‘A safe space to do dangerous things’
The National Archives’ Digital Lab is a dedicated environment for experimentation, as we confront our greatest challenge – digital – while also seeking to become a digital archive by instinct and design. The Lab is a place that enables innovative, interdisciplinary and collaborative research, making it a must-visit research hub.
As part of this offer, The National Archives collaborates with universities to host an annual series of Digital Experimentation workshops. We will be inviting insights from a range of disciplines such as computer science, archival science, information studies, digital humanities, mathematics, psychology, social sciences, conservation science, and more.
The workshops will focus on topics that cut across research disciplines, requiring multi-interdisciplinary synergies and inter-methodological collaborations. They will explore and drive forward innovative research questions, methods and tools. This will enable us to contribute to the rethinking of digital research, both theoretically and practically.
Through this collaboration, we aim to bridge the gap between external partners and experts at The National Archives, encourage them to work together on specific thematics, and inspire them to be ambitious and creative in ‘a safe space to do dangerous things’.
In order to explore major questions that are fundamental to us as a national digital archive, our research agenda will support the fulfilment of our Digital Strategy by engaging with new research communities and creating opportunities for multi-disciplinary and critical intervention into research.
Upcoming workshops
Tuesday 9 May 2023 – Archives and The Environment: A digital experimentation workshop
In collaboration with School of Advanced Study, University of London
Find out more about this event
Past workshops
Monday 20 January 2020 – Computational Archival Science Network: Final Symposium
In collaboration with King’s College London and The Alan Turing Institute
Find out more about this event
Thursday 20 to Friday 21 June 2019 – Computational archival science: Exploring data, investigating methodologies
In collaboration with Dr Mark Hedges, King’s College London and Richard Marciano, University of Maryland iSchool
Read our blog post about this workshop
Saturday 23 to Sunday 24 February 2019 – Hacking the past: an archives game jam
In collaboration with Dr Louise Seaward, The Bentham Project, University College London
Read our blog post about this workshop
Friday 7 September 2018 – Computational archival science: automating the archive
In collaboration with Dr Mark Hedges, King’s College London
Read our blog post about this workshop
Tuesday 10 July 2018 – Web archiving
In collaboration with Professor Jane Winters, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Read our blog post about this workshop
Thursday 28 to Friday 29 June 2018 – Materialities of digitisation in the heritage and archive sector
In collaboration with Professor Andrew Prescott, University of Glasgow
Read our blog post about this workshop
Friday 8 June 2018 – Scanathon: Testing new ‘digitisation on demand’ tools
In collaboration with Dr Louise Seaward, University College London
Read our blog post about this workshop
Friday 9 March 2018 – Data visualisation: The National Archives’ ‘War Diaries’
In collaboration with Dr Charles Perin, City, University of London
Read our blog post about this workshop
Tuesday 6 February 2018 and Friday 15 December 2017 – Beyond words: challenges in reading historical document collections at scale; technical focus, and setting the framework
In collaboration with Dr Anne Alexander, Cambridge Digital Humanities Network
Read our blog post about these workshops
Monday 26 to Friday 30 June 2017 – Archives without borders
In collaboration with Professor Matthew Connelly, History Lab, Columbia University