In “Mapping a Changing Humanities Sector,” we explored the varied forms that research infrastructures can take, particularly highlighting the critical role of digital platforms. We considered how platforms like the Oxford Text Archive and community-driven networks such as Pelagios champion a more collaborative and open approach to research. By promoting collaborative working, responsible, open-access publishing, and transdisciplinary practices, they make it possible for digital resources and scholarly expertise to remain accessible and discoverable over the long-term.  In the same spirit, the Mapping the Arts and Humanities dataset brings these endeavours by placing them on a map of UK research infrastructures to maximise their visibility and highlight the sector’s disciplinary interconnectedness.

As we saw, this ethos of cross-organisational collaboration aligns with University UK’s recent report, “Towards a New Era of Collaboration,” which calls for more joined-up working across the sector. Such partnerships, we would add, are essential for tackling some of the most persistent challenges facing the humanities today – including, but not limited to, institutional isolation, precarious funding, and the fragmentation of research and training resources. Fragmentation is a particularly serious risk; when a website goes dark, years of accumulated expertise can vanish overnight. Meanwhile, valuable resources can remain siloed within departments or institutions, inaccessible to those who need them. These disruptions can materially undermine the sector’s ability to respond swiftly and effectively to new research priorities and educational needs, with the most acute effects felt in the provision and continuity of research training.

The training deficit

Having reviewed the existing humanities research training offers, the School of Advanced Study’s Doctoral Centre identified persistent gaps in accessible, sustainable, and connected research training. While valuable resources do exist, they are often scattered across departments or lost on unsupported online platforms. This lack of cohesion hinders upskilling, disproportionately affecting Early Career Researchers who need flexible, transferable training to navigate an increasingly complex professional landscape. As HEPI’s 2024 report on “The Lives of Early Career Researchers” indicates, researchers are often expected to juggle numerous responsibilities (e.g. teaching, administrative tasks, research, student support, public engagement) yet frequently without the necessary structured training or resources.

This training deficit is also evident in digital upskilling. Despite the growing reliance on digital tools, many researchers still lack essential digital competencies — from managing large datasets  and using digital collaborative tools to working with APIs for open data analysis.  The AHRC’s Digital/Software Requirements Survey (2021) found strong demand for software training in the arts and humanities, alongside a need for better recognition of research software as scholarly output. Complementing this, a 2025 press release by FutureDotNow reports that the UK faces a staggering digital capability gap, with one in two PhD holders unable to complete all 20 of the benchmark digital tasks expected in today’s workplace. Together, these findings expose a structural barrier:

There is a growing consensus that new tools and infrastructures are needed to safeguard intellectual legacies and facilitate knowledge sharing. This can be seen from calls the AHRC has put out in recent years for pilot digital skills training programmes. The recognition of the training deficit is now being met with significant investment. A prime example is the £5 million investment from Wellcome to launch the Leadership and Advancement SHAPE programme with the British Academy. This initiative is explicitly designed to “plug a skills development gap” for ECRS by offering accredited training in the “latest methods and tactics.”

What these initiatives reveal is that, so far, ad hoc training has been insufficient. One of the challenges is developing a more structured and scalable approach to skills development that avoids duplication, signposts valuable materials, and fosters sector-wide collaboration to keep humanities research training open and accessible for the future.  What is needed are “living” systems that are responsive and continuously evolving.

A sector-driven solution

The RESHAPED project emerges as a sector-driven solution: a space designed to tackle fragmentation and make research training more equitable across the humanities while also raising awareness of the training materials available. By providing openly shared, dynamic resources RESHAPED aims to support the full diversity of our research community. The platform is built to be a genuinely shared infrastructure for skills development and knowledge exchange.

RESHAPED supports PhD-level researchers and beyond by bridging higher education, the creative industries, and the cultural sector. Its provision ranges from courses such as: “’agile’ for Academics” (research-ready project planning and workload management), “Interviews as a Humanities Research method” (ethics and practice), and a “Public Engagement Hub” (designing audience-focused events and working with GLAM/community partners to “Born-Digital Research in the Humanities,” a dedicated “Digital Humanities Training Hub,” and the forthcoming “Perspective on AI,” with further offerings on the way.

Building the Future: A Conversation with the RESHAPED team

RESHAPED encourages the community to consider how a collaborative  platform for research training and resource sharing can meet the needs of today’s researchers and preserve valuable resources for the future. Developed within the School of Advanced Study’s Doctoral Centre, RESHAPED was born out of a recognition that research training needs to remain current, inclusive, and responsive to change. It was specifically created to address wide-spread issues of fragmented access, shrinking resources, and long-term support in research training. Its solution?  Alongside the development of expert-led content designed to respond to new and emerging training needs, RESHAPED brings together training resources  from across institutions into a single, accessible, curated space, making it easier for researchers to find what they need, when they need it.

Dr Naomi Wells, who led the earlier development of reshaped frames its origins clearly:

“We didn’t start with a platform. We started with a number of questions… about research training at SAS and research training in the wider humanities research landscape. Some of these questions have actually become even more urgent and important, as we think about the declining resources, the increasingly stretched provision that many humanities departments across the UK and beyond are facing.”

Building on this, Niilante Ogunsola-Reibero adds:

“We wanted to provide an infrastructure that could bring together specialist resources from across the research training landscape, across universities and institutions.”

Instead of a static repository, the RESHAPED team conceptualises the initiative as a continuously growing resource. Rather than offering a prescriptive structure, Simon Parr likens RESHAPED to “a bit like a rhizomatic web,” an aggregate of hubs, toolkits, and training materials, “which will continue to grow organically.” This speaks to RESHAPED’s open-ended and adaptable nature. As Parr puts it, “infrastructure sounds rigid; platform sounds limited. What we want is something that grows, something that is, yes, curated, but also living and responsive.”

The tension between labels and the definitions they carry (throughout our conversation with Ogunsola-Ribeiro and Parr, we referred to RESHAPED as “infrastructure,” “platform,” “tool,” “network,” and even “ecosystem”) is not incidental. It lies at the heart of ongoing debates across the humanities around the vocabulary we use to describe collaborative (often digital) spaces. These terms can shape expectations, determine funding pathways, and even encode assumptions about authority and legitimacy. As Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star remind us in their influential work Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences (1999), “each standard and each category valorizes some point of view and silences another. That is not inherently a bad thing – indeed it is inescapable. But it is an ethical choice.”

Perhaps this is why RESHAPED resists settling into a single definition, embracing instead a productive ambiguity. It proposes a deliberately hybrid model that cuts across traditional categories of platform, tool, and resource infrastructure, challenging conventional boundaries around access and the forms training can take. Though primarily a site for learning, RESHAPED can also function as a connective tissue across institutions, sustaining collaboration and long-term knowledge exchange.

Curating and connecting: RESHAPED in Practice

RESHAPED’s ethos of openness and adaptability carries through into the way the initiative structures and updates its offerings. Courses, toolkits, and hubs on RESHAPED are reviewed and updated regularly – and if you’re wondering what those are, you can explore them here (if you’re taken to a login page, you can click “access as a guest.”) In rapidly advancing areas like Artificial Intelligence, turnaround of new material can be as quick as three to six months. The development process is dialogic and user-focused: materials are built around clear learning objectives, refined through peer review by humanities researchers, and shaped through cycles of rapid prototyping.

Furthermore, the RESHAPED team is now actively working to provide a wider and more strategic coverage of the skills and competencies needed by humanities researchers today. This includes aligning content with benchmarks provided by reference models such as the Vitae Researcher Development Framework, and establishing a steering group of leading academics and partner institutions to help shape future content.

But RESHAPED is also not trying to reinvent the wheel. Where strong resources already exist, the focus is on collaboration, on repackaging content to maximise accessibility and impact:

 “We see our role as curators and connectors – signposting resources, where needed, not duplicating.”

This collaboration-oriented model can support partnerships across the Higher Education and GLAM sectors, allowing institutions to contribute existing resources without having to build courses from scratch. Using speedy mock-ups and collaborative authoring tools, RESHAPED allows contributors to visualise content early, identify gaps, and build bespoke learning materials that transcend institutional boundaries.  Equally important, the platform offers a sustainable, durable home for these materials so that training assets stay findable and usable over time, beyond a grant’s lifecycle.

And while RESHAPED is not currently a credit-bearing platform, the team recognises that accreditation and micro-credentialing may play a role in the platform’s evolutions, particularly as demand grows for flexible, modular training opportunities in the humanities.

RESHAPED needs you!

RESHAPED is still new and, like any infrastructure, its strength will depend on the community that shapes it.

Whether you’re a researcher, educator, or practitioner, we invite you to explore the platform, contribute your expertise, and help RESHAPED keep building a humanities training resource that’s open and connected.

Explore RESHAPED here.

Interested in contributing or suggesting content for RESHAPED? You can fill out this quick form here.