Harold Short and Marilyn Deegan have secured King's College London its first £1 million grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Board. The money will go towards an information technology research-methods network that the pair plans to launch next February.
The network will allow academics to share expertise in the use of information and computer technology in arts and humanities research.
Mr Short, who is based at King's Centre for Computing in the Humanities, said the programme should do two things: enable researchers to ask new questions and to ask old ones in new ways. "The main purpose is to document and disseminate advanced ICT methods and to identify new possibilities that may lead to research."
Part of the programme will involve seminars and specialist workshops on advanced ICT methods. The directors will also invite proposals from other centres of excellence to run activities. "We don't want to be too prescriptive because we want people to use their imagination."
The AHRB said the award was among the biggest it had given, aside from those for its research centres. But Mr Short's advice on how to secure such grants was restrained. "It's really a one-off in that it's for a special purpose programme," he said. "If you can find a group of people who specialise across a range of technologies, it helps."