Mapping the Humanities

The Mapping the Humanities Project (MHP), commissioned by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, seeks to map the UK’s arts and humanities research infrastructure. There is significant arts and humanities research infrastructure in the UK, consisting of institutes, centres, hubs, research clusters and networks, and professional, learned and scholarly societies with a research focus. Much of this infrastructure remains invisible, undiscoverable, and unconnected, and there is a pressing need to identify and connect this complex research eco-system. The MHP will create an interactive, online, open access map of this ‘hidden’ infrastructure.

The project will demonstrate the importance of maintaining a diverse landscape for arts and humanities-based research, and help to develop a more nuanced understanding of how arts and humanities research infrastructure benefits culture, society and the economy. The project will explore what constitutes humanities research infrastructure, complementing existing UKRI infrastructure landscape analyses that have identified the need for deeper research.

Over the course of 18 months, the project will create a research resource that will support complex analysis and answer the questions that humanities organisations, researchers and funders want to ask.

The MHP is being designed to be sustainable in the medium and long term, with an online data submission process so that relevant communities and constituencies can contribute to the project database once it goes live in 2023. This will ensure that the information remains up-to-date and relevant, enabling the map to provide insights for years to come. The MHP team plan to hold workshops, events, and other engagement activities to gain wider insights from the community and future users. If you would like to be involved in this, please email rachel.saunders@sas.ac.uk.