Dr Kathryn Eccles
Kathryn is Associate Professor of Digital Culture and Heritage and Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, which she joined in 2008. Though her academic post is in the Social Sciences, she also works extensively with the Humanities Division. As the University's first Digital Humanities Champion, Kathryn was responsible for the Digital Humanities Programme at the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH) from 2014-7, including the 2015-16 TORCH Headline series Humanities and the Digital Age. She holds a DPhil in Modern History from the University of Oxford and a BA (English Literature and History) and MPhil (European Modernisms) from the University of Birmingham. She has been a member of the Pembroke community since 2015.
Kathryn’s work broadly focuses on the ways in which museums and cultural heritage organisations can implement new tools and technologies to measure and enhance visitor engagement, and to better understand how visitors engage with art, cultural heritage collections and sites. Her AHRC Early Career Fellowship (2012-3) focused on the role of crowdsourcing in the cultural heritage sector, leading to insights about how and why people engage with online collections. These findings led to the development of the Cabinet project, (2015-present) which produced an interactive, mobile-optimised digital platform to support and encourage object-based learning in formal and informal settings. Cabinet was a collaboration between the OII, the Oxford University Museums and the University’s IT Services . The Open Cabinet project (2018-9) explored the use of augmented reality to engage visitors and students at the Pitt Rivers Museum with objects in the collections.
In her research and teaching, Kathryn has explored the ways in which we might use cultural analytics and social data to map and understand cultural engagement. She held a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship at TORCH (2018-20) ‘Hashtag Heritage’ to work with English Heritage to pilot the use of social media data to understand engagement with their free-to-access heritage sites and led the Playful Spaces project (2019-20), a GLAM Labs project to explore the use of social media to surface and map playful engagement with Oxford’s museums. Kathryn’s recent work has explored the ways in which cultural data is increasingly tied up in questions about AI and its encroachment into the production and consumption of cultural images, through the AI Futures project (2022-3) and AI is not Photography (2024-5).
Dr Kathryn Eccles
Kathryn is Associate Professor of Digital Culture and Heritage and Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, which she joined in 2008. Though her academic post is in the Social Sciences, she also works extensively with the Humanities Division. As the University's first Digital Humanities Champion, Kathryn was responsible for the Digital Humanities Programme at the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH) from 2014-7, including the 2015-16 TORCH Headline series Humanities and the Digital Age. She holds a DPhil in Modern History from the University of Oxford and a BA (English Literature and History) and MPhil (European Modernisms) from the University of Birmingham. She has been a member of the Pembroke community since 2015.
Kathryn’s work broadly focuses on the ways in which museums and cultural heritage organisations can implement new tools and technologies to measure and enhance visitor engagement, and to better understand how visitors engage with art, cultural heritage collections and sites. Her AHRC Early Career Fellowship (2012-3) focused on the role of crowdsourcing in the cultural heritage sector, leading to insights about how and why people engage with online collections. These findings led to the development of the Cabinet project, (2015-present) which produced an interactive, mobile-optimised digital platform to support and encourage object-based learning in formal and informal settings. Cabinet was a collaboration between the OII, the Oxford University Museums and the University’s IT Services . The Open Cabinet project (2018-9) explored the use of augmented reality to engage visitors and students at the Pitt Rivers Museum with objects in the collections.
In her research and teaching, Kathryn has explored the ways in which we might use cultural analytics and social data to map and understand cultural engagement. She held a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship at TORCH (2018-20) ‘Hashtag Heritage’ to work with English Heritage to pilot the use of social media data to understand engagement with their free-to-access heritage sites and led the Playful Spaces project (2019-20), a GLAM Labs project to explore the use of social media to surface and map playful engagement with Oxford’s museums. Kathryn’s recent work has explored the ways in which cultural data is increasingly tied up in questions about AI and its encroachment into the production and consumption of cultural images, through the AI Futures project (2022-3) and AI is not Photography (2024-5).