Izzy Barrett-Lally, PhD researcher and a 2024-25 co-director of the Centre for Victorian Studies
networking event wordcloud
On 27th November 2024, we held a ‘Nineteenth-century studies research networking pot-pourri' event on campus in Egham, seeking to generate discussion around shared research interests and current research problems across the spectrum of nineteenth-century studies broadly defined. This event showed what a wealth of research we have in the area across the university, with attendees from English, History, Languages Literatures and Cultures, Classics, and Geography, with others from Music, Politics and Philosophy also keen to attend.
We ran several activities to help identify commonalities and areas of collaboration. Informal activities included pinning research areas on a big world map and perusing the ‘library table’ of colleagues’ recent work, which were followed by a plenary session. During this we came together to consider cohesive questions for our 25 attendees of varied disciplinary backgrounds, and used Mentimeter to gather responses to stimulate group discussion. Questions included:
What do you think are currently important areas in nineteenth-century studies?
What skills do we need more of in your area?
What is a current methodological or theoretical challenge in your area?
What would you like AI to do/not do in your area?
As you can see from the above image, we generated wordclouds during the discussion in response to a few of these questions. Unifying themes of mobility and science emerged from these discussions, as well as affection and emotion, environment and decolonisation.
Additionally, we were keen to ask colleagues about perceived skills gaps and AI, which generated significant overlap. Popular contributions were that data analysis, especially using digital data, and interdisciplinary skills were needed. Addressing these gaps will be relevant to how develop our use of AI research methods. Hand in hand with this was the methodological needs for ethical research methods and interdisciplinary methods that were identified.
Following the enthusiasm this event generated, we will follow up on the themes the group identified later this year with further events to discuss and share work in progress.
