Arts and Humanities E-Science Support Centre

Grid technologies

Grid technologies are most associated with the large-scale international and international e-infrastructure on which the original concept of 'e-science' was based. When the Arts and Humanities e-science Initiative began in 2005, the grid was concieved of in three forms:

Most importantly, the tools for large-scale data management and sharing provided by data grid technology will be a vital means of meeting the present grand challenge to A&H e-science: how to locate, access and integrate the content of resources that embrace text, still and moving images and sound, are highly distributed, of variable quality, encoded and described using different standards, and often incomplete, fuzzy, and complex

The advanced video-conferencing facilities provided by the access grid will become increasingly important with the spread of collaborative research in the A&H, partly under the impact of the AHRC’s research grant schemes, and in particular provide exciting opportunities for sharing performance and creative interaction in the arts

The sharing of processing power through the computational grid may only occasionally be relevant to the A&H, but there are some exciting potential uses

For a recent succinct overview, see the UK Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology's Postnote on the subject.

Applications and testing

Many of the A&H e-Science Initiative projects are addressing, or have addressed, the deployment of grid technologies in the arts and humanities in various ways, e.g. the Researching e-Science Analysis of Census Holding project.

Please see the project pages for more details.

Try the Grid

A brief practical introduction to the grid can be found in EGEE's GILDA Grid Demonstrator.

More information can be found at CERN's Grid Cafe.