Published Monday 26 January 2009 by Anthony Gladdish

Netskills has contributed a key online component to an AHRC funded research project led by staff in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University.

Anthony Gladdish, Carl Vincent and Paul Trueman designed and developed the database system for the project. Anthony said, "Particularly during the design stage, we met regularly with the project team to make sure we captured all their requirements in the database."

The Developing Diasporas project, now in its final year of funding, is investigating the relationship between reading, location, and migration. They have coordinated and recorded a series of reading group discussions in the UK, Africa, the Caribbean, India, and Canada, investigating how different reading communities make sense of the same texts.

The database is being used by the project to collect bibliographical details of diasporic writing and performances in Central Scotland, 1980-present.

Will Allen, Netskills Consultant Trainer, was involved with the initial proposal writing stage of this project. He said, "Both the project and Netskills have benefited from us being involved from an early stage. Back in 2006 we were approached to provide technical expertise for the project bid and after consulting with the applicants, we wrote a technical appendix. Once we heard the good news that the project had been awarded full funding, our technical team were primed and in perfect position to carry out the actual work of designing and developing the database - on time and on budget."

Find out more: http://www.devolvingdiasporas.com/