In our previous conversation on RESHAPED, we explored the training deficit facing humanities researchers and how the initiative sets out to address it. In this post, the Mapping the Arts and Humanities team catches up with Niilante Ogunsola-Ribeiro and Simon Parr, the learning technologists behind RESHAPED, to explore how a training platform becomes infrastructure, why content needs “best before dates,” and what a living training resource actually looks like in practice. This post is a companion to the latest episode of the Mapping the Arts and Humanities Podcast – listen above, then read on for the fuller conversation.

Training as infrastructure

When we first spoke to the RESHAPED team, the question of what to call the initiative was already a live debate: platform, tool, network, ecosystem? Months on, Ogunsola-Ribeiro and Parr report a new word has begun to stick: infrastructure. As Parr puts it, the initiative “really is that bringing together of the training, the events, everything which is going on in the research training landscape of the humanities.”

The distinction in naming matters. For Ogunsola-Ribeiro and Parr, RESHAPED moves beyond the work of a repository. At its core, the initiative aims to create a throughline between previously disconnected resources, to draw together offerings across institutes, build navigable learning pathways across career stages, and surface disciplinary overlaps that allow researchers to expand their skills in directions they might not otherwise encounter.

The initiative is built on the belief that research training is fundamentally a communal endeavour; it prioritises how researchers relate to one another and collaborate within the humanities landscape as much as the resources themselves. RESHAPED began by addressing a structural problem at the School of Advanced Study, which has eight institutes that each run their own training calendars, events, and workshops. A PhD student interested in palaeography for instance, might find relevant sessions at the Institute of Historical Research, the Warburg Institute, and the Institute of English Studies – without knowing the others existed. RESHAPED maps the various training opportunities into a single space, making it possible to see, compare, and combine them.

For Ogunsola-Ribeiro, by bringing isolated resources into relation with one another is what makes the project infrastructural: “by putting these disparate courses, toolkits, and live events in the same place, you can start to turn them into coordinated, tailored journeys for different types of learner and different types of use case.”

Cross-disciplinary discovery

Beyond streamlining access, the learning journeys enable cross-disciplinary encounters that can reshape how a researcher understands their own work. Parr offers a telling example: a Legal Studies student, invited to user-test a digital humanities course, reported that the experience had transformed his approach to his own research. “He said his mind was absolutely blown,” Parr recalls. “This is exactly the sort of behaviour that we really want to encourage.”

RESHAPED’s approach reflects a wider shift in how the sector thinks about researcher growth. An earlier iteration of the Vitae Research Development Framework described the highest level of research development as the ability to make “imaginative leaps of understanding across disciplines, research areas, agendas and beyond academia.” Research backs this up. A study of multidisciplinary doctoral environments at a Swedish university found that early-stage researchers immersed in cross-disciplinary settings developed a stronger sense of scholarly independence and collaborative ambition than peers who remained within their home discipline (Brodin and Avery 2020). The implication is that exposure to unfamiliar methods and questions strengthens a researcher’s command of their own field.

Within the realm of RESHAPED, this domino effect – one resource leading a researcher into an unexpected discipline – is built into how the project organises its content. Courses, toolkits, and hubs are designed to interlink, so that arriving at one resource opens pathways to others. A forthcoming course on computer vision, for example, will connect to existing material on responsible AI and cultural heritage, and from there to textual analysis. Each addition enriches the network as a whole.

The model echoes SAS’s own physical infrastructure (its research hubs, libraries, and institutes) but removes the barriers that can make it difficult to cross institutional thresholds in person. The palaeography hub, currently in early development, is a case in point. Colleagues from the Institute of Historical Research, the Warburg Institute, and other parts of SAS are collaborating on a shared space they will co-own, working through what makes their respective palaeography offerings distinct and how they might complement one another – tying in summer schools, events, and disciplinary perspectives that had previously run in parallel. As Ogunsola-Ribeiro observes, it is “literally bringing all those people into the same place.” The cross-disciplinary exposure, in other words, runs in both directions: researchers discover new pathways, and the colleagues building those pathways find themselves working across institutional lines they had not previously crossed.

Preserving institutional memory

Even though RESHAPED is primarily a discovery tool, Ogunsola-Ribeiro and Parr noted that it has a role to play in preservation. In a sector where institutional priorities change, lapsed hosting arrangements (e.g., when a website goes dark) and stretched provision can leave training material stranded, giving resources a durable, maintained home matters.

The team’s experience with PORT (Postgraduate Online Research Training), RESHAPED’s predecessor, informed this thinking. PORT had been a valuable resource in its time, but without a sustained process for reviewing and refreshing its content, the platform had gradually fallen behind. “It looked like it was slightly from a bygone era,” Ogunsola-Ribeiro reflects. The experience underlined something the team was determined to build into RESHAPED from the start: content that is preserved but never revisited will eventually stop serving the people it was made for.

This is partly what RESHAPED’s toolkit format addresses. Departments can repurpose existing resources (materials that may be sitting in a folder, unformatted and undiscoverable) into content that carries the same look, feel, and quality assurance as a full course, giving those resources, in Ogunsola-Ribeiro’s phrase, “a new lease of life.”

Quality control and “best before dates”

Learning from PORT, the RESHAPED team made content upkeep a structural part of how the platform runs.  Every piece of content is logged in a metadata table with what Ogunsola-Ribeiro half-jokingly calls “best before dates” – a yearly review cycle that checks whether links still work, whether statements remain accurate, and whether the content still serves its intended learning objective.

The review process itself runs through four layers of quality control: a learning technology check (does the thing function?), a subject matter expert review (is the content accurate and complete?), user testing by early career researchers and PhD candidates, and a final copy edit for tone and consistency. Parr emphasises that this process brings out perspectives that neither the technologists nor the academics had anticipated: “during user testing, perspectives come up that have never occurred to us.”

Crucially, every course also has an allocated owner: the subject matter expert responsible for reviewing it when the review cycle comes around. The Freelancers Toolkit, for instance, includes links to freelancer wage rates that date quickly; the team spotted the need for an update almost as soon as the design went live. The review cycle, in short, is part of how the platform is maintained. It is scheduled, recurring, and built into the team’s working processes.

Built together: courses and toolkits in focus

When asked to name a favourite course, the team’s choices say something about what RESHAPED values. Parr highlights the “Concepts of Digital Humanities” course, which was originally built in 2020 as a piece of emergency remote instruction, long video lectures that few viewers completed. After sustained reworking, the course has been restructured into something more interactive and modular, a process that involved two researchers, one based at SAS and the other in Luxembourg. Ogunsola-Ribeiro points to “Exploring Collections,” a collaboration between libraries at Senate House Library, the Institute of Historical Research Library, and the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies Library, with input from Dr Amara Thornton. The course brought together teams who had not previously worked in this way.

Looking Ahead, the Research Management (RDM) toolkit, led by Kunika Kono (Digital Humanities Research Hub), is in development. It is a particularly topical resource, since RDM guidance in the humanities has largely been adopted from STEM conventions – understandably, since pre-existing frameworks offer a starting point, but often without sufficient attention to where and how humanities research differs in practice. FAIR data management principles, for instance, are designed to be domain-agnostic, but the humanities have often struggled with the work of domain-specific adoption. This is the type of work that the RDM toolkit is designed to support: helping humanities researchers think through where and how frameworks like FAIR and the Research Data Lifecycle apply to their own practice. Given RESHAPED’s wide audience, from those encountering RDM for the first time to experienced practitioners in need of a quick refresher  It is built to function as a dip-in resource or as a guided journey: users can enter at any point and still come with a plan tailored to their own research data needs.

A computer vision course is also on the way, and will connect to existing material on Responsible AI and cultural heritage; another example of how each new addition extends the network of learning pathways across the platform.

Empowering diverse audiences

RESHAPED’s primary audience is postgraduate researchers and early career academics, but its reach extends further. Independent scholars, GLAM-sector professionals seeking continuing development, and even undergraduate students directed by their tutors all stand to benefit. Parr describes a scenario in which a supervisor tells a research student to improve their palaeography skills and can now point them to RESHAPED, where a completion certificate awaits at the end.

Looking ahead, the team is working to align content with the Vitae Research Development Framework, so that researchers can evidence their professional growth more systematically. The ambition is to build reflection into the platform itself, enabling users to track what they have completed and what they have gained from the process, turning feedback into a record of development that they can carry with them.

The heartbeat of the humanities

Asked to imagine RESHAPED five years from now, Parr reaches for a biological metaphor: he wants the platform to be “like the blood pumping through the body of the humanities landscape.” Parr and Ogunsola-Ribeiro envision researchers throughout the UK and beyond using the content as well as contributing to it, mixing and matching, tailoring it to their needs. Ogunsola-Ribeiro adds that every resource deepens the network’s connective tissue, creating “extra journeys” that did not exist before.

There is a broader stake here, too. In a moment defined by the rise of AI and the complex societal questions it raises, Ogunsola-Ribeiro argues that the humanities are uniquely equipped to respond. He notes that “humanities scholars have been actively researching questions of ethics, care, bias, and fair usage for years, building methodologies and critical frameworks that are now urgently relevant to how AI systems are designed, governed, and deployed.” As we saw in “Mapping the Humanities and AI,” recent interventions across the sector bear this out. By equipping researchers with interconnected and current skills, RESHAPE ensures that this expertise remains accessible, discoverable, and ready to be built upon.

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