Location: School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Greenwich.
Funding award: UK/EU fees + £15,290 (inclusive of London Weighting) annual maintenance.
Closing date 28 July 2010
This studentship will form part of the interdisciplinary EPSRC/AHRC funded PATINA collaborative research project. PATINA aims to provide researchers of all kinds, including academics, creative practitioners and citizen researchers, with new opportunities to create research spaces that integrate physical, digital and personal space and support the sharing of research activities as well as results. The consortium will build wearable prototypes that can enhance research objects by projecting related information back into their research space. The PhD research will investigate the relationship between the researcher’s ‘research journey’, its capture in the archive and how it is replayed and shared with others.
FURTHER DETAILS:
Background and Context
The University of Greenwich is offering a fully funded PhD studentship, based at the University’s Institute of Converging Arts and Sciences (ICAS), to explore the relationship between computational (data) provenance and personal narrative as archival forms. This is an exciting opportunity for interdisciplinary research, forming part of the multidisciplinary project PATINA (Personal Architectonics of Interfaces to Artefacts), which is a collaboration between six universities, (Greenwich, Bristol, Brighton, Newcastle, Southampton and Swansea) and involves researchers from the humanities, the arts and computer science.
Funded by the EPSRC and the AHRC through the RCUK Digital Economy programme, this £1.7 m project will provide researchers of all kinds, including academics, creative practitioners and citizen researchers, with new opportunities to create research spaces that emphasise the primacy of research material, and support the sharing of research activities as well as results. The consortium will build wearable prototypes that can enhance research objects by projecting related information back into their research space. These technologies will also provide the means to capture, record, and replay the researcher's activities to support intuitive archiving, sharing and publication of interactions with research objects. The design of the technologies will draw on theoretical frameworks of space developed from studies of research spaces as diverse as libraries, museums, homes and archaeological fieldwork sites.
Role Description
The PhD Studentship field of study will be situated within the established body of research that explores the relationship between history and archive, and within the study of categorisation systems through which it is possible to articulate knowledge and being. The project will focus on the researcher’s interaction with the research object and with the archive that is created of his or her activities. It will examine the relationship between the researcher’s ‘research journey’, its capture in the archive and how it is replayed and shared with others. It will explore and establish links between the researcher’s personal narrative and the field of computational provenance, which seeks to model ways of recording and representing the history and therefore the authority and viability of data and information generated within computer systems.
It is anticipated that the project will
1) investigate similarities, differences, overlaps and conflicts etc. between the objectives and processes of computational provenance, historiography and personal narratives, e.g questions of authenticity, truth and falsehood, ontology and teleology.
2) contribute to current debates about the social, political and economic implications of contemporary proliferation of personal digital archives on and offline, together with large scale automated generation, capture and storage of digital data.
3) seek to establish what new cultural narratives are and might be produced from the meeting of the two.
The Studentship will start on October 1 2010, which is the start of the PATINA project.
UK/EU fees and maintenance at the standard EPSRC rate will be covered, including annual stipend of £15,290 (inclusive of London weighting).
Location
The studentship will be based at the University of Greenwich Maritime Campus, in the historic buildings of the Old Royal Naval College.
Entry Requirements
Ideally, applicants will have an MA/MSc in digital arts, multimedia, media or a related subject. They should have a proven interest in and aptitude for interdisciplinary research across the humanities, arts and sciences, encompassing both theory and practice. The Studentship will require the successful candidate to be fully committed to the aims and the outcomes of the PATINA project, to which their enquiry will make an important contribution. The successful candidate will be required to liaise frequently with colleagues from other universities and a variety of discipline areas and should have excellent verbal and written communication skills.
Academic Staff contact details: Rosamund Davies R.Davies@gre.ac.uk
Deadline 28 July
Interviews will be held on the 7 September 2010. Candidates will need to be available on this day and to be able to start the studentship on 1 October.
Application details
Please download an application form and guidelines from http://www.gre.ac.uk/research/apply
Please attach to the application a separate statement giving evidence of how your research interests and experience qualify you for this Studentship, as outlined in the role description, and how you meet the entry requirements. Then EMAIL THE COMPLETED FORM AND THE STATEMENT TO R.Davies@gre.ac.uk by 28 July 2010.
(DO NOT send to the Research Student administrative office as it says on the application form)
Rosamund Davies
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Greenwich
Old Royal Naval College
Park Row
London
SE10 9LS
Email: r.davies@gre.ac.uk
