described as a ‘model for other Russian Departments to follow’ in a recent external review.

Following an unsuccessful application for a research grant, which was rejected on technical grounds, the department approached JISC Digital Media to re-work the technical aspects of its project proposal.

The department wanted to ensure that, in the notoriously competitive funding landscape for humanities research, it could present the best possible case for the money and retain its position at the forefront of its field through the ensuing project.

Rationale

The research team within the department, led by Professor Offord, planned to embark on a three-year project to examine the development of the French language in Russia during the period from c.1700 until the October Revolution of 1917.

The team had an exciting opportunity to study in depth an important subject about which no detailed or comprehensive account had previously been written. This was chiefly because the use of French by the Russian nobility, as an aspect of elite culture, was of less interest to Soviet scholars working within a Marxist framework than were the phenomena that tended to break down that culture.

Funding was requiredfor two post-doctoral research assistants and a PhD student to be involved throughout the three years of the project and, although the AHRC has commended the ‘excellent’ academic content of the initial funding proposal, the measures described to preserve and make the data sustainable were felt to be inadequate.

This rejection endangered the success of the entire project and so addressing the defect by seeking out appropriate technical expertise became a priority before the proposal could be re-submitted.

Objectives

Using the University’s Content Management System (Expression Engine), the research team (i.e. the Principal Investigator, the two Post-Doctoral Research Assistants and the Postgraduate Student) sought to create, develop and maintain an online project resource which would contain three basic elements:

1. Information about the project and news about events
2. Materials that disseminate and develop the findings of the project, including a discussion forum
3. Interoperable digital assets of lasting use to the academic community. These assets will include bibliographical information, a description of the total corpus of primary sources used by the team and a small sample of these sources or of extracts from them.

The bulk of the sample of sources (at least 95% of it) would consist of material that has been transcribed and edited, but the sample also needed to allow the inclusion of a small amount of digitised material (e.g. photographs of hand-written letters). The website was to provide a secure hosting for these assets although they would potentially be independent of the site itself.

Overall, the aim was that the project would promote interdisciplinary dialogue, throwing light on the extent to which the theories, models, methods, and insights associated with different disciplines can prove valid and useful for scholars in other disciplines.

Outcomes

JISC Digital Media provided advice on the technical content of the revised bid, specifically: project management of technical aspects, data development methods, infrastructural support, data preservation and sustainability, access and copyright and intellectual property issues.

Via face-to-face meetings and email contact each of these aspects was addressed and systematically developed. Solutions were found which supported the research team’s intentions without detracting from their core business of conducting effective research.

Byre-thinking the notion of the website as inseparable from the data itself and instead considering it as one (of many) potential platforms for that data, the team increased the reusability of its research data considerably.

This meant that, by the submission stage, the technical appendix was extremely strong and all of the project’s technical aspects were viewed in a very positive light by the AHRC’s technical assessor.

The project’s W3C/WAI (Web Content Accessibility) compliant website is now in the process of being launched and will be freely available and managed by the University with guaranteed access without the need for passwords or registration. This means that other related disciplines will in future have access to hitherto inaccessible first hand documentation, drawn directly from archival sources.

Following the support of JISC Digital Media and a subsequent resubmission of their bid the Department secured the necessary research funding for the three-year project ensuring it continues to build upon its already excellent reputation as one of the UK’s top Russian departments.

Support from JISC Digital Media

“I cannot over emphasise the importance of the advice that I received from Stephen Gray of JISC Digital Media as I attempted to raise the quality of the technical aspect of my application for a research grant to a level consistent with the academic level expected of a project for which funding in the region of £688k was being sought. This advice proved invaluable in enabling me to turn a technical appendix that was of patchy quality in the original submission into one that was commended by the funding council’s technical reviewer as exemplary.”

- Professor Derek Offord