Research Profile

Our research is organised under four broad subjects: Language, Images, Numbers, and Culture. 

All faculties at Durham are stakeholders in all aspects of our research, thereby breaking up the silos of discipline-specific knowledge and skills, and enabling new perspectives on old problems and the development of new ideas. We have identified four research themes, Language, Images, Numbers, and Culture, that cut across our subject-based specific research within our faculties and departments, thereby breaking up the silos of compartmentalized best practice and knowledge, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and enabling the development of new and exciting ideas. It is easy to imagine, for example, that researchers working in Digital Humanities will be interested in cross correlating artefact in various museums to enhance the experience of visitors by providing additional context. For this, they would naturally use tools and methods developed in natural language or image processing and they would have to reflect on the cultual implications of their work. Similar logic applies also to research related to Scientific and Environmental Data or Quantitative Social Sciences, and it will also impact on ideas on Business Development and the Economy of the Future. 

The context of Data Science 

Data of relentlessly increasing volume, velocity, and variety, their acquisition or generation, their processing and collection, their storage, management and curation, their analysis, visualisation and interpretation are ubiquitous in all strands of research to an extent that “Data Science”, interdisciplinary at its core, has established itself as a discipline in its own right. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a cornerstone in modern methods of analysing, interpreting, and contextualising ever larger and more intricate data and in making decisions based on them.