The DISKAH network has recently completed the first round of its fellowships, delivered between April 2025 and March 2026. The DISKAH fellowships are an opportunity to broaden engagement with large-scale computational methods in Arts & Humanities research using Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI). Fellows commit 165 hours throughout the year to training, independent hands-on experimentation, developing their research workflows and delivering training and outreach activities to their communities to maximise knowledge exchange and impact. In 2025, five Fellows were recruited through a competitive process, with applications assessed by an interdisciplinary review panel after a first call in early January. The DISKAH Fellows for 2025-2026 were Dr Gabriel Egan, Professor of Shakespeare Studies, from De Montfort University; Dr Maribel Hidalgo Urbaneja, Postdoctoral Researcher, from the University of the Arts London; Dr Jasper van der Klis, Postdoctoral Research Associate, from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama; Dr Brian Ball, Professor of Philosophy, from the Northeastern University London; Dr Jessica Witte, Digital Research Analyst, from the University of Edinburgh.

The DISKAH Fellows cohort gained access to resources, networks and training events which supported them in developing their projects and building DRI capacity. The training events and support for the 2025-2026 DISKAH Fellows' cohort included a two-day Introductory and Co-design Workshop held at the University of Brighton in April 2025. The workshop introduced the programme and co-designed activities and outputs. The fellows then attended the DH & RSE Summer School 2025, held at King’s College London, which explored the intersection of digital humanities and research software engineering. Training also focused on research software engineering practices, including version control, building digital research skills for producing outputs with the Programming Historian platform and using HPC. The Summer School was co-organised by King’s College London, University of Cambridge and University of Edinburgh.  

Moreover, individualised support was provided by the Research Software Engineers (RSE) team at Durham University to enable access to the Bede Supercomputer (N8 Universities, Tier 2 HPC). The RSEs collaborated with the DISKAH Fellows and assisted them in porting their code to run on the Bede HPC architecture, profiling, optimising it and helping them to benchmark performance and improve code scalability. 

Use Cases 

Through involvement in the above programme and with DISKAH’s support, a series of use cases for DRI were developed by the DISKAH Fellows, leveraging large-scale data and access to HPC. These use cases included deploying phylogenetic software to analyse the Texting Scarlatti large dataset, generating and analysing simulation data for social epistemology, and comparing dramatists’ texts from the late 16th and early 17th centuries, including Shakespeare’s plays. 

Dr Jasper van der Klis, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, developed the project “Analysing Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas”. The project used phylogenetic software to analyse the Texting Scarlatti large dataset. The results supported stemmatic analyses and illuminated the genealogical relationship between different sources of Scarlatti’s sonatas. 

Professor Brian Ball from Northeastern University London developed the project “Generating data for social epistemology simulations”. The project generated simulation data and extended the range of analyses that can be performed with Polygraphs, identifying new correlations that influence epistemic attitudes in social epistemology. 

Professor Gabriel Egan from De Montfort University developed the project “Exploring differences in Shakespeare’s plays”. The project explored different variable choices in Word Adjacency Networks (WANs) of Shakespeare’s plays and compared them to the WANs of seven dramatists from the late 16th and early 17th centuries to strengthen literary investigations within Shakespeare's and his contemporary authors’ work. 

The projects resulted in a set of lessons and reflections on how DRI infrastructure provision should adapt to the workflows used by the Arts and Humanities community to suit varying levels of digital skills. This suggests that stronger advocacy, peer networks and development of use cases are needed to demonstrate how digital approaches can complement and even transform traditional scholarship. Continuous training and hands-on experimentation, along with technical support by RSEs, are key to navigating the demanding transition from desktop to HPC environments. Moreover, support for managing data, code, and workflows is needed to effectively promote open science practices, with a focus on interoperability and reproducibility throughout the research development process, rather than at the late stages of completion. Flexibility to accommodate evolving workflows and user-friendly interfaces will further promote uptake and help researchers overcome barriers. These lessons learned have been taken into account in designing the next cohort of fellowships, which runs from 2026 to 2027.