Kathryn Eccles is a Research Fellow in Digital Humanities, Oxford Internet Institute and Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, University of Oxford. Her research interests lie primarily in the Digital Humanities, ranging from the re-organisation of cultural heritage and higher education in the digital world and the impact of new technologies on Humanities scholarship and scholarly communication, to broader debates surrounding the human and social aspects of innovation and technological change. As the University’s first Digital Humanities Champion, Kathryn was responsible for the Digital Humanities Programme at The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH) from 2014-7, including the 2015-16 TORCH Headline series Humanities and the Digital Age. Her current work focuses on the ways in which museums and cultural heritage organisations can implement new tools and technologies to enhance visitor engagement, and to better understand how visitors engage with collections.
Kathryn currently holds a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship at TORCH (2018-19) where she leads the Hashtag Heritage project, working with English Heritage to pilot the use of social media data to understand engagement with free-to-access heritage sites. She is PI of the Playful Spaces project, which also uses social media to map and better understand playful engagement with Oxford’s museums. Kathryn is also a Research Affiliate at the Pitt Rivers Museum where she leads the Open Cabinet project, exploring the use of augmented reality to engage visitors and students with objects in the collections.