Anna-Maria Sichani

Anna-Maria Sichani began working as Senior Researcher with the Towards a National Collection team in January 2026. In this article, she discusses her background and research interests, explaining how they contribute to her current role.

I recently joined the TaNC directorate team as a Senior Researcher on the N-RICH prototype project. I am also a Research Associate in Digital Humanities at the Digital Humanities Research Hub, School of Advanced Study, University of London. With a background in Media History and Digital Humanities, my research and teaching focuses on responsible data-driven research and emerging technologies, including AI, for Humanities and Cultural Heritage, sociocultural aspects of media and technological changes, and more recently broader questions of data fragility, failure, precarity, preservation, and sustainability in digital scholarship.

Over the last years, I have worked at the intersection of research, cultural heritage, data and technology through collaborations in the UK and internationally, including a recent BRAID fellowship with The National Archives, the AHRC/TaNC-funded Congruence Engine project led by the Science Museum, and the Connected Histories of the BBC project at the University of Sussex. This work has given me first-hand insight into the challenges around making and using digital collections usable for computational research. Data access alone is never enough: ensuring data quality, genuine openness, interoperability and reuse still remain highly challenging in practice and is only the starting point, particularly as we move into AI-driven research and work. Meaningful computational research also depends on compute, services, tools, workflows and research environments, on secure and sustainable systems, robust yet flexible processes and strong ethical values throughout, and, crucially, on people with the expertise, creativity and curiosity to bring these elements together.

Since 2022, particularly through my UKRI Policy and Engagement Fellowship in Digital Research and Innovation Infrastructure, I have been closely involved in scoping UK digital research infrastructures for the Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Heritage as part of the AHRC iDAH programme, while developing a strong ‘infrastructural logic’ in my own research, attentive not only to data but also to compute, research software, people, and skills.

The N-RICH role allows me to bring these strands together, by connecting real-world GLAM data challenges with infrastructure design and policy. Building on the work of the Towards a National Collection programme, N-RICH shifts from experimentation to operational practice, addressing long-standing infrastructural bottlenecks in cultural heritage collections and contributing to the business case for a future National Research Infrastructure for UK Cultural Heritage.

Such an infrastructure would be genuinely transformative, shaping research and cultural heritage practice for decades to come and redefining how society benefits from them. I am excited to bring my experience to N-RICH, working closely with the TaNC and AHRC teams and partners across the sector at what feels like a milestone moment of change for our disciplines and the wider sector, both nationally and internationally.