The second round of DISKAH fellows for 2026-2027 has recently been appointed after launching our latest call in January 2026. The successful applications were selected through a competitive process assessing the quality of the proposed projects, their potential to benefit from the capabilities of Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) and  become use-cases for DRI in the Arts and Humanities (A&H).

The new cohort of DISKAH fellows comprises colleagues working on a variety of data and/or compute intensive projects. Dr Iain Emsley, Research Software Engineer (RSE) from the University of Warwick, works on a toolkit to trace hidden AI services embedded in mobile phone apps to surface the ethical, environmental and access challenges and inform the research of the App, Software, and Critical Code Studies communities. Ruicen Li, doctoral researcher from the University of Cambridge, examines how national imaginaries are reinterpreted across large-scale born-digital fandom archives produced by participatory online communities. Dr Matilda Peruzzo, postdoctoral researcher from the University of Oxford, develops a computational tool to model and study how geographical factors shape the large-scale spread of technologies and cultural practices in the ancient world. Emmanuel Iduma, doctoral researcher from the University of Cambridge, uses computer vision to analyse early 20th century colonial ethnographic photographs from Nigeria and Sierra Leone, supporting and enriching the interpretation of ethnographic archives at scale.

All 2026-2027 fellows and associate fellows began their fellowship journeys by attending the two-day Introductory and Co-design Workshop in April 2026, which took place at the University of Brighton. The workshop aimed to co-design the training activities for the fellows, help them plan their fellowship outputs and consider methods for developing DRI use-cases and delivering training within their institutions and communities. Previous DISKAH fellows, Dr Jasper van der Klis from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and Prof Brian Ball from Northeastern University London, also attended the co-design workshop, discussed their DISKAH fellowships and presented their DRI use-cases to the new cohort of DISKAH fellows.

In addition to the introductory workshop and as part of its outreach activities promoting the use of DRI, DISKAH co-organised the one-day Hackathon: Data Driven Approaches to Safeguarding Cultural Heritage alongside the Archaeology Data Service (ADS), the AHRC-funded Data/Culture project and the Data & Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure (DAFNI). The event was open to all the DISKAH fellows as well as researchers, digital research technical professionals, creative technologists, computational artists and practitioners working with Arts and Humanities data. The hackathon day began with presentations by Dr Tom Kirkham, Dr Kyle Stevenson, Dr Teagan Zoldoske and Elizabeth Mamtsits, who introduced the DAFNI DRI (presentation available here), Dr Nicky Garland, who discussed the ADS DRI (presentation available here) and Prof Pieter Francois, Dr Giovanna Di Martino, Dr Matilda Peruzzo, who introduced Data/Culture, connecting datasets, software and researchers through a dedicated platform and collaborative activities. 

The hackathon day continued with Prof Leif Isaksen, DISKAH’s Co-Investigator from the University of Exeter, who presented different tools for AI agentic coding in A&H. Consequently, the attendees were separated into groups which developed their research ideas and associated workflows with the support of RSEs based on a set of scenarios or challenges. Those included prioritising emergency recording of cultural heritage; informing planning of infrastructure affecting cultural heritage; mitigating the impacts of ageing infrastructure on urban communities; and mapping Seshat data to historical polities with Cliopatria. After a few hours of collaborative work, all groups were able to present their proof-of-concepts and demos, integrating data from heterogeneous sources, exploring different infrastructures, tools, disciplinary perspectives and skills to address the given scenario or challenge.

Finally, the latest training event the DISKAH fellows attended this summer was the DH & RSE Summer School 2026, co-organised by the Software Sustainability Institute, King’s College London, University of Cambridge and University of Edinburgh, in collaboration with DISKAH. The training focused on providing an insight into projects, roles and practices of Research Software Engineering in the Digital Humanities (DH). During the training, the participants further explored best practices for research software development, upscaling research for High-Performance Computing (HPC), Git for version control, data visualisation and other topics relevant to the work of RSEs in DH. As an extension of the summer school training, an additional DISKAH day was also scheduled for our fellows. The technical sessions were supported by the Bede Supercomputer RSE team and the day focused on mapping workflows, using DRI more efficiently, onboarding to HPC and discussing DRI requirements and the fellows’ next steps in developing their projects.

The discussions during the day illuminated various aspects relevant to the experience of the DISKAH fellows so far with the deployment of DRI training to support their projects. These highlighted the diversity of backgrounds and skills across A&H researchers when developing their workflows, including ML-supported pipelines. It also emphasised the broad benefit of following a logical structure throughout training, with hands-on opportunities to gradually build up workflows. Looking forward, fellows expressed interest in building tools, applications and platforms to share research and enable reproducibility, which consequently raises questions about the affordances of DRI to support this kind of work.