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SPARKLE

laidlaw library building front

SPARKLE is an AHRC-funded project based at University of Leeds, scoping the development of a national repository for practice research.

UPDATE: the SPARKLE project is now complete, and the final report and recommendations can be found here: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/203045/ . We continue to move forward in this with colleagues from the PR Voices project and beyond.

 

Principal Investigator - Tom Jackson

Co-Investigators: Claire Knowles, Scott McLaughlin, Rachael Kotarski (British Library)

Post-Doctoral Research Associates (PDRA): Alex De Little, Matthew Warren.

'Sustaining Practice Assets for Research, Knowledge, Learning and Engagement' (SPARKLE) will be a national infrastructure for the storage, discovery, access, analysis, and preservation of practice research assets: which may include text, but also image/video/audio/software, and other less common mediums. Practice research is a broad community that cuts across disciplines (creative arts, humanities, healthcare, and others) that is not well-served by current text-focussed repositories, needing a more considered approach to a wider range of mediums. Equally, the current repository focus on single outputs is a poor fit for the processual and interconnected nature of practice research. SPARKLE will address these issues and fill in a significant gap in the interconnected trusted repositories landscape, as the current institutional/subject repositories lack capabilities in the management of complex, multipart, interconnected assets. It will provide an integrated technology infrastructure for innovative design and practice research, along with economies of scale through a cloud-based data service, encompassing critical FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles. As a holistic service to support practice research for now and the future, SPARKLE will include capabilities for analysing quantitative, thick, and big data, and learning resources to support documenting, accessing, and reusing practice assets. This project will produce an initial scoping of the required data infrastructure and community training needs.