King’s Digital Lab (KDL) is a Research Software Engineering (RSE) team in King’s College London. Based within the college's Faculty of Arts and Humanities and with a staff of thirteen full-time members our mission is to enable and deliver high quality digital research across the Faculty's domains.
Our work
We design and implement systems, infrastructure, tools, and processes needed to produce a heterogeneous range of digital scholarly outputs, including historical database, digital editions, data visualisations and infographics, georeferenced maps, natural language processing workflows, and immersive experiences. We also allocate a modest amount of resources to non-grant-funded activities within Faculty and the college, including technical consultancy, development, peer review, archiving and sustainability, and increasing staff and students’ capabilities. (For more information on our Research Services Catalogue see this blogpost.)
Teams and roles
KDL's technical (or Solution Development) team includes research analysts and software engineers, designers and systems managers, and they are supported by a project manager, Lab manager, and Director (Lab Support team). We have found this wide spectrum of roles vital for running a Lab which at any one time can have around 20 projects under active development, 30 funding proposals being prepared, 60 projects in various post-funding states.
Partners and collaborators
As well as working with people and groups within Faculty (and King's as a whole) we also engage widely with other higher education institutions, with libraries, museums, and cultural heritage bodies, and with the performing arts and creative industries sector. The projects directory showcases a large breadth of projects and methods we are working on or have been involved with. Our collaborations with partners are typically funded by external grants and we are very grateful to several organizations that have supported our work over the years. (See the partners and funders page.)
Communities
The Lab's progenitors at King's were the Centre for Computing in the Humanities and the Department of Digital Humanities, and KDL continues to be actively involved in the digital humanities (DH) world through dissemination of research, contributions to conferences and networks and participation in groups such as UK Ireland Digital Humanities Association. We are also increasingly engaged with groups such as RSE Society UK and see numerous benefits in bringing the DH and RSE worlds together.
Research interests
The rapid and widespread changes in 'the digital' constantly open up new areas of interest for the Lab. Team members are currently exploring a variety of pathways which include Digital Creativity (see for example Digital Ghost Hunt project, Room is Sad blogpost), AI and Machine Learning (see for example Critical Modelling of Extensive Literary Data blogpost), and Indigenous Digital Humanities (see this blogpost on that emerging research theme).
Interested in working with KDL?
Please get in touch via this contact form or via email (kdl-info@kcl.ac.uk). You can also approach members of our team directly if their profiles inspire you. If you’re unsure whether we are the right technical partners for you, email us at kdl-info@kcl.ac.uk, and we’ll point you in the right direction.
Further information
Our FAQ page has more about how we work and what we do. If you notice a general question you’d like answered is missing, please let us know. We also have a page describing what maintaining our digital outputs entails and another which explains our overall approach to archiving and sustainability. To learn more about the project management templates we use in our Software Development Life Cycle see our SDLC wiki and associated blog post.