Towards a National Research Software Engineering Capability in Arts and Humanities Research: a Roadmap

The increasing importance of digital methods in Arts and Humanities (A&H) research presents exciting opportunities and significant challenges. As ideas become more ambitious and projects grow in complexity – leveraging software development, large-scale data analysis, visualisation tools, and new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) – the need for dedicated research software engineering expertise has never been greater. However, Research Software Engineers (RSEs) remain in short supply, are unevenly distributed across institutions, and often lack the skills and training necessary to address A&H-specific research challenges. Meanwhile, many A&H researchers struggle to access the collaborative technical expertise required to innovate effectively and exploit the potential of digital methods.

This Roadmap outlines a strategic plan to establish a national, people-centred A&H RSE Capability, ensuring that digital expertise is accessible and sustainable within A&H research. It proposes:

- a UK-wide Directory and community of RSEs
- a programme of new and existing skills and training initiatives
- matchmaking mechanisms to facilitate collaboration
- an outreach and community-building programme to promote the networking, open-practice - collaboration and knowledge exchange that will be crucial for the Capability's effectiveness
- an Incubator to drive innovation in reusable research methods and tools
- continuous monitoring and evaluation to ensure the Capability’s long-term success.

The expected outcomes of the Capability include:

- increased access to RSE expertise, unlocking new digital research opportunities in A&H
- skills and career development for both researchers and RSEs
- sustainable infrastructure, supporting long-term growth and innovation
- greater cross-disciplinary impact as A&H digital research methods and knowledge benefit  -STEM and other domains
- a more robustly interconnected ecosystem and community that is easier to navigate and collaborate within.

Beyond infrastructural improvements, the Capability will foster concrete advancements in A&H research by creating the conditions for innovative, high-impact scholarship. By facilitating non-consumptive computational research on collections such as those held by The National Archives, UK, it will connect curators and researchers with essential technical expertise, enabling new forms of large-scale analysis and interpretation. Additionally, the Capability’s Research Development Work Package will stimulate tools and methods with clear, long-term benefits to the A&H digital research community, helping promising ideas transition from prototypes to fully realised solutions. Collaboration with initiatives such as King’s Digital Lab will allow the Capability to refine and scale flexible, modular approaches to research software development, making digital research infrastructure more sustainable and responsive to evolving scholarly needs.

By embedding efforts like these within a national framework, the Capability will not only enhance technical capacity but also enrich A&H disciplines with new methodologies, insights, and interdisciplinary opportunities, ensuring that digital methods drive meaningful intellectual and cultural discoveries. It will also ensure that A&H research fully leverages the UK’s investments in high-performance computing (HPC), keeping the sector at the forefront of technological advancements and enabling cutting-edge research methodologies that push the boundaries of scholarly inquiry. That leverage will come, in part, from developing and employing more A&H-skilled RSEs to capitalise on existing investments. Not only that, but A&H researchers will bring crucial alternative perspectives to these new and advanced technologies, from understanding behaviours and power dynamics to the impact of technologies on society.

Funders, government, and industry will also benefit from the Monitoring and Strategic Development Work Package. This is designed to continuously produce key insights about the applied computational research ecosystem and provide crucial advice for decision-making in an era of increasing demand for computational methods, rapid technological change, and strong international competition - not least regarding advancements in AI.

There are economic benefits, too, of investing in digital A&H in this way. One paper, The Value of Digitising Natural History Collections (Popov et. al., 2021), estimates that digitising the collections of London’s Natural History Museum will create economic benefits – including returns on investment and efficiency savings – of more than £2 billion over 30 years. And, as Professor Christopher Smith, Executive Chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), emphasised in a recent article for Research Professional on transforming A&H research, “the cost of investment is always less than the price of missed opportunities” (Smith, C., 2025).

Investment in this Capability will help the UK reinforce its global leadership in A&H research by fostering the thriving, empowered, community-focused research ecosystem necessary to drive innovation and produce breakthroughs in the digital age. This initiative will establish a highly skilled RSE profession capable of addressing uncertainty, navigating bias, and working effectively with heterogeneous data. By embedding these advanced digital skills within A&H research, the Capability will not only drive innovation in the humanities but also create methodologies that benefit a wide range of disciplines.