The UK's research infrastructure, mapped by the people who build it
Research centres, networks, learned societies, and labs sustain humanities research across the UK, but the landscape is scattered and hard to see. Mapping the Arts and Humanities makes it visible, and the sector keeps it current.
One dataset, mapped through different lenses
The parent map holds the whole sector. Subject-specific maps apply a disciplinary lens. They're co-designed with the communities they serve.
Law and the Humanities
Where law meets the humanities, with dual entanglement filters built from community feedback. The folksonomy began here.
Explore the map → KDMI · 2025Knowledge Diplomacy
The first cross-border map — visualising the worldwide partner networks behind international research cooperation.
Explore the map →Humanities and AI
Humanities-led infrastructures shaping AI, with live funded-research data and an entanglement score that surfaces hidden AI work.
Coming soonSustainability is therefore best regarded as a range of activities with people at its heart, not a state any digital resource simply reaches. — after Joanna Tucker, Journal of the British Academy (2022)
Arts and humanities infrastructure is always shifting: centres become institutes, networks form and dissolve. A one-off survey is out of date the moment it is published. So the map is built to be used — focus groups, a blog and podcast, and co-designed subject maps keep it growing, and contributors update their own records. As long as the community keeps writing, the map keeps living.
Eight centuries of infrastructure
The oldest body on the map was founded in 1323; most arrived in the last twenty-five years. Press play to watch the sector fill in, decade by decade.
Based on the 1,709 records with a recorded founding year. Decades shown from the 1320s to the 2020s.
A vocabulary the sector writes for itself
Alongside a controlled list of project tags, infrastructure leads name their own work. Widely-adopted keywords graduate into the project tags. Words are sized by how often they are used.
What counts as infrastructure?
The data we hold is overwhelmingly university-based — but the sector is not. That gap is itself a finding: a cold spot showing where infrastructures beyond the university are still under-recorded, and where there is more work to do. Each block below is a broad kind of infrastructure; the tiles inside are the 33 names institutions actually use, from the familiar Centre to the rare Observatory and Academy. Everything is sized by how many records use it.
Outer blocks are the broad category; inner tiles are the specific type within it. Based on the 99% of records with a recorded type.
Further reading
- Drucker, Johanna. “Sustainability and Complexity: Knowledge and Authority in the Digital Humanities.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 36, no. Supplement_2 (2021): ii86–94. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab025.
- Fenlon, Katrina Simone. “Sustaining Digital Humanities Collections: Challenges and Community-Centred Strategies.” International Journal of Digital Curation 15, no. 1 (2020): 13. https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v15i1.725.
- Nowviskie, Bethany. “Capacity through Care.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. University of Minnesota Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctvg251hk.
- Tucker, Joanna. “Facing the Challenge of Digital Sustainability as Humanities Researchers.” Journal of the British Academy 10 (2022): 93–120. https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/010.093.
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Search 4,093+ arts and humanities research infrastructures across the UK.
Use the map to search by name, filter by subject tag, location, funding opportunities, or AI entanglement score.