The project aims to provide a full-fledged Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC) where data, tools, and training are available and accessible for users of SSH data. The focus of the project is determined by the goal to further the innovation of infrastructural support for digital scholarship, to stimulate multidisciplinary collaboration across the various subfields of SSH and beyond, and to increase the potential for societal impact. The intention is to create a European open cloud ecosystem for social sciences and humanities, consisting of an infrastructural and human component. Development, realisation and maintenance of user-friendly tools & services, covering all aspects of the full research data cycle will be built, taking into account human-centric approach and creating links between people, data, services and training. SSHOC will encourage secure environments for sharing and using sensitive and confidential data. Where relevant, the results of EOSC-hub H2020 project will be adopted. The SSHOC will contribute to the Open Science agenda and realising the EOSC. This project aligns with prescribed cluster activities in order to realise a SSH cloud that can fully encompass infrastructural support for the study of social and cultural phenomena. Moreover, the planned SSH Cloud is instrumental to Europe's multilingualism; data in Europe is often available in multiple languages thus making a strong incentive for comparative research of the societal and cultural phenomena that are reflected in language use. The SSH Cloud shall contribute to innovations stemming from the coupling of these heterogeneous data types - and work on the Interoperability principle of FAIR.

As far back as the mid 2000s museums were talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI), however while these technologies have become increasingly pervasive in wider society from voice activated systems such as Alexa to the promise of Tesla's self driving cars, they are only beginning to be explored, in a museum context. With the National Gallery (UK), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (US), American Museum of Natural History (US), MoMA (US), Cooper-Hewitt (US) all beginning to explore the potential of AI this network will bring together a range of senior museum professionals and prominent academics to develop the conversation around AI, ethics and museums. AI technologies including machine learning, predictive analytics and others, bring exciting possibilities of knowing more about visitors and collections. However, it raises important challenges to ethics. With the increasing awareness and regulations about data usage, museums, must approach AI with both caution and fervour. To successfully achieve this senior museum professionals need to be provided with the opportunity to examine what this model might look like, and the wider impact that museums can have when it comes to advocating for new ethical standards. This research project will bring together museum professionals and scholars to discuss the cost, and indeed skills required to successfully adopt the true possibilities of AI. Cost and skill, have thus far acted as a barrier for museums, however with these technologies becoming more pervasive and skills more in demand, this is a timely moment for museums to explore the possibilities and ethical challenges of AI across their work from visitors to collections. As such this network seeks to challenge this known issue - ethics as an afterthought - by embedding it into the conversation on AI in Museums at this critical moment. A conversation that will help to inform funders and senior managers about the opportunities and challenges this technology poses for the sector.

'Linked Art II: Developing Community, Practice, and Scholarship' brings together University researchers with experts from some of the leading art museums in the UK and US. The project will engage with scholars and practitioners to highlight the opportunities afforded by connected collections as data, and establish where new digital methods and tools are needed to enable novel research. Linked Art II will engage with cultural institutions to examine how structured data can contribute towards digital challenges, including improving the accessibility of collections, and increasing the range and diversity of institutions and material available to the public. The foundation of the project is the development and application of Linked Data to cultural heritage collections, with an emphasis on works of art and their provenance. Linked Data will provide a platform for multi-modal digital scholarship across these rich collections; Linked Art II will continue a partnership setting an international agenda to realise this platform through a common data model, building capacity for future collaborative implementations and research investigations. In the first phase of this work, a research network was formed to bring together experts who are collaborating on the design of the common data model. The Linked Art II project continues this work, but also seeks to trial and test the model through a series of feasibility studies and proof of concept implementations. These 'exemplars' will be developed in collaboration with project partners and the wider Linked Art community; two exemplars will be selected via an open call for collaboration. The project will publish documentation and explanation of the exemplars on the Linked Art website so that others can understand and learn about the practicalities of Linked Art adoption. The project is led by the University of Oxford and the J. Paul Getty Trust, with project partners from the UK and US including: the American Numismatic Society, the National Gallery (London), the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), Newfields, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the University of the Arts London, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Yale Center for British Art. The project will advocate Linked Art adoption amongst the cultural heritage community in the UK and US through a series of outreach workshops, disseminating discussion points and conclusions from the network in easily understood and readily available forms, and enabling the wider sector to benefit from the transformative step-change offered by Linked Art as it evolves.

The Hidden Florence project addresses a non-academic audience of visitors to the historic city through the medium of audio-walks delivered on site through smartphone apps. The project is delivered by an international team of researchers and gallery professionals concerned with the lived experience and material culture of public space in early modern cities in Italy, presenting this through an innovative and engaging medium. We will work collaboratively to create a locative history city-guide smartphone app (for Android and iOS devices), through which issues of place, movement, meaning, and interaction with end users are placed at the heart of the research process and the end-user experience. The Hidden Florence project develops and creates new value from AHRC-funded work by PI that explored the everyday experience of early modern public space, including Taverns, Locals and Street Corners: Cross-Chronological Studies in Community Drinking, Regulation and Public Space (AH/J006610/1) and the Street Life and Street Culture research network (AH/G000417/1). It significantly develops the impact, reach and unanticipated potentialities for engagement with the museum and tourism sector of the AHRC-funded pilot project, Street Life Renaissance Florence (AH/K005138/1, 2013). This received additional university and HEIF funding, leading to the creation of a prototype app, Hidden Florence (see: www.hiddenflorence.org) published in July 2014, and has attracted considerable attention among the academic peer community. The current proposal sets out to test its scalability by developing a research methodology and collaboratively-created outputs developed in the context of workshop-driven activities. The project assembles a team academics working in digital humanities applied to early modern Florence, including an international CoI Prof Nicholas Terpstra, director of the DECIMA (Digitally Encoded Census Information and Mapping Archive) research team at the University of Toronto, and CoI Dr Donal Cooper (University of Cambridge) who led a 3D visualisation of San Pier Maggiore project in collaboration with the National Gallery (2014). This offers a valuable opportunity for initial collaboration, which has to date remained informal, and we anticipate will be taken forward through other grant applications in UK and Canada (see Terpstra's attached letter). Importantly, we will also work closely with a group of project partners, including the city of Florence UNESCO world heritage office, the Polo Museale della Toscana (the state agency that manages many of the city's museums) and the National Gallery (London), to co-create public-facing outputs (app and supporting website) that connect with art works in gallery collections and address UNESCO policies for this much-visited city. The team and project partners thus combine academic researchers, gallery and heritage professionals and policy-makers in order to create public-facing outputs that address audiences of local residents, tourists, as well as students. We will be working with Calvium (http://calvium.com/) - industry leaders in user-experience design for placemaking location-based apps - to create the editing platform within which to build the app. The app will be made available freely on the AppStore and GooglePlay sites, and promoted through the extensive networks of our project partners, as well as with the support of our university press offices. The project offers a significant opportunity for international research and development collaboration between academics and museum professionals in the context of digital outputs aimed at a wide public of users. Combining state of the art product design supported by Calvium and research-based content, delivered in the form of a locative media augmented reality experience, the project adopts digital humanities approaches for the purposes of impact and engagement.