Data/Culture. Building Sustainable Communities around Arts and Humanities data and tools

Arts and humanities researchers are losing valuable digital resources—datasets, software, and tools—because they are scattered across institutions, poorly documented, or simply invisible to the scholars who need them. This project builds a central online portal that links existing digital collections and tools, making them findable and usable. It also runs match-making events and skills training to get more researchers actually using these resources, and continuously tracks what scholars, data holders, and funders need from the system. Without this infrastructure, years of funded digital work—from historical archives to linguistic corpora—sits underused. If successful, the project turns fragmented digital assets into a coherent, sustainable ecosystem. Researchers will spend less time hunting for data and more time analysing it. Funders will see better returns on their investments in digital humanities. The portal and community-building model could also be adapted by other disciplines facing similar discoverability problems, quietly improving how academic knowledge is preserved and shared.