Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)

The FuzzyPhoto project was a two year AHRC funded research project (AH/J004367/1) to develop computational methods for finding the pictures "missing" from the catalogues of the annual exhibitions of the Royal Photographic Society 1870-1915 by matching the textual exhibit records with photographic item records in a range of partner institutions. Project partners awee Birmingham Central Library, the British Library, the Musée D’Dorsay and the Louvre, Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Media Museum, St Andrews University and the V&A.

The National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, known as the Social Science Association, was an influential forum for the development of social policy between the 1850s and 1880s to which many notable Victorians gave papers and addresses. Leading politicians, intellectuals, bureaucrats, churchmen and businessmen were among its members. It was influential in many different areas - legal reform, penal policy, education, public health and commercial relations – and provides vivid insight into Victorian social and institutional development.

The original project, a database of Athenian figure-decorated pottery 626-300BC, began in 1979. It was the second in the University of Oxford to be available 'on line' (after Cairns Science Library). From 1992 that database, and others begun from the early 1990s, began to be prepared for migration to the web. The project funded by the AHRB 2003/6 represented the first stage of an integrated multiple database system available on the web; more than 20 databases were programmed into XDB during 2004. Also during 2002/4 the digitisation of Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum for the web was undertaken.

The cultures of Southern Sudan have been central to anthropological research and teaching since the publication of Evans-Pritchard’s classic works on the Zande and Nuer in the 1930s and 1940s. A number of collections from Evans-Pritchard and other figures in the history of the study of the cultures of the Southern Sudan are represented in the collections of the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum.