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Digital Research Showcase 2025- 26 - Project Information

Our Digital Research Showcase 2025-26 brings together a collection of research that highlight the depth and diversity of work across the arts and humanities. Each poster represents an individual research project and illustrates how these projects contribute to understanding and addressing issues in contemporary society. The four themes of our showcase are:

  • Interdisciplinary working
  • Innovative methods
  • Collaboration and co-production
  • Global challenges

The posters demonstrate the unique ways in which arts and humanities approaches can uncover and mobilise knowledge from human thought and experience.

Vaporwave: A Requiem for the Future? - Ross Cole

About the Research

The term ‘vaporwave’ emerged during the early 2010s to describe a wraithlike nexus of remediated videos, memes, and music transgressing digital and material realms.

With the research time generously afforded by a Philip Leverhulme Prize, I plan to extend my work on the ‘off-modern’ qualities of online subculture into a second book, tentatively entitled Vaporwave, or, A Requiem for the Future.

This project will examine vaporwave across intersecting planes from architecture and melancholia to surveillance capitalism, gimmickry, and utopian thought.

Why does this matter in today's society?

The vaporwave nexus is symptomatic of widespread generational disaffections engendered by the smartphone and ubiquitous online connectivity, especially those relating to loneliness, mental health, political polarisation, and what Mark Fisher has characterised as ‘horizons of the thinkable’. This project aims to understand why the 1980s and ’90s have come to hold such a central place in online creative practice—an era coextensive with the triumph of neoliberalism and the so-called ‘end of history’. Ultimately, this work suggests that we need new frameworks for understanding the convoluted ways in which cultural production on the internet engages in critique.

Interdisciplinary Working

This project forms part of an international research network I have been co-convening over the past few years with Michiel Kamp of Utrecht University on what we have termed ‘sonic retrofuturism’. This network and my own research on internet subculture embrace a variety of fields and approaches, from digital ethnography, media aesthetics, and popular music studies, to queer theory, psychology, and literary history.

The Soviet Union, the WHO, and Global Health, 1957-1991 - Robert Hornsby, Anastasiia Akulich, Marek Eby, Simon Huxtable

About the Research

  • Studies the Soviet role in global efforts to tackle smallpox, malaria, polio, and HIV/AIDS.
  • Draws on archival and interview evidence to show how Soviet participation impacted WHO policy-making and on-the-ground campaigns.
  • Reexamines the influence of the Cold War on global health programs.
  • Explores how socio-cultural factors shape responses to infectious disease.

Why does this matter in today's society?

  • In the wake of the COVID-19 epidemic, public health interventions in response to infectious disease have been a subject of debate.
  • By examining the results of international disease control efforts, the project advances understanding of key aspects of international health work, offering:
    • analysis of the experiential and social diversity of global health problems.
    • critical examination of the assumptions underpinning modern epidemiology.
    • exploration of alternative practices of public-health intervention.

Global Challenges

  • Through historical analysis, the project speaks to present and future global health challenges faced by the WHO and in other bilateral and multilateral fora.
  • Beyond the focus diseases, it examines four cross-cutting themes of contemporary relevance: primary healthcare, vaccination, health education, and medical surveillance.

Funded by a Discovery Award from the Wellcome Trust.

Please follow this link to view the project page on the Wellcome Trust website.

‘How Songs Make Money’ podcast series - Dr Ellis Jones (School of Music), Sam Wyman (Digital Education Systems Team)

About the Research

  • A nine-episode podcast series exploring the world of music copyright, released weekly in Oct–Dec 2025
  • Combining original interviews with industry practitioners and high-level student work from the MA module How Songs Make Money
  • Drawing on relevant academic research to connect interviews to critical scholarship
  • Aiming to reach an audience of music students and young aspiring musicians
  • Creating a sustainable link between student education, research, and industry outreach

Why does this matter in today's society?

The digitalisation of the music industries has brought concern regarding declining incomes for musicians. The role of music publishing (revenues associated with compositional copyrights, rather than specific sound recordings) is of growing importance, but is poorly understood. This podcast series seeks to support general understanding of music publishing while maintaining an independent, critical perspective on industry practices.

Collaboration and Co-production

  • This project drew on expertise associated with the Digital Education Service’s Podcasting pilot – including extensive use of specialist software licences, and participation in Podcasting Forum events.
  • Interview guests for the podcast series have spanned a range of fields including new music composition, library music production, sync licensing, music publishing platforms, and global scholarship.

Please follow this link to listen to the podcast.

Comics Practice and Theory: Towards a Collaborative Comics Research Network - Miriam Kent, Erini Boukla and Rik Worth

About the Research

This project develops a new research agenda for practice-led comics scholarship. Our goal is a major AHRC bid to establish a Northern-focused network that connects academics with comics creators through collaborative events.

The network would place value on the creative labour of comics artists. Tangible outcomes may include best-practice toolkits for co-creation and a digital archive of practice-led research.

How this will make a difference:

  • Develops new methodologies for practice-led research, formalising how comics can be used as a tool for academic inquiry and knowledge creation.
  • Strengthens the regional creative economy by platforming comics creators through paid, collaborative opportunities.
  • Generates public engagement using the accessible medium of comics to communicate complex university research to wider audiences.

Collaboration

Our activities have featured an international roster of collaborators from the UK, USA and the Netherlands. Our strategic partners include Thought Bubble Comic Arts Festival and the Comics Cultural Impact Collective (CCIC).

This work has been built through a phased series of LAHRI-supported collaborations:

  • Speculative Conversation, “Comics and Interdisciplinary Arts and Humanities Research” (2022) brought together researchers to identify a shared need.
  • Sadler Seminar Series, “Expanding Narratives: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Comics” (2023-24) built our international network of artists and academics.
  • Pump-Priming Award (2025, with additional funding from the School of Media and Communication) has led to our pilot event, “Comics Practice and Theory” to further scope out research needs and discuss methodologies.

AIAI: Artificial Intelligence, Art and Indigeneity - Professor Thea Pitman (LCS)

About the Research

  • The AIAI project (2023–) explores Indigenous representation and the creative possibilities of AI image generation tools with Indigenous artists and writers from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil & Chile.
  • Partners: Thydêwá (NGO, Brazil), Immersive Networks (artist-technologists, UK), aruma-Sandra de Berduccy (Bolivian multimedia artist), Dr Andreas Rauh (Dublin City University).
  • Exhibitions: Convention House, Leeds, Galería Gabriela Mistral, Santiago de Chile and National Botanic Gardens, Dublin, 2024.
  • Funding: IRIFC (LAHRI), Research Culture, DCCH & Digital Good Network (ESRC).

Why does this matter in today's society?

  • Generative AI is developing very quickly, and we know bias is hard-baked into the datasets and algorithms that underpin these tools.
  • Racial bias in image generation tools is evident in overly generic ‘mix-and-match’ representations, increased stereotyping, as well as in a tendency to invisibilise certain groups.
  • It’s important that people who are being negatively affected by these tools are aware of what is happening and understand why. This then gives them the power to choose how to respond.
  • In the case of the AIAI project, some people rejected the tools outright, while others chose to appropriate them for their own purposes, to achieve pragmatic and/or creative objectives.

Collaboration and Co-Production

  • Our first experiments with Midjourney constituted standard participatory research.
  • We went on to design ‘IndigenIA’, a prototype Indigenous image generator based on an offline version of Stable Diffusion, accessed remotely.
  • Prototype design was coproduced during a week-long workshop in Leeds (but not on campus).
  • Approach was holistic, addressing Indigenous needs, desires, histories and epistemologies rather than merely technical specifications.
  • Prototype still in use. Forthcoming coproduced book

Learning from Yorkshire’s Holocaust Torah Scrolls - Prof. Jay Prosser (Lead), Sophia Lambert (Project Assistant), Dr. Eva Frojmovic (Director, CJS), Karen Sayers (CC&G)

About the Research

This project brought together Torah scrolls rescued from the Holocaust by a Leeds alumnus, now on long-term loan to different faith and non-faith organisations across Yorkshire. We explored what these scrolls — often the sole surviving witnesses of their destroyed communities — reveal about the Holocaust, resilience, and the enduring sacredness of text shared across Jewish, Muslim, and Christian traditions.

Why does this matter in today's society?

These scrolls link Yorkshire’s present to a global history of loss and renewal. They inspire remembrance, interfaith understanding, and community resilience against intolerance today.

Collaboration and Co-Production

Working with scribes, rabbis, librarians, museum curators, and local congregations, we co-produced new knowledge about the history, care, and meaning of Holocaust scrolls today. These collaborations reconnected Yorkshire communities through shared acts of remembrance, conservation, and education.

Memorial Scrolls Trust, London -- Sinai Synagogue, Leeds – Bradford Reform Synagogue - York Liberal Jewish Community – Harrogate Hebrew Congregation – Cultural Collections and Galleries – Centre for Jewish Studies

Language teaching needs language science: Linguistics in Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) - Prof. Sascha Stollhans (Languages, Cultures and Societies) with Prof. Michelle Sheehan (PI, Newcastle), Dr Alice Corr (Birmingham),  Dr Anna Havinga (Bristol), Dr Jonathan Kasstan (Westminster) & Dr Norma Schifano (Cambridge)

About the Research

  • The project explores ways to leverage research insights from linguistics to enrich and diversify secondary-level language teaching and learning
  • We have developed, trialled and evaluated research-informed mini-courses, teaching mate-rials, and CPD training for teachers
  • Evaluation of co-created materials (Sheehan et al. 2024) showed that embedding linguistics into A-level French, German and Spanish classes was perceived by teachers and students to be useful, coherent, inclusive, engaging and motivating
  • Funders include: AHRC OWRI Language Acts and Worldmaking, PhilSoc, University Council For Lan-guages, Newcastle University and University of Bristol (Impact Accelerator Awards), University of Westminster School of Humanities

Picture included displaying Prof. Stollhans and Prof. Sheehan accepting a Newcastle University Engagement and Place Award for "Inclusive Education, Lifelong Learning and CPD” on behalf of the team.

Why does this matter in today's society?

  • Formal language learning in the UK has been in decline for many years, which has resulted in calls for revisions to the curriculum, assessments and teacher training
  • Linguistics – the analytical and critical study of language itself, including its history, varieties, and role in society and culture – is largely absent from school-based language education, which focuses primarily on the acquisition of skills and, at higher levels, engagement with literature and film
  • We argue that this is an unfortunate omission and inconsistent with other subjects (such as Music and PE)
  • Including a linguistics perspective could spark curiosity, be motivational for diverse cohorts of learners, and increase inclusivity (e. g. by making language learning more relatable for students who are already multilingual and speak ‘heritage‘/community languages)

Collaboration and Co-Production

  • Close collaboration with teachers who co-create materials with the researchers
  • Oxford University Press is project partner and has purchased materials
  • Strong long-standing engagement with external stakeholders has resulted in policy manifesto launched at All-Party Parliamentary Group meeting at the House of Lords
  • Project results reported on in various media out-lets, including National Geographic, TES and The Economist

Quote included which reads, 'This goes right to the heart of addressing the fundamental psychological barriers towards modern languages learning in the UK: linguistics reduces the gulf between the knower and the 'non-knower' and therefore increases the wish to learn, by bringing in observable, fascinating details that everyone can partake in. It makes languages come alive, be a multi-faceted tool for human understanding that is part of everyone's history. Linguistics is a leveller, and a formidable skill to learn.' Anonymous teacher feedback, 2021.

Please follow this link to the project website.

The Displaced in English Drama, 1575-1625  - Dr Alexander Thom

About the Research

  • The Elizabethan and Jacobean periods are famous for their drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, to name a few playwrights of the age.
  • James Joyce once wrote, ‘the note of banishment [...] sounds uninterruptedly’ in Shakespeare’s works—but what of the others?
  • No systematic review of banishment, exile, or coerced migration across the dramatic corpus (1575-1625) has hitherto been conducted.
  • Doing so reveals the extraordinary prevalence of plots involving flight, banishment, or exile.
  • It also reveals diverse, often contrasting patterns of depiction: from sympathetic to xenophobic; fatalistic to optimistic.

Why does this matter in today's society?

  • Beyond Shakespeare: rather than a unique feature, this research reveals that Shakespeare’s plays reflect wider cultural preoccupations; preoccupations which resonate today.
  • Empires of exiles: English imperialism traced itself to an exiled Roman prince, Brutus—this mythic displacement was used to justify the displacement of others.
  • Contradictions of hospitality: resident aliens fleeing religious wars were expected to integrate but then were resented for perceived successes: social, financial, domestic, etc.

Innovative Methods

Since 2011, instalments of Martin Wiggins’s British Drama, 1533-1642: A Catalogue have been published by Oxford University Press. This catalogue allows, for the first time, systematic searches for specific plots, characters, disguises, narrative sources, and so forth. Before this resource—especially in its searchable digital form—comprehensive projects of this kind were effectively untenable for early career scholars.

Given the sheer volume of plays identified (300+), the project also involves creating an Obsidian database to visualise and map connections. The poster includes a screenshot from the Obsidian computer programme.