A new website designed to help students make the transition between school, university and employment is launched today, by Queen Mary, University of London's Thinking Writing team.

The 'Writing in Schools, Higher Education and Employment Settings' (WISHEES) project is funded by JISC, and aims to help raise aspiration and attainment in schools and universities. 

Working in collaboration with local schools and employers, Teresa McConlogue and Debra Hills of the Thinking Writing team have developed an online collection of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) writing texts and podcasts. The site features examples of real student texts, with tutor commentaries on those texts and interactive tutorials to help students think about quality in STEM writing.

The team hope school teachers and academics will find the website useful when designing STEM writing tasks that better prepare students for the demands of university and employment.

Sally Mitchell, Thinking Writing Co-ordinator at Queen Mary, commented: "This resource provides fascinating insights into what teachers and lecturers value in their students’ writing. It’s a great addition to the Thinking Writing website which supports academics to develop their thinking and practice in relation to writing."

Resources like WISHEES help to celebrate the good work that goes on in schools and universities around writing, and help students explore the trajectory of student writing from school to employment.

Academics from Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, USA and employers such as Transport for London and Astrium Ltd (space transportation and satellite systems) have also contributed to the WISHEES collection.

Osman Bawa from Astrium Ltd commented: “Technical writing is an essential skill on which industry and business as a whole depend. To our thousands of engineers and managers it is their main means of communication. Students and young engineers need to actively develop and practice their technical writing, not only to speed up the process or reduce the time it takes, but to guarantee a project's success.

“Astrium is pleased to be a part of the STEM WISHEES project as it is an excellent way of helping students and academics to understand just what industry expects.”

JISC Digitisation Programme Manager Paola Marchionni added: "This resource is an excellent example of how the higher education sector, schools and employers can work in partnership to tackle the need for innovative resources which are engaging and at the same time develop students' digital literacy skills to prepare them for the demands of tertiary education as well as for the job market."

This project is funded by the JISC eContent programme 2011.

Analysing 600 years of music, drilling down into population databases, understanding social unrest through digitised newspapers – these are just some of the new lines of research that the winners of the second Digging into Data Challenge will now undertake.

Their research is part of an international competition that promotes innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis.

Funded by eight international research organisations from four countries – including JISC, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the arts and humanities research council (AHRC) from the UK - the successful 14 teams are mixed groups of researchers from the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands and the United States.

They will receive grants of over £3m in total to investigate how computational techniques typically applied to the sciences can also be applied to change humanities and social sciences research.

Alastair Dunning, digitisation programme manager at JISC, said, "Digitised data offers researchers radically new
opportunities for understanding old questions and formulating new ones. The
range of projects demonstrate some of these opportunities."

The successful projects being led by UK organisations are:

1. Cascades Islands or Streams? (Indiana, Wolverhampton and Montreal universities) will measure the impact of humanities and social science research on traditional scholarly sources but also across social networks, blogs and other informal modes of communication.

2. ChartEx (Washington, Leiden, York, Toronto, Brighton and Columbia universities) will develop new ways of exploring medieval charters in their full text versions

3. Digging into Connected Repositories (The European Library Office, Open university) will analyse the effects of open access publishing on research

4. Digging by debating (universities of Indiana, East London, Dundee and London) will develop and implement a workbench called InterDebate, with the goal of digging into data provided by millions of expert books and articles

5. Digging into Metadata (Universities of  Drexel, Manchester and Glamorgan) will create new metadata tags to help researchers discover information across multiple repositories

6. Electronic Locator of Vertical Interval Successions (ELVIS) (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, universities of Aberdeen, McGill and Yale) will study changes in Western musical style from 1300 to 1900, using the digitized collections of several large music repositories

7. Imagery Lenses for Visualizing Text Corpora (Universities of Utah and Oxford) will explore whether data visualization can help researchers make new observations and generate new hypotheses about literature and linguistics

8. Integrated Social History Environment for Research (ISHER)-Digging into Social Unrest (Manchester, Illinois and Tilburg universities and International Institute of Social History) will develop an integrated tool to help social history researchers use sophisticated text mining

9. Integrating Data Mining and Data Management Technologies for Scholarly Inquiry (University of California, Berkeley; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; University of Liverpool; the Internet Archive and JSTOR) will integrate large-scale collections into a stored and managed preservation space

10. Mining Microdata (Minnesota, Leicester, Guelph, Alberta, Montreal and Essex universities) will make use of make use of data-mining technology to exploit one of the largest population databases in the world originally digitized for genealogical research

11. Trading Consequences (Universities of Edinburgh, York and St Andrews) will examine the economic and environmental consequences of commodity trading during the nineteenth century using information extraction techniques to study large corpora of digitized documents

Total programme funding is approximately £3,075,000

What did you come to JISC to find out about in 2011?

This year has seen approximately half a million people visit the JISC website – who have looked at over 2.3 million pages in 2011 taking advantage of our resources and guidance across teaching, learning and research. 

Nearly 800 of you took time to visit the JISC website on Christmas Day 2010 with the most popular searched story on the day being the Great War Archive rolled out in Germany.

JISC EMBEDDED OBJECT

What were you looking for?

Funding, online resources and JISC Collections were the three most searched-for terms on JISC’s website in 2011, with the top topics you wanted to know about shown below:

What were you reading?

Top five news stories as viewed by you in 2011:

1. The Burney Collection: 17th and 18th Century newspapers free online
2. JISC to reshape to deliver in a competitive market
3. ‘Google Generation’ is a myth, says new research
4. UK’s open access full-text search engine to aid research
5. Tech-savvy doctoral students increasingly look to open web technologies

 
What were you viewing?

Over 25,700 of you watched us online.

The top five YouTube videos you visited were:

1. Libraries of the Future strategy video
2. myExperiment film about the social media site for scientists
3. British Newspapers 1620-1900 Showreel
4. Knowledge Is - a short film about opening up access to archives
5. Using audio in higher education - Film & Sound Think Tank

 
What did you listen to?

Top five podcasts:

1. Breaking down the e-books barrier: JISC – News
2. ‘HE in a Web 2.0 World’ report
3. Keynote speaker hails the collaborative power of wikis
4. Open source – an open and shut case?
5. What do learners think of ICT? 

 
What did you download?

Top five reports:

1. What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education
2. Digital Preservation Coalition: Training Needs Analysis Final Report
3. TechLearn: Interactive Whiteboards in Education
4. Information of the Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future
5. JISC & SCONUL: Library Management Systems Study

Do you want to be part of the conversation in 2012?

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View the JISC Annual review 2010/2011 here

Isaac Newton’s own annotated copies of his works, notebooks and manuscripts are being made available online by Cambridge University Library and the University of Sussex with JISC funding.

Digitised title page from
Newton’s own copy
of Principia

Researchers, students and the public can now zoom in to each page to explore texts like Principia Mathematica in incredible detail and make use of transcriptions to understand Newton’s mind – and handwriting.

Alastair Dunning, programme manager at JISC, said: “The end results of Newton’s work are world famous but his notebooks and annotations give a rather different insight into the process that he went through to get there. JISC looks to share insights like those with as wide an audience of possible and digitising this collection means that researchers and students now have online access wherever they are.”

However, while the two universities have received JISC funding to help expose Newton’s papers to the eyes of the world, a closer look at some of the pages from the newly digitised archive reveals that not all his peers thought his output should be shared so openly.

Several of the manuscripts in the collection contain the handwritten line ‘not fit to be printed’, scrawled by Thomas Pellet, a Fellow of the Royal Society, who went through Newton’s papers after his death to decide which ones should be published.

Project manager Rob Iliffe, Professor of Intellectual History and History of Science at the University of Sussex, said: “The publication of these foundational texts, thanks to funding from JISC, represents the result of a great deal of hard work put in by both the Cambridge and Sussex teams over the past year. It is a significant milestone in the work of the Newton Project, and with access to nearly five million words of Newton's personal, scientific and religious writings, readers can now look at Newton's creativity in its broadest contexts.

Cambridge University librarian Anne Jarvis said: “With great collections comes a responsibility to make these as accessible as we can. Now, through the use of new technologies and with vital support from the Polonsky Foundation and bodies such as the JISC, we are able to open up our collections in ways that would have been inconceivable a few years ago. Wherever possible we will seek to enhance our digital collections by aligning them with scholarly research.

“Our initial collection, the Newton Papers, is a good example. Through our collaboration with the Newton Project at the University of Sussex, we’ve been able to provide superb transcriptions alongside the images of many of Newton's manuscripts.”

Launching the website with more than 4,000 pages of its most important Newton material, Cambridge University Library will upload thousands of further pages over the next few months until almost all of its Newton collection is available to view and download anywhere in the world.