How can we unlock "dark" digital archives closed to the public? What is the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in making digitised and born-digital cultural records more accessible to users, on both sides of the Atlantic? AEOLIAN (Artificial intelligence for cultural organisations) focuses on born-digital and digitised collections that are currently closed to researchers and other users due to privacy concerns, copyright and other issues. Archives are meant to be used, not locked away. In order to unlock cultural assets, we need to work across disciplines and harness the latest technology. AEOLIAN brings together Digital Humanists, Computer Scientists, archivists and other stakeholders to transform the access and use of born-digital and digitised collections which are currently hidden away. Analysing vast amounts of data cannot be done manually: automation is no longer a choice, it is a necessity. Artificial Intelligence can be used to improve access to non-confidential materials through sensitivity review, for example by distinguishing between personal and business emails. AEOLIAN aims to unlock born-digital and digitised collections and open them up to a large number of users. Access to digital archives is essential, but we also need to anticipate the moment when born-digital records will be more accessible. To make sense of this mass of data, new methodologies are urgently needed, combining traditional methods in the humanities with data-rich approaches. Collaborations between humanities scholars, computer scientists, archivists and other stakeholders are therefore essential to make archives more accessible, but also to design new methodologies to analyse huge amounts of data. AI and machine learning create opportunities, but also challenges, for libraries, archives and museums. The project will address larger questions in the humanities - including ethical and social considerations at the centre of current debates on AI and digital technologies. The AEOLIAN project will lead to the following research outputs: _6 online workshops , which will result in the creation of an international network of theorists and practitioners working with born-digital and digitised archives. _5 case studies of US and UK cultural organisations . These case studies will feed into an open-access 100-page report for an interdisciplinary audience outlining avenues for future research. _2 collections of essays published as special issue of journal or edited collection. The final report will offer a roadmap on born-digital and digitised cultural assets, based on 5 case studies of specific collections in the UK and US and detailed interviews. Crucially, it will also develop specific ideas for interdisciplinary research areas to solve the issue of access to digital cultural assets, which could form the basis of future research initiatives. Archives are of course not reserved to academic researchers. The online workshops and the website will foster public engagement on the topic of the changing nature of archival collections (from print to digital) in the twenty-first century. The website will keep track of all the project activities in the form of presentation materials from all workshop participants, video recordings of workshop presentations, and case studies that will then feed into the final report. Associated social media will help us connect with interested parties - in academia, archival institutions and beyond.

Archives, libraries and museums are increasingly opening their collections and placing them online. This is a welcome step to widening the access to historical materials, which thanks to digitisation are available for researchers all over the world as well as the public. However, some historical sources pose ethical challenges that are urgent to consider. This is the case of medical photographs, which often show vulnerable or identifiable patients, naked, in pain, restrained, sometimes underage, who did not consent to have their portrait taken. Sometimes even the act of taking the image was violent, coercive or exploitative. While current patients who are photographed are protected by medical ethics codes, the same safeguarding does not exist for patients photographed over a 100 years ago. Moreover, the public display of these images, which can be extremely graphic and are often accompanied by offensive language, can trigger present viewers. This network will bring together a multidisciplinary team of historians of photography, medicine and colonialism, philosophers, social scientists, archivists and artistic and documentary photographers to examine how we can display, preserve and write about historical medical photographs in an ethical way. We have three main aims. The first is to widen access to early medical photographs while protecting both historical subjects and present viewers. Our second aim is to broaden the range of ethical questions we ask of early medical photographs. We believe that current ethical codes that apply to contemporary medical photographs do not work with historical material. For instance, patients did not consent to have their photographs taken because the concept of "informed consent" did not exist in the nineteenth century. Our third aim is to challenge the racist, ableist and other damaging legacies of many of these photographs. We believe it is ethically necessary to confront photographic representations that have highly stigmatised certain groups and conditions, for instance children with learning disabilities, and that are still embedded in current collection, cataloguing and classification practices. To achieve these aims, we will organise a series of events around three strategic areas: research, collection management and public engagement. The activities will include online academic seminars, specialised workshops with archivists, librarians and curators, public engagement workshops and an Early Career Researchers training workshop. The focus of these events will be on co-creating new ways of displaying, preserving and writing about historical medical photographs. We will publicise our results through the first journal Special Issue on the ethics of medical photography, which we plan to submit to the Science Museum Group Journal, which is Open Access and therefore, available to everyone. The Special Issue will include 2 or 3 articles per strand, including one on best practice guidelines, or sensitivity guidelines, for heritage institutions that preserve medical photography collections, as well as for researchers. Our second output will be an Online Exhibition, which will put into practice the best practice guidelines. The exhibition will be curated by members of the network based on the discussions and suggestions from the workshops, including innovative ways of showing the images and alternative approaches for labelling and describing medical photographs. In line with our co-creation strategies, the Online Exhibition will also allow for feedback and comments from users.

From the beginnings of cinema in 1895, film cameras accompanied excursions into colonial worlds and recorded the activities of colonial officers, missionaries, anthropologists and various personnel such as doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, and their families. The role of film in the making of empire has only recently been gaining traction in film history. Whilst official film histories have been most prevalent, unofficial film production has had less attention. 'Colonial Reels: Histories and Afterlives of Colonial Film Collections' overturns this trajectory by focusing on the colonial film collections in four unique archives, the British Empire and Commonwealth Collection, the British Film Institute, Royal Anthropological Institute and Wellcome Collection. The project is a collaboration between three scholars, who are specialists in the field and have worked together in a research network for several years. The research will cover the period from 1920 up to 1980, by which time many British colonies had gained independence. The project will analyse colonial film held in the four archives in relation to the historical contexts of the countries and locales where they were produced. We will explore the infrastructures, networks and technologies that their production drew upon and the means by which they circulated. We will expand the production histories and contexts of films, identifying the people involved in their making and their positions in colonial offices or other colonial enterprises. The project is especially interested in the representations of colonialism that the films in these collections embody, particularly in relation to race, gender, ethnicity, and culture. The project will achieve an in-depth view of the films held in each collection that will extend knowledge and understanding of film and its role in the making of the British empire. There are increasing calls for access to imperial archives and the project will participate in, and organise, events providing forums for debate about decolonisation, reparation and restitution, particularly in relation to colonial film archives. The project aims to create a record of the perspectives of contemporary filmmakers and visual artists working critically with colonial films, who seek to access the histories of colonialism embedded within their imagery. To this end, the project also focuses on questions of archive, particularly as it pertains to histories of colonial film holdings and how archives matter both historically and in relation to the world in which we live. The project will run two symposiums, at Centre for Developing Societies, New Delhi, India and at the University of Cape Town, South Africa and will culminate with an international conference and gallery exhibitions, at Birkbeck, University of London, and Wellcome Centre, where films drawn from the archival collections as well as short films produced within the project will be screened. Under the auspices of the Afrika Eye Film Festival, Bristol, the project will offer educational workshops. Other dissemination plans include a website, a co-authored monograph, an edited collection of conference papers, the publication of journal articles, and short films using film footage from the collections. This project will open up the colonial film collections of four partner archives and will extend discussion and debate across academic communities of film and history, other groups of scholars such as medical historians and anthropologists, and contemporary filmmakers and visual artists, as well as a wider public. It creates a unique opportunity to delve deeply into four colonial film collections created in the British empire, when film became a powerful means of official and unofficial record that is yet to have wider focus in histories of British cinema. It is this gap to which this project seeks to respond.

The proposed research network will act as a forum for the discussion of non-sighted modes of beholding art, within the context of situated forms of contemporary art practice. It will question how a shift in the aesthetic engagement afforded by hybrid (intermedia) forms of contemporary art opens up new engagements for the partially sighted and blind community. Sound, smell and touch, for instance, have become an important factor in some installation art, while the discipline of sound art has expanded the spatial reception of the auditory. The network aims to develop a deeper understanding of the spatial and curatorial possibilities of such forms of engagement, and their potential application beyond the world of contemporary art. The proposal is set against a background where the engagement of 'visual' art by blind and partially sighted beholders has primarily been addressed through questions of improving access to medium-specific forms of art, such as through audio descriptions and touch tours, or (more problematically) mediated forms such as 'tactile' paintings and 3D facsimiles. While in a post-pandemic situation access is an ongoing concern, a narrow focus on 'traditional' art does not register how intermedial/installation art has (i) fundamentally challenged ontologies of art, (ii) deliberately sets out to dehabitualise the beholder position, and (iii) challenges the notion of 'context independent' art. Addressing where the criticality lies in non-sighted modes of engagement, the proposition is that the engagement afforded a blind or visually impaired audience should be every bit as complex as that of sighted beholders. This issue is pressing given the prevalence of the default white cube gallery situation and entrenched conventions of 'viewing' art. A deeper understanding of non-visual ontologies of art will not only widen participation to new audiences, but enhance the experience of non-sighted and sighted beholders. This will impact upon the design of galleries and museums - the types of spaces made available, such as their acoustic properties and embedded tactile cues - and attitudes to curating (where partially and non-sighted beholders are rarely treated as part of the core audience, despite the RNIB estimating that over two million people in the UK have visual impairment). This means challenging museum conventions of engagement which prioritise sighted audiences (such as the ubiquitous 'please do not touch'). This research network will facilitate an exchange of ideas that engages interdisciplinary thinking on the phenomenology of the non- or partially-sighted engagement of art. Crucially, it will engage the blind and partially sighted community and organisations that promote cultural opportunities for this audience, and those within institutions enacting policy around inclusion and access to (and the design of) museum/gallery environments. But it will also draw upon disciplinary insights from: cognitive science and psychology (i.e. non-sighted spatial orientation, and the interdependence of perceptual systems); the philosophy of art (the ontology of art and the aesthetics of reception); art and design practice (sighted and non-sighted artists making work where the engagement extends beyond the visual); theoreticians engaging critical disability studies. The workshops and symposium will be organised around three key themes: (i) non-visual perception and orientation (such as sound/haptic localisation); (ii) architectural and spatial situations/contexts (rethinking the gallery situation); (iii) expanding art and curatorial practices (theorising new types of encountering art). The discussions will be transcribed and made available through the network's research website, and live-streaming will facilitate virtual participation. An edited book, organised around themes emerging from the network discussions, will be published at a later date, and made available as an audiobook and large format print edition.

Through a series of three workshops, the Silences of Science network will examine different aspects of the paradox that science depends both on prolixity and on reticence. It will seek to interrogate the assumption that open and efficient channels of communication are always of greatest benefit to science and to society. It aims to draw the attention of the research community to the creative importance of silence, of interruptions in communication, of isolation and of 'stuckness'. Discussion of the theory and practice of science communication typically emphasises the removal of barriers (for example, between scientist and citizen) and the reduction of distortion (scientific inaccuracy and misrepresentation in the media). Restricted access to scientific knowledge becomes the object of moral censure, whilst maximised communication is frequently taken as an unquestioned social good. However, science - and its communication - depends as much on discontinuities, on barriers and lacunae, as it does on the free flow of information. Contrary to the ideal of science as an open enterprise, scientific innovation and scientific commerce rely on the constant use of moral, legal and technical devices that restrict, rather than encourage, the sharing of ideas. For instance, Information Property Rights procedures close off the flow of information to the scientific community, even as they enable the subsequent commercial development of an idea. Likewise, fear of plagiarism can radically restrict scientists' willingness to discuss their work openly. Humanities scholars from a range of disciplines have drawn attention to the constructive role of silence - from the meaningfulness of pauses and omissions in literature, to the role of solitude and quietude in the history of religion, or the uses of silence within the legal system. However, to date such interests have been sporadic and largely directed towards disciplinary interests. In particular, there has been no attempt to draw on this work to inform the study of the practice and communication of science. The Silences of Science research network will bring together a range of scholars - for instance, from literary studies, media studies, legal studies, religious studies, as well as from the history and philosophy of science, policy studies and science communication studies - who are able to draw on insights from their disciplines in order to develop a conceptual framework with which to examine the role of silence within the sciences. The workshop format facilitates interdisciplinary collaboration and is intended to stimulate novel research among the academic participants. The network will also include practising scientists and those working in science policy, with the aim of informing research communication practice and policy.