It is clear, from the results of the Digital Picture, that there are serious concerns within the arts education community relating to the impact of digital technologies on arts education and, in some ways, on the arts in general.

Although the central focus of the Digital Picture was on digital images, it soon became apparent during the consultation with the community that discussion of the problems could not be constrained by such a label: the real fears relating to digital images are as much to do with educational processes and pedagogical values as with the quality of JPGs or the latest imaging software.

The vast majority of respondents to this survey feel that the increase of digital images in arts education has had an impact on them. For an extremely heartening three quarters of people, this impact materialises as an improvement in the learning and teaching environment, with two thirds believing that the rise in digital images helps them to be more computer literate.

However, less than a third of the community remains unconcerned at the corresponding loss of traditional products, skills or knowledge.

Much of the fear lies in the speed with which change is happening, and in concerns that there is a lack of forethought and consideration for any negative impact that such change brings.

Furthermore, the new technology seems to threaten livelihoods and the essential qualities of ‘human’ skills, with an apparent shift away from traditional expertise and resources towards increased ‘virtual learning’ and reliance on online materials with all attendant problems.

The community has problems with finding the right images for study; problems of reliable provenance and image quality; problems of ownership and licensing costs; and problems relating to educational agendas being led by technological advances. And, for tutors and students alike, there is a perceived lack of support and investment for the new technologies across the sector.

In particular, there are fears that, although a balance of old and new is to be desired, financial and strategic imperatives mean that this is unlikely to happen. Institutes will not, the community believes, maintain ‘out-of-date’ equipment and practices because of issues with cost, space, expertise and, increasingly, health & safety.

Despite such concerns, the consultation has clearly demonstrated that, overall, the community is keen to embrace the new technology, but in a measured and informed way, and in a manner that would compliment, rather than replace, traditional art teaching and practice. Sculptor Antony Gormley, when asked about digital imaging by AHDS Visual Arts Director Mike Pringle, at the Association of Art Historians’ conference in April, perhaps sums up the art education community’s feelings about digital media. He stated that his studio practice now made use of digital technologies and that “the Angel of the North could not have been made without digital space”, but also emphasised the importance to him of taking his work “out of the virtual and into the real”.

See the the Digital Picture website for the full report.

The AHRC has launched a major new scheme to strategically survey, test and build the use and capacity of ICT across its subject domains.

Operating under the auspices of the ICT in Arts and Humanities Research Programme, the AHRC ICT Strategy Projects Scheme consists of 12 projects with individual funding of up to £140,000, which will each run for one or two years. The Programme has spent just under £1m on the Scheme.

The projects will function as a coordinated and carefully targeted programme with two fundamental aims.

Firstly, they will gather knowledge: conducting surveys, scoping needs and assessing current use of a range of ICT methods and resources.

Secondly they will develop capacity, tools and resources, adding to the corpus of applications available to arts and humanities researchers at points where there are currently critical and / or strategic deficiencies. The scheme is divided into two strands which reflect these aims.

The seven projects funded under the knowledge-gathering strand are all one-year undertakings, scheduled to report in time for the Fundamental Strategic Review which the ICT Programme will be conducting in 2006.

Survey work on needs will be carried out by Dr Lesly Huxley (Bristol) in Gathering Evidence: Current ICT Use and Future Needs for Arts and Humanities Researchers. Other aspects covered are more technical. LAIRAH: Log Analysis of Internet Resources in the Arts and Humanities (Dr. Claire Warwick, UCL), will assess use by the community of digital resources funded by the AHRC (and its partner organisations).

User Requirements Analysis for Portals in the Arts and Humanities (Professor Mark Greengrass, University of Sheffield) will consider what the Arts and Humanities need from portal technology. The outcomes of these two projects will be intimately linked with the future direction of the ICT Programme itself.

Similarly Scoping e-science and e-social science developments and their value to the arts and humanities (Sheila Anderson, King’s College London) will underpin the ICT Programme’s planning for the E-Science Initiative which it is overseeing in partnership with JISC.

Elsewhere, familiar areas which have taken on new dimensions as a result of the proliferation of digital technology are addressed. Professor David Bates’ Peer review and evaluation of digital resources for the Arts and Humanities (University of London) examines what measures can be taken to assess data resources to the same rigorous standards as those long in place for non-digital publications. Interdisciplinarity is, of course, a key issue.

Dr Mike Pringle (University College for the Creative Arts) looks a methods of cross-disciplinary mapping in his project The Hunt for Submarines in classical art: mappings between scientific invention and artistic inspiration, while Dr. Alan Marsden (Lancaster) will survey technologies under development for searching and analysing audio and visual media (ICT Tools for Searching, Annotation and Analysis of Audio-Visual Media).

In sum, these projects will provide a framework of knowledge for and about arts and humanities computing which will be fundamental to the recommendations that the ICT Programme makes via the 2006 Review.

While this knowledge base is being developed, the Scheme’s second strand, resource development, will increase the range of tools and capacity currently available to researchers.

Focusing on the strategically important areas of 3-D visualisation and data mining, Making Space: A Methodology for Tracking and Documenting the Cognitive Process in 3-dimensional Visualisation-based Research (Professor Richard Beacham, University of Warwick) and ARMADILLO: Information Mining in Distributive Research Datasets in the Arts and Humanities (Professor Mark Greengrass, University of Sheffield) will produce new trans-disciplinary resources for others to use.

The topical and important issue of linking online archives with e-publications is being addressed by Professor Julian Richards (Making the LEAP: Linking E-Archives and E-Publications).

Lexical Searches for the Arts and Humanities (Professor Jeremy Smith, University of Glasgow) is investigating new ways of searching texts by drawing on The Historical Thesaurus of English, while Professor Robert Zimmer (Goldsmith's) is focusing on a select portion of the Tate’s existing Online Event Archive to create an intelligent system for archiving and retrieving video and audio recordings of events about contemporary and modern art (Creation of a flexibly searchable streaming media archive of contemporary and modern art theory and practice).

Collectively, these projects will lead to a suite of tools which will guide the AHRC in new directions of capacity development for ICT.

Everyone is familiar with the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” and until recently AHDS Visual Arts has let its 50,000+ image catalogue speak volumes about itself.

Things are about to change, however, with the launch of the Learning Index, a new resource from AHDS Visual Arts that shows just how effectively words can be in bringing a picture to life.

Through a series of specially commissioned, richly illustrated learning and teaching materials, the Learning Index adds dimension to the AHDS Visual Arts image catalogue by interpreting the collections from an expert’s point of view.

Often, one of the primary barriers to the use of digital collections in higher education is the lack of time to engage with new resources on offer. The Learning Index offers ready made packages of information that demonstrate the relevance of AHDS Visual Arts image collections to teaching needs therefore saving valuable time and effort.

Seven Learning Index resources, for instance, use over 800 high-quality images and text to enhance course curriculum and learning experiences in Art, Design and Communication.

These materials use the extensive Design Archives at the Faculty of Arts and Architecture University of Brighton to explore the history of British post-war design, including product design, sculpture, fashion and the crafts.

Another suite of materials further an understanding and appreciation of the link between the historic collection of the Crafts Study Centre and new developments in the crafts.

Simon Olding, Director of the Crafts Study Centre, comments on the importance of these Learning Index resource: "Each resource examines in detail the works held in the Crafts Study Centre’s collection in relation to the techniques, use of materials, history and biographies associated with their makers, thus providing substantive context to a valuable body of material now globally accessible to students, researchers and enthusiasts of 20th-century and contemporary crafts.”

All Learning Index resources are quality assured having been written by subject specialist lecturers – often based on their own teaching experiences.

They employ a traditional walk through approach to learning using a uniform design and an easy to use web interface. This uniformity of design allows the resources to be re-usable and more adaptable to a variety of learning environments – an essential element in today’s resource intensive market.

Learning Index resources engage students and teachers with AHDS Visual Arts subject matter and work well as a supplement to coursework, as a means of exploring e-learning or simply as an introduction to AHDS Visual Arts collections.

All Learning Index resources are freely available and rights cleared for use in UK Education.

Designing Britain 1945-1975: the visual experience of post-war society

A series of seven modules exploring the history of British post-war design using the historically important and extensive design archives at the Faculty of Arts and Architecture, University of Brighton

Crafts Study Centre

Six learning and teaching guides reviewing the key subject areas of the Crafts Study Centre’s collection. Eminent craft historians and curators, as well as practitioners, have written these unique guides; for instance Emmanuel Cooper on Bernard Leach; Ewan Clayton on lettering; Barley Roscoe on textiles and Margot Coatts on ceramics and a general introduction.

Thomas Becket’s stained glass windows at Canterbury Cathedral

This resource presents a sample of images from the photographic archive of the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (CVMA), an international research project dedicated to the publication of medieval stained glass.

Britain in the age of the French Revolution

A tutorial in political imagery during the period 1789-1815. The primary content is a collection of political cartoons or satires relating to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The cartoons are arranged thematically and chronologically.

Tim Mara Artist’s Alphabet

The Artist’s Alphabet consists of 26 individual sections, one for each letter of the alphabet, each one highlighting and representing a different area or topic relating to his practice.

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A linguistic corpus is a collection of texts which have been selected and compiled so that they can be studied on the computer. Corpus linguistics offers some of the most powerful new procedures for the analysis of language, and the impact of this dynamic and expanding sub-discipline is making itself felt in many areas of language study.

In Developing Linguistic Corpora, a selection of leading experts offer advice to help the reader to ensure that their corpus is well-designed and fit for the intended purpose.

Increasing numbers of researchers are seeing the potential benefits of the use of an electronic corpus as a source of empirical language data for their research. However, it has not been easy to find out how to build a corpus. There is a great deal of useful information available which covers principles of corpus design and development, but it is dispersed in handbooks, reports, monographs, journal articles and sometimes only in the heads of experienced practitioners.

This Guide draws together the experience of corpus builders into a single source, as a starting point for obtaining advice and guidance on good practice in this field. It aims to bring together some key elements of the experience learned, over many decades, by leading practitioners in the field and to make it available to those developing corpora today.

This Guide is aimed at those who are at some stage of building a linguistic corpus. Little or no knowledge of corpus linguistics or computational procedures is assumed, although it is hoped that more advanced users will also find the guidelines here useful. It also has relevance for those who are not building a corpus, but who need to know something about the issues involved in the design of corpora in order to choose between available resources and to help draw conclusions from their analysis.

The authors set down principles and definitions in a clearer and more accessible form than they have done in previous publications. It is therefore likely that this Guide will become a key reference point for discussions of methodology in corpus linguistics, as well as a practical guide for corpus builders.

John Sinclair sets out ten principles for corpus design, plus a new definition of a corpus. Geoffrey Leech offers a taxonomy of types of annotations as well as clear guidelines and some provisional standards for annotation at various linguistic levels.

Lou Burnard explains the different types of metadata which can be provided for a corpus, and gives examples of how these can be implemented using the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines.

Tony McEnery and Richard Xiao take on the tricky issue of encoding characters in languages other than English, giving an historical overview of the various solutions, leading to a discussion of how to use Unicode today in encoding corpus texts.

Paul Thompson draws on his experience in developing the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus to set out the stages involved in the development and exploitation of a corpus of speech, covering data collection, transcription, markup and annotation, and access. In chapter six, I explain how good planning and design can help to ensure the ongoing availability and usefulness of a corpus.

This and other guides in the series are available from the Guides page on the AHDS website. This also includes details on buying hard copy versions.

AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics is also host to many freely available corpora in several languages, including English, French, German, Italian and a variety of South Asian languages.