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The Centres of Excellence PR/ Comms tends to focus on the excellent research of academics, but Centres of Excellence are also hubs for researcher development and community building as well as fundamental research. Steering the ship behind the scenes are professional service staff who often have professorial levels of experience. In this piece, we spotlight Elena Dennison, the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab Programme Manager who came into post as the School of Media Arts and Humanities came into being.

The Sussex Digital Humanities Lab Research Programmes Manager role was developed explicitly to synergise the interdisciplinary activities of the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab with its home Faculty of Media, Arts, and Humanities (MAH). It combines the management of the SHL Digital Centre of Excellence, with supporting research and knowledge exchange activity in the Faculty and its Research Institute as part of the Professional Services research support team.

After three years in the role, we catch up with Elena to see how it is going.

Why this role?

The first thing that attracted me was the experimental, busy and interdisciplinary nature of the post. A new role, based in a then brand-new School (now Faculty), following an innovative business model. I thought my eclectic background as journalist and experience in grant development, specifically in interdisciplinary, collaborative research and EU funding, could make a difference. It appeared to be a demanding and varied role with a lot of scope. I wasn’t wrong.

In which way is the model innovative and different?

I took over managing SHL at the crucial point of transition from its inception phase funded by significant investment from the University’s Sussex Development Fund (SDF), to a ‘business as usual’ phase based in the home of our host Faculty (MAH), with strong support from Engineering and Informatics. The Centre is a research-intensive unit with a strong focus on external funding capture. All awarded grants go into the respective Faculty coffers which in turn support the Centre through the peaks and troughs. It is a model that takes the long view with sustainability as a big-picture goal, and that is what makes it special and different.

Describe a big challenge so far.

SHL was born 10 years ago as partnership between the then Schools of History, Media Film and Music (MFM), Education and Social Work (ESW), Engineering & Informatics and the Library, fully funded by SDF. I joined in 2021, just as MAH was forming. The challenge for me and the directors was to turn a fully funded research programme into a self-sustaining Centre of Excellence. We did it! We are now based in MAH, with strong support from Informatics, and core input from ESW and LPS.  In 2023 we rebranded as Sussex Digital Humanities Lab to more clearly identify our relationship with the wide MAH Faculty, as well as our partner schools in social science, law, and informatics.

How do you support researchers?

Simply making the space to talk, get to know colleagues and their interests and aspirations, creating a trusted environment where researchers are comfortable with not knowing. I run a fortnightly drop-in session where colleagues can just come in and chat. A lot of the time is just about being a sound board, asking questions, signposting or connecting people. Working across MAH, ESW, LPS and Eng Inf we can help join up ideas and people. These sessions are complementary to the weekly research development surgeries offered by our Research Development Manager and the Director of Research for grant capture. The development of ideas into successful funded proposals is a team effort!

Has anything good come out of these sessions?

These one-to-one sessions are part of a bigger series of activities to develop ideas into funded research. We call it the ‘incubator’. For example, there is twice termly Research Forum where colleagues present ideas at different stages of development for feedback and/or input from the lab’s multidisciplinary research community. Some recent successful examples are Hannah Field’s ERC stating grant, Viki Walden’s Landecker Digital Memory Lab, and Chris Kiefer’s Musically Embodied Machine Learning fellowship funded by AHRC. Initial conversations, input from our Research Software Engineer, from researchers from the Text Analysis Group (TAG) team and our Research Fellow in Informatics, reviewing and commenting on drafts, all of it helped develop ideas into successful multimillion grants. So, a lot of things have come out of it, and we continue to cook more SHL flagged bids.

What does it mean, to be an SHL flagged bid?

Researchers who have benefited from any element of SHL Digital development activities flag their bids so that we can track our impact for reporting purposes.  The award goes to the schools or faculties of the investigators in full; it simply enables us to identify the value we bring to wider research environment.

What are you most looking forward to?

Settling into the business-as-usual model (that is self-sustaining) has meant a lot of work supporting the development of bids to ensure income contribution. We are now in a position to be more strategic about the bids we produce, which not only set the intellectual agenda for the lab but also contributes to the University's strategy. For example, we've recently led the submission of a 4 million Euro Horizon Europe MSCA DN bid, a consortium project which speaks directly to the University’s Digital and Data Futures strategic theme. I am looking forward to developing more of these agenda setting bids in which we are in the driving seat.

Who can get involved in Sussex Digital Humanities Lab activities? Anyone. Come and see me and I’ll put the kettle on. I’ve got good biscuits.

Find out more about Elena and the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab.

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