A team led by the University of Westminster has received UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure (DRI) funding through AHRC’s infrastructure for Digital Arts and Humanities (iDAH) programme to build the Enact Practice Research Data Service (Enact). Enact will create a space for the global community to come together and make practice research more accessible to all.
The Enact project builds on from two previous projects funded by AHRC’s Scoping Future Data Services call. These were the Practice Research Voices (PR Voices) and the Sustaining Practice Assets for Research, Knowledge, Learning and Engagement (SPARKLE) projects.
Led by Jenny Evans as Principal Investigator, Enact brings together those who worked on both the PR Voices and SPARKLE projects, including colleagues from Queen Mary University of London and the University of Leeds, and will be supported by the British Library and Jisc. The collaboration between libraries and academics will harness shared expertise and support the academic drive to recognise practice research, which is research where practice such as making or doing, e.g. performance, is the significant research method. This type of research is sometimes referred to as practice-based or practice-led.
Word cloud including potential definitions of practice research
The funding will enable the team to work with communities to build Enact: Core – infrastructure which aims to make AHRC-funded practice research, findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR). Underpinned by metadata standards and persistent identifiers, Enact will collaborate with the global information standards community to ensure the recognition of its importance as a research method.
The Enact Data Service will become part of AHRC’s infrastructure for Digital Arts and Humanities (iDAH) programme (iDAH) programme and will promote the use of practice research more widely in order to ensure the recognition of all contributors, including creators, collaborators and participants. The project will also support the recognition of practice research outcomes as diverse, ongoing and connected rather than an add-on to the scholarly communications landscape.
The original PR Voices project was led by the University’s Head of Library Research and Education Services Jenny Evans in collaboration with Enact Co-Lead Professor Neal White as well as Westminster colleagues from the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) and the then Research and Knowledge Exchange Office’s Research Environment and Scholarly Communications Team.
Enact will contribute to developing more inclusive global research infrastructure and addressing the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 4: Quality Education, SDG 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure and SDG 17: Partnerships for the Goals.
About the project Jenny Evans said: “What’s so exciting about this project is that it is coming from a creative practice perspective and will ultimately benefit all disciplines. The Enact team are committed to embedding sustainability planning across the project, which will see professional services and academic teams working in collaboration to make a positive impact on society, reflecting Westminster’s research and knowledge exchange strategy and institutional commitment to sustainable development.”
Find out more about research at the University of Westminster.
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