Thomas Pennant's Tour in Scotland 1769 and Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Western Isles 1772 (published 1771-76), and his Tours in Wales (1778-1783) played a foundational role in the birth of tourism in Scotland and Wales. Profoundly influencing contemporary writers and travellers, Pennant's Tours represented the first extensively illustrated documentation of Scotland and Wales, providing 'national descriptions' of the cultural, economic and environmental condition of both countries on the cusp of the modern era. Although reprinted over the years, these complex, multi-voiced texts have never been properly edited: they are a valuable resource for research across a wide range of disciplines. Our searchable digital editions will allow readers to experience these works within their rich context of images, objects, buildings and places, connecting them to online collections in heritage institutions. A description of Dunvegan Castle on Skye, for example, would link to a watercolour made by Pennant's artist Moses Griffith on the 1772 tour; an account of a shell picked up on a beach in north Wales would link to its description in Pennant's British Zoology, and to the actual specimen from Pennant's collection at the National History Museum. The tour narrative does not always represent Pennant's eyewitness account, even when it appears to do so: much of his information was gleaned from local experts, often postdating the journey itself. Linking the Tours into his wide-ranging correspondence will allow critics, historians and archaeologists to get behind the published text to understand 'who saw what, and when'. Our expertise in Celtic languages will enable us to explore the nature of cultural translation from Scottish Gaelic or Welsh-speaking contributors. Digital editing will also make it easier to trace the development of the published tours through successive editions, as Pennant incorporated more and more material, sometimes verbatim, from enthusiastic readers. Descriptions of sites will be linked to (and used to enhance) the entries held by Coflein (Royal Commission for Ancient and Historic Monuments in Wales) and Canmore (Historic Environment Scotland), both of them widely-used public resources. We will also be working closely with the National Libraries of Wales and Scotland and the National Maritime Museum on a range of online exhibitions and projects. Our partnership with the Natural History Museum will allow us to examine more closely how Pennant's work as a naturalist influenced and was influenced by his travels. His correspondence with another important natural historian, Gilbert White, will be the focus of an exhibition to be held at the Gilbert White House Museum in Selborne. Projects with schools and community groups in Flintshire and Skye, online exhibitions, digital maps, workshops and other events will all help to bring the hidden stories in these pioneering tours to life. What Pennant's writings can tell us about the complex legacies of eighteenth-century colonialism, slavery and the industrial revolution will be a key thread of our research, explored in various articles and in an exhibition at the Greenfield Valley Industrial Heritage Park near Pennant's home in Holywell, Flintshire.

The project's objective is to harness digital tools from different fields to transform scholarly and popular understanding of Ogham - an ancient script unique to Ireland and Britain. At a more general level, it provides a potential model of collaborative ways of working to ensure the long-term sustainability, continued development, and inter-operability of diverse digital resources for multi-disciplinary humanities research. It addresses the challenge of giving continued and renewed life to existing digital resources beyond the end of individual funded projects by integrating them with new data created using subsequent technological and intellectual advances. Through collaborative working, resource-sharing and skills-exchange the project will strengthen partnerships between academia, museums, libraries, and state heritage agencies across all 6 nations in the UK, Ireland and Man. It will also contribute to Europe-wide collaboration in digital epigraphy and place Ogham in the vanguard of global epigraphical studies. Ogham is highly unusual among world writing systems. It entirely lacks iconicity: like a barcode, it consists solely of a succession of straight lines. It is read vertically and is written in 3 dimensions across the edge of a solid object (using letters which consist of bundles of 1-5 short parallel lines, their value depending on their position relative to a baseline). Its heyday was the 1st Millenium CE, but knowledge of it never died out. Texts written in this ingenious script are of international significance to historical linguists as the earliest evidence for the Gaelic languages. We will digitally document all c.640 examples of Ogham writing in all media, from its origin in the fourth century CE until the dawn of the modern revival c.1850. We will build on the success of the 'Ogham in 3D' website (2012-15, 2016-17), created by our partner organisations, the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, the Discovery Programme, and the National Monuments Service which covers c.25% of surviving ogham and provides detailed supporting information, photographs, & 3D models. We will upgrade its data and metadata, enhance its searchability, and greatly expand its thematic, chronological & geographical scope by including Oghams from the whole island of Ireland (i.e. including Northern Ireland) and from outside Ireland. The latter - from Scotland, Wales, Man, England, and Continental libraries - comprise almost a third of the total surviving. We will also move beyond stone monuments to include portable objects, graffiti, and manuscripts. We will document in 3D all Ogham in the collections of the national museums (the British Museum; the National Museums of Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Wales; and the Manx Museum), with the support of state heritage agencies in 4 countries. Additional joint fieldwork in all six nations will allow us to more than treble the number of 3D models available to nearly 80% of the corpus. Uniting this scattered evidence will transform Ogham studies, and connect local communities with their heritage. We will work with the Discovery Programme to evaluate the effectiveness of different methods of 3D recording and visualization, and use for analysis techniques hitherto used only for documentation. We will refine new methods of digital groove analysis (to identify the work of individual carvers and establish the contemporaneity of different carvings) and digital reconstruction of worn detail. We will conduct analysis based on the new documentation, using analogue and new digital techniques, including computational corpus linguistics. The enduring social value of Ogham is reflected in its increasing popularity for decorative, symbolic, and creative functions. The project will support this use of Ogham in contemporary culture by responding to the need for authoritative guidance on writing accurate and authentic Ogham, and by inspiring new & innovative applications and artistic responses.

The built heritage of Wales and the wider UK is a multifunctional collection of structures, many of which have moved beyond their original purpose to a present in which they must perform for communities and collections on a local and national scale. Whether a renowned visitor attraction or a modest private home, historic buildings are environments in which the wellbeing of people and things are safeguarded. How effectively are they performing in this role? Set against a landscape of sky-high energy prices, ambitious net-zero carbon targets and rapidly evolving heating technologies, can heritage and conservation sciences guide owners, tenants and managers of historic buildings in their decision-making? Can we benefit from understanding traditional building methods and retrofit principles to improve lived experiences of housing today? In a changing climate, what leeway do we have to broaden our long-held acceptable environmental parameters for preservation of heritage artefact collections? Led by Cardiff University experts from the School of History, Archaeology and Religion and the Centre for Sustainable Building Conservation in the Welsh School of Architecture, PERFFORM puts built heritage under the microscope. Using heritage science to understand how buildings work, it examines the impact of their internal environments on human lifeways, past and present. It activates conservation science to correlate those environments with decay of buildings and collections to offer guidance for their preservation.

Advisory guidelines on archaeological data entry encourage use of controlled vocabulary but the means to achieve this are lacking. Many datasets simply have free text descriptions. Other databases employ pick lists based on major thesauri but the output is still text rather than any standard ID that other databases will employ. Links to online thesauri exist with some web based data entry systems but free text entry inevitably leads to errors of various kinds. Controlled vocabularies are not readily available in standard semantic formats and easy means to provide controlled indexing are not generally available. Data providers lack an efficient way to provide uniquely identified controlled indexing of data that is compatible with semantic technologies and standards. Knowledge Exchange (KE) activities based on enhanced vocabulary services are the focus of the proposed work. The general aim is to provide the means to encourage, but not force, data providers to use controlled types, by providing services to do this easily, together with tools for retrospective enrichment of existing datasets. The work follows on from the STAR project that developed web services and user interface widgets that will be adapted and extended to meet the user needs described in this proposal. The services and KE activities will make it significantly easier for data providers to index their data with uniquely identified (machine readable) controlled terminology - ie semantically enriched and compatible with Linked Data. A further aim is to make it easier for vocabulary providers to make their vocabularies available in this format. The project builds on the STAR/STELLAR collaboration between University of Glamorgan Hypermedia Research Unit and the Archaeology Data Service (ADS), with ADS playing a dual role as co-Investigators and users of the project outcomes. The work is in collaboration with project partners, English Heritage, who act as both vocabulary providers and users of the linked data creation and semantic enrichment services, together with RCAHMS and RCAHMW, in their role as national vocabulary standards setting bodies. Wessex Archaeology Ltd. and the Bespoke HER User Group join through their association as heritage data managers, data providers to Local Authorities and users of ADS resources. The project will employ three major vocabulary resources maintained by EH as exemplars - the Monument Types Thesaurus, the Event Types Thesaurus and the MIDAS Archaeological Periods List. These resources will be converted to standard machine readable data formats and made freely available under a suitable open licensing arrangement. It is anticipated that converting these resources into standard linked data format with unique identifiers will encourage wider use of controlled terminology by archaeology users and act as exemplar for the wider cultural heritage domain. RESTful web services will be developed for the project to make the vocabulary resources programmatically accessible and searchable. These will include provision to 'feed back' new terms (concepts) suggested by users. Summary of the main anticipated outcomes: - Freely accessible and reusable persistent vocabulary resources as linked data, the techniques to achieve this being made freely available - Web Services to SKOS representations of the vocabularies and semantic enrichment services, along with web application components - Knowledge exchange for semi-automatic tools (using the services) to facilitate retrospective semantic alignment of existing datasets - Knowledge exchange for tools to facilitate semantic enrichment (via URIs) within data entry - Mechanism for feedback of supplementary terms to augment existing vocabularies - The software developed will be available as open source.

Principal Subject of the Research\nThe inscribed stones and stone sculpture are still the most prolific form of material evidence for Wales cAD 400-1100. Analysis of the catalogue data on monument context, form, ornament and inscriptions illuminates research questions about this formative period of Welsh history. These are addressed in the catalogue discussions and brought together in the introductory chapters. The material throws unique light on questions concerning conversion to Christianity, identification of early church sites, their hierarchy and evolution, as well as changes in liturgy and belief. The inscriptions provide the main source for study of the Welsh and Irish languages in post-Roman Wales and their evolution and can shed light on literacy and learning. The identification of local and regional sculptural groups contributes to debates concerning wealth and the exploitation of resources (stone), the role of patronage, changing cultural identities, the impact of Irish, Anglo-Saxon and Viking settlement in Wales, and the significance of Welsh cultural and artistic contacts with other parts of Britain and Ireland, especially around and across the Irish Sea, as well as with the Continent.\nKey Aims\nCompletion of A Corpus of the Early Medieval Inscribed Stones and Stone Sculpture in Wales, Volume III: North Wales, the final volume of the Welsh early medieval sculpture corpus series, thereby finishing the overall project, the first country in Britain to be completed to modern scholarly standards. This will complete the provision of a pan-Wales multi-disciplinary, well illustrated analytical catalogue and introductory discussion. This will act as the key resource on the subject for the foreseeable future and may be used by other scholars, both in the UK and globally, in a range of disciplines (archaeology, history, Celtic Studies, geology, religious studies); also by public and heritage bodies, e.g. Cadw, facilitating future protection and display; other specialists e.g. archaeological units. Completion of the published resource will allow wider academic and more popular dissemination. \nWhere and how the research will be undertaken\nThe book analyses data collected for the catalogue and sets it within the broader context of research on early medieval inscribed stones and stone sculpture in Wales, elsewhere in Britain, Ireland and elsewhere in Europe as appropriate. It will also take into account relevant published research on the archaeology, history, languages and religion of Britain, Ireland and Europe. Initially research focussed on primary and secondary written material, including published books and academic articles and medieval and later manuscripts in Bangor, Aberystwyth and Oxford and relevant on-line data, to write draft catalogue entries and bibliographies for each monument. Fieldwork was then conducted throughout north Wales and in National Museum Cardiff to record and check each extant monument and its original find-site if appropriate to enable final catalogue descriptions to be written; comparative material was visited where appropriate. Additional comparative research, for example on Continental material, was carried out in Oxford. Using the data gathered in preliminary research, fieldwork and comparative work, and incorporating research of my collaborators, I am now writing up discussions of individual monuments and the broader introductory analytical chapters, a process which would be completed by the award of a Fellowship.\nOthers involved\nThe Corpus has been undertaken with the continuing support of two partners: The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales and National Museum Wales. For Volume III: North Wales photographs and line-drawings have been done specially by or for the RCAHMW. Specialist contributors are Jana Horak and Heather Jackson (NMW, geology); Patrick Sims-Williams(Celtic languages); David N. Parsons (runes); Helen McKee (later palaeography).