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This page has been created to complement the call for proposals 2026-2027 for the Digital Skills in the Arts and Humanities (DISKAH) Fellowship Programme. Please read carefully the call before reading the FAQs and submitting your application.
If you have any questions that are not answered below, please contact: M.Samaroudi3@brighton.ac.uk
▶ What is DISKAH?
The DISKAH (DIgital SKills for Arts and Humanities) is a network initiated through a collaboration between the University of Brighton, Durham University, the University of the Arts London, and the University of Exeter, N8 Centre of Excellence in Computationally Intensive Research (N8 CIR), King’s Digital Lab, UCL’s Centre for Advanced Research and the European Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH). The network has expanded with fellows from De Monfort University, Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Northeastern University London, and The University of Edinburgh. The network will further expand via the new Fellowship scheme by supporting researchers to access and co-develop a UK-wide training program to enhance computational and data literacy as well as engage with cutting-edge Digital Research Infrastructures (DRI).
▶ What is the DISKAH Fellowship Programme?
The DISKAH Fellowship is a year-long programme designed to provide an opportunity to broaden engagement with the UKRI Digital Research Infrastructures (DRI), including data-services and compute services, to underpin large-scale computational methods to support innovation. DISKAH Fellows will gain access to digital resources and networks to develop their projects, build capacity, co-design training, as well as contributing to the DISKAH network
▶ What does the Fellowship Programme involve?
A key aspect of the fellowships is the hands-on scaling up of data-intensive workflows using existing software by accessing computing infrastructure and/or creating new workflows to address larger or more complex datasets. Fellows are encouraged to deploy data available in UKRI-funded data services, such as the Distributed System of Scientific Collections, Archaeology Data Service, Literary and Linguistic Data Service, British Library Research repository, Museum Data Service, Heritage Science Data Service.
The DISKAH Fellowships involve developing exemplary use-cases for DRI in A&H and delivering training for wider capacity building within their institutions and communities. The programme of work is as follows:
Dates | Activity | Location |
|---|---|---|
15-17 April 2026 | 3-day introductory and co-design workshop | Brighton |
May-June 2026 | Access and onboarding to DRI | Remote |
July-August 2026 | 5-day (dates TBC) training workshop on DRI for research | TBC |
July – December 2026 | Independent deployment and testing of research software in DRI | Remote |
January 2027 – March 2027 | Dissemination and training of research community/ies | Face to face at various institutions |
▶ What are the expectations from the Fellows?
DISKAH Fellows are expected to commit up to 165 hours to this programme, including at least 60 hours for independent hands-on experimentation utilising DRI. Fellows will also be expected to co-design the DISKAH curriculum. Training workshops will support Fellows with relevant technical and non-technical skills, including communicating research through academic and non-academic outputs. Fellows are expected to develop an independent piece of work utilising DRI to produce an exemplary use-case for DRI; as well as lead the delivery of one face-to-face training event between January and March 2027 within their network or community/ies. This training will be an opportunity for them to share the knowledge and skills they have developed during the programme.
Additionally, they should further disseminate their use-case for DRI in A&H to build capacity in the community via outputs, such as training materials (e.g. Carpentries-style), digital research outputs (e.g. Programming Historian, research paper), blog posts, datasets, or software prototypes. Fellows are expected to make these outputs, including software and datasets, findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR).
Fellows will be invited to showcase their programme of work at a network DISKAH event towards the end of the project.
▶ What funding is available?
Fellows will be supported financially for 165 hours between April 2026 and March 2027. A flat rate of £6,500 will be provided to Fellows’ institutions during the programme to buy-out 10% of their time. Additional funding is available through DISKAH to attend the programme activities, including network workshops, events and/or activities. This will be handled centrally. Other costs associated to organising the training event will be available once the programme has started.
▶ What is the duration of the Fellowship?
The duration of the Fellowship is one year from April 2026 to March 2027.
▶ What is digital research infrastructure (DRI)?
UKRI states that the digital research infrastructure (DRI) system includes: large-scale compute facilities, including high-throughput, high-performance, and cloud computing; data storage facilities, repositories, stewardship and security; software and shared code libraries; mechanisms for access, such as networks and user authentication systems; and the users and experts who develop and maintain these powerful resources.
▶ What is high-performance computing (HPC)?
High-performance computing (HPC) – sometimes informally referred to as “cluster” computing – is an important component of DRI. It refers to shared-use compute facilities at a variety of scales, ranging from local installations within a department or research group to those world-leading facilities shared by the whole UK-based research community. HPC supports computationally intensive research at scales beyond what is possible on an individual desktop or workstation computer. Lately, they are the site for general-purpose graphics processing units (GPUs), the accelerators used to support the development and deployment of modern artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, including large-scale machine learning and deep-neural networks.
▶ Which are the national DRI data services in the A&H domain?
The national DRI data services in the A&H domain, funded by UKRI, include the following: Distributed System of Scientific Collections, Archaeology Data Service, Literary and Linguistic Data Service, British Library Research repository, Museum Data Service, Heritage Science Data Service. The proposed project can use datasets already deposited or those which are in the process of being deposited in these data services.
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