It’s an interactive tool that visualises research infrastructures in the UK where Law and the Humanities appear together – whether as close collaborators or cohabitants of a wider interdisciplinary space. You can search, filter, and explore connections. We very much see this resource as a launchpad; it’s first and foremost a tool for discovery and dialogue.  

Researchers, funders, practitioners, policy makers, and curious minds interested in getting a feel for the landscape of Law and the Humanities in the UK (from established centres to emerging collectives) and in finding opportunities to connect, collaborate, or develop new work.

It was created to provide a shared space for recognising the diverse ways Law and the Humanities intersect. It was also built to support collaboration, strategic planning and network-building across disciplines.

As well as using the search bar and filters, you can simply scroll and zoom to explore infrastructures across the UK. Zoom in to focus on a particular university, city, or region, and click on markers to learn more about the infrastructures located there. Some infrastructures are not tied to a physical place. This means that they may not show up on the map, but they’re still visible and accounted for in the visualisations and relationship graph.

Use the dropdowns to filter by tags and entanglement score (how strongly an infrastructure is connected to non-Law Arts and Humanities topics and vice versa.) You can also use the search bar at the top to look up infrastructures by name – just start typing and suggestions will appear! 

Tags help you zero in on topic-specific infrastructures. The entanglement scores indicate how interdisciplinary an infrastructure is, based on whether A&H or Law topics appear in the title, description or tags.

The bar chart shows the tags that most frequently co-occur with Law. The word clouds highlight prominent themes sourced from the “tags” field of the Mapping the Arts and Humanities dataset, with one cloud showing common associations and another spotlighting less frequent ones (i.e. potential gaps or openings for new interdisciplinary work.) The tag network graph visualises how different themes relate to one another by mapping co-occurrences. The infrastructure relationship graph shows how infrastructures themselves are linked (through collaborations and institutional ties) and can be explored interactively to trace both individual connections and the broader research network.

The Arts and Humanities entanglement score reflects how closely an infrastructure is connected to Arts and Humanities topics beyond Law. It helps tease out the degree of interdisciplinary presence, whether A&H themes appear as a passing reference or form a more central focus. 

Please note this is a BETA feature, meaning it’s still evolving. It isn’t meant to be definitive or comprehensive, but rather a suggestive tool to help you notice patterns, explore possibilities, and reflect on infrastructural self-representation.  

There are currently three levels in the entanglement score: 

• • Emerging (1): A&H terms found in tags 
  • Integrated (2): Terms found in both description and tags 
  • Strong (3): Terms found in title, description, and tags

No score is inherently better or worse; they simply indicate different levels of emphasis. Law is always present, but the entanglement score draws attention to how other A&H subjects surface within an entry.  

The Law Entanglement slider helps identify how centrally Law figures in a given infrastructure. Like the A&H filter, this is a BETA feature, developed to help you notice patterns in self-descriptions. 

The score ranges from: 

• • Emerging (1): Law appears in tags 
  • Integrated (2): Law appears in both tags and description 
  • Emerging (3): Law is prominent in the title, description, and tags 

The “Law Entanglement” filter can be used alongside the “Humanities Entanglement” for more targeted search results.  

A tag is a keyword associated with an infrastructure, like “English studies,” “History,” “Postcolonial studies.” Tags help describe themes, methods, or disciplines. 

There are two easy ways to contribute if you’d like to add an infrastructure to the dataset: 

• • You can create an account to submit your infrastructure details through our platform; ideal if you’d like ongoing access and the ability to update entries. Get started here. 

• • Or, if you prefer something quicker, you can simply fill out this short online form – no sign-up required. Submit via the form. (Please note: entries submitted this way may take a little longer to appear, as they need to be reviewed and input manually by a member of the Mapping team.) 

If you’d like to edit information but you don’t have access to an already existing entry, please reach out to [email protected] and a member of the Mapping team would be delighted to help you claim ownership of the listing.  

Let us know! You can contact us at [email protected]. Your input is essential in helping us keep the dataset accurate and up to date. Every correction or suggestion makes the map better for everyone. 

The “Law and the Humanities Map” draws directly from the Mapping the Arts and Humanities dataset, which is maintained by the School of Advanced Study, University of London. This includes self-submitted entries, updates from infrastructure representatives, and publicly available information recorded by the Mapping team. 

The “Law and the Humanities Infrastructure Map” refreshes its data every 24 hours to avoid overwhelming the Mapping API – so new entries or changes may take up to a day to appear on the map. However, if you’re logged into the Mapping platform, any edits or submissions you make are saved immediately. 

The Mapping team also checks in with infrastructure representatives bi-annually to ensure that infrastructure entries remain up to date. 

Some infrastructures may not yet have been submitted, or they might not appear on the “Law and the Humanities Map” due to how they’ve been tagged or described. If something seems missing, it’s never because we’ve intentionally excluded it. More often than not, it’s a question of self-definition and filtering. 

You’re very welcome to submit or suggest an addition. The Map is meant as a conversation starter: a way to reflect on how infrastructures position themselves, how Law and the Humanities are described in practice, and what might need to be surfaced differently. 

If there’s an infrastructure you expected to see, let us know. We’d love to think with you about why it might not be appearing and how to best include it.  

We appreciate that the intersections between Law and other A&H disciplines can take many forms. Sometimes these connections can be deeply collaborative, other times it might be the case that themes and subjects are simply co-located within a broader centre or institute.  

Our criteria are intentionally inclusive. If an infrastructure touches Law and at least one other Arts and Humanities subject, even indirectly, it may be listed. That includes cases where Law and the Humanities subjects are housed in the same space, but might not interact in obvious ways.  

We believe this tells a wider story about the interdisciplinary nature of infrastructures and about the potential for new connections to emerge. The Map reflects both current activity and the structural conditions that support (or could support) collaboration.  

We define “Law” broadly. It includes infrastructures focused on legal research, legal theory, and practice-based legal work, as well as those that engage with Law as part of wider interdisciplinary conversations. 

An infrastructure might include “Law” as a tag because a member once published on legal aesthetics, or because it’s a centre for socio-legal studies, or because law is an emerging theme within their research collective.  

Our aim is to capture the full spectrum of intersections between Law and the Arts and Humanities. In some cases, Law will be the central focus; in others, it may simply be present alongside other themes. To us, both are equally important for understanding the landscape. 

Not necessarily. The answer is pretty similar to the one under “Why do some infrastructures show up even though they seem more ‘Law’ than ‘Humanities’ and vice versa?”

Tag combinations like “Law [and] Literature” or “Law [and] History” can often indicate that both topics appear in the infrastructure’s tags, but this doesn’t always signal a formal interdisciplinary methodology.  

The tags can reflect thematic co-presences as much as they can represent interdisciplinary approaches to legal studies. That said, even if two subjects are co-habitants instead of close collaborators, their appearance still tells us something important: they point to infrastructures that support work across fields, suggesting an oppenness to interdisciplinary exchange, even though it might not always be their core approach.  

Absolutely! The code can be adjusted and reused to map other interdisciplinary fields. If you have an idea you’d like to explore, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected]. We’d be more than happy to chat, advise, or see how we might support your project.