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Voluntary job role (Internal only): UCLDH Associate Director (ECR)

By Lucy Stagg, on 5 September 2023

Role Description

Salary: voluntary
Term: 2-year term once renewable

The UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH) was founded in 2010 as a cross-faculty research centre that brings together a vibrant network of people who teach and research digital humanities in a wide range of disciplines, in the heart of London. UCLDH is led by a management group: Steven Gray (CASA – Director), Adam Crymble (Information Studies – Deputy Director), and Ulrich Tiedau (Dutch – Associate Director), and coordinated by Lucy Stagg (Institute of Advanced Studies).

We are seeking a new Early Career (ECR) Associate Director of UCLDH to help shape the strategy and direction of UCLDH in its second decade. You will be an early career scholar interested in digital humanities, and based within the UCL community. We define ‘Early Career’ broadly, and include those currently registered on a PhD programme. We particularly welcome expressions of interest from candidates with the following interests or expertise:

  • Early career researcher support
  • Remote community building
  • DH skills and training
  • Accessibility in DH
  • Multilingual DH

As an active member of the UCLDH Management Group, you will participate in meetings and decisions, and setting the agenda for future activity. Meetings usually take place remotely, approximately six times per year. You are welcome to participate fully or co-lead in the range of activities UCLDH offers, as well as to help establish new ones. As an unpaid leadership role, you will not be expected to contribute to day-to-day tasks that would better be classed as employment, unless you deem them of interest to you and your own career development. The successful candidate will receive mentorship from one of the fellow directors.

UCLDH is committed to a harassment-free space for all members, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age, religion, or technical experience. The candidate will be expected to champion these values.

This post is linked to the UCL community and candidates should be a student or member of staff at UCL at the time of application, with at least 12 months remaining on their contract or period of study. If appointed, a candidate can remain in post while at UCL or while on the job search, but will be asked to stand down if they are no longer based at UCL and obtain a substantial post at another university or organisation.

How to Apply

Please send a 1-page cover letter and 1-page CV to lucy.stagg@ucl.ac.uk  by 25 September 2023.

Candidates are encouraged to seek the support of their supervisors if relevant, but UCLDH does not need evidence of that support.

Informal Queries

Informal queries can be made to Dr Adam Crymble, Deputy Director UCLDH at a.crymble@ucl.ac.uk

The Sloane Lab Community Fellowship Round Two (extended)

By Lucy Stagg, on 19 July 2023

We are seeking to appoint Community Fellows (ten in total until summer 2024) to contribute to “The Sloane Lab: Looking back to build future shared collections”, led by University College London (UCL) in partnership with the Technische Universität Darmstadt, British Museum (BM) and Natural History Museum (NHM). The fellow will undertake creative, critical, practice and/or research-led projects with the Sloane Lab’s Knowledge Base and data, demonstrating the new forms of analysis and interpretation the project will unlock.

The fellowship comes with an award of £7,500. We welcome applications from outside as well as inside the United Kingdom. The tenure of the fellowship does not require residency in the UK. All fellowships will be hosted remotely online. Applications to the fellowship are particularly welcomed from Global Majority Individuals.

This advertised role offers an exciting opportunity for individuals with an interest in contributing to the Sloane Lab, including but not limited to, digital humanists, artists, computer and data scientists and heritage practitioners (community or institution based). The Fellows will exemplify the research capacity unlocked by the Sloane Lab, engage with its Knowledge Base and data directly by undertaking creative, critical and/or research-led projects with collections as data. Research areas may include but are not limited to local and family history, object biography, critical heritage, Indigenous and devalued knowledge, or the transferability of the technology developed by the Sloane Lab.

Start Date (extended round two): 15th January 2024 or based upon negotiation

End Date: The post is funded for 3 months

Application deadline: 11th September 2023

Application details and the application form

For questions and queries please contact: sloanelab@ucl.ac.uk

The Sloane Lab Community Fellowship Round Two

By Lucy Stagg, on 4 April 2023

We are seeking to appoint Community Fellows (ten in total until summer 2024) to contribute to “The Sloane Lab: Looking back to build future shared collections”, led by University College London (UCL) in partnership with the Technische Universität Darmstadt, British Museum (BM) and Natural History Museum (NHM). The fellow will undertake creative, critical, practice and/or research-led projects with the Sloane Lab’s Knowledge Base and data, demonstrating the new forms of analysis and interpretation the project will unlock.

The fellowship comes with an award of £7,500. We welcome applications from outside as well as inside the United Kingdom. The tenure of the fellowship does not require residency in the UK. All fellowships will be hosted remotely online. Applications to the fellowship are particularly welcomed from Global Majority individuals.

This advertised role offers an exciting opportunity for individuals with an interest in contributing to the Sloane Lab, including but not limited to, digital humanists, artists, computer and data scientists and heritage practitioners (community or institution based). The Fellows will exemplify the research capacity unlocked by the Sloane Lab, engage with its Knowledge Base and data directly by undertaking creative, critical and/or research-led projects with collections as data. Research areas may include but are not limited to local and family history, object biography, critical heritage, Indigenous and devalued knowledge, or the transferability of the technology developed by the Sloane Lab.

Start Date (round two): 11th September or based upon negotiation

End Date: The post is funded for 3 months

Application deadline: 15th May 2023

Application details and the application form

For questions and queries please contact: sloanelab@ucl.ac.uk

Extending the history of digital humanities by 510 million years

By rmapapg, on 30 March 2022

UCLDH was fortunate to be awarded funds through UKRI’s Research Capital Investment Fund in 2019 in a bid led by our previous director Prof Simon Mahony. The bid funded the purchase of a Bruker Tornado M4+ x-ray fluorescence scanner. This is a unique system that uses x-rays to excite the atoms making up a substance which then emit x-rays that are characteristic of the elements making up the sample. The beam is narrow and scans across an object, allowing an image to be built up of the elemental composition. It is situated in the UCLDH Digitisation Suite, with radiation safety provided by the Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering.

The system was delivered in February 2020. Events then conspired to delay its commissioning until Summer 2021. It is now fully functional and we are familiarising ourselves with its performance. Importantly, the system is capable of running under a vacuum which allows lighter elements to be detected than is possible with other similar systems. We are in the process of installing a helium pump which will mean we can image objects containing light elements without needing a vacuum.  This is important for many objects of relevance to DH including paper and parchment documents which can be damaged by a vacuum.

The UCL Bruker Tornado M4+ X-ray spectrometer

Figure 1: The UCL Bruker Tornado M4+ X-ray spectrometer

We were approached by colleagues at the Natural History Museum who had prepared a paper describing a new fossil that needed an image of the elemental composition, exactly what this system can provide. The fossil was of a edrioasteroid, a relative of starfish and sea urchins. With the help of Tobias Salge from the Museum, we scanned the fossil overnight. The x-ray scans supported their other analysis, which showed that its skeleton was partially mineralised and partly soft. Its ancestors had had fully mineralised skeletons which mean that this was the earliest example of an organism that had lost a previously mineralised skeleton. The x-ray fluorescence imaging was able to show that some elements (phosphorus and calcium) were enriched throughout the fossil, but others (iron, zinc and silicon) were enriched only in the hardened regions, suggesting a different elemental composition in life.

A visible fossil and the heightened levels of iron

Figure 2: Showing the visible fossil (in greyscale) and the heightened levels of iron (in red)

This was an exciting departure for a system that was purchased to support research in DH, but imaging this fossil was too good an opportunity to miss. The work has been published in the Proceedings of Royal Society B:

Zamora Samuel, Rahman Imran A., Sumrall Colin D., Gibson Adam P. and Thompson Jeffrey R. (2022) Cambrian edrioasteroid reveals new mechanism for secondary reduction of the skeleton in echinoderms Proc. R. Soc. B. 289: 20212733 http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2021.2733

Digital Humanities Longview Seminar – 2022 Programme Announced

By Adam Crymble, on 9 February 2022

We are very pleased to announce the programme for the 2022 Digital Humanities Longview (virtual) seminar series, co-hosted with our friends at CESTA (Stanford, US) and the Centre for Digital Humanities (Uppsala, Sweden). In this our second year of the series, our focus is on the idea that technology is global, but where we live affects how we apply digital solutions to humanities work. We all have what Roopika Risam described as a digital humanities (DH) “accent”. This seminar series explores those accents by looking at DH research here, and there, and over there too. This is a chance to build greater global awareness and empathy about regional and local approaches to digital humanities in the twenty-first century.

It’s an opportunity for newcomers to understand how the field has developed differently around the globe, and for established practitioners to consider their work as part of a larger movement with competing influences, ambitions, and blindspots.

Programme:

  • 10 March 2022 (5pm): Dr Nirmala Menon (IIT Indore), ‘Decolonizing Knowledge Infrastructures: Open Access and Multilingual Scholarly Publishing’ [Register to attend]
  • 7 April 2022 (5pm): Dr Grant Parker (Stanford), ‘Curating enslaved pasts of the Cape of Good Hope’ [Register to attend]
  • 21 April 2022 (5pm): Dr Ale Pålsson & Victor Wilson (Uppsala) ‘SWECARCOL. Swedish Caribbean Colonialism 1784–1878: Research, Challenges and Opportunities for Caribbean Digital History’ [Register to attend]
  • 5 May 2022 (5pm): Dr Roopika Risam (Salem State University), ‘To be confirmed’ [Register to attend]
  • 19 May 2022 (5pm): Professor Tim Williams (UCL), ‘Central Asia and the Role of Digital Heritage Inventories’ [Register to attend]
  • 2 June 2022 (5pm): Jessie Loyer (Mount Royal University), ‘To be confirmed’ [Register to attend]

Mapping the state of the art of Named-Entity Recognition for early modern documents. New Publication.

By Julianne Nyhan, on 2 November 2021

[posted by Julianne Nyhan on behalf of Marco Humbel]

This blog post reports on our recent paper: Humbel, M., Nyhan, J., Vlachidis, A., Sloan, K. and Ortolja-Baird, A. (2021), “Named-entity recognition for early modern textual documents: a review of capabilities and challenges with strategies for the future”, Journal of Documentation, https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-02-2021-0032

Link to full text of publisher-accepted version:  https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10127463/ (note that this is the version of the paper accepted by the publisher before final proofs and so there will be some minor differences between this and the final published version).

Summary of paper:

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an information extraction technique for identifying, segmenting and labelling phenomena of interest like those of people, organizations and places (Piskorski and Yangarber, 2013). In the article reported on here, we synthesise current research on the application of NER to digitized documents of the early modern period. We also examine NER and authority files from a more critical perspective, and suggest directions to enrich the application of NER going forward. Our findings are based upon an extensive literature review and a case study undertaken by the Leverhulme Trust-funded ‘Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane’s Catalogues of his Collections (2016–2021)’. Our findings suggest that “Currently, it is not possible to benchmark the capabilities of NER as applied to documents of the early modern period”. And we “draw attention to the situated nature of authority files, and current conceptualisations of NER, leading … to the conclusion that more robust reporting and critical analysis of NER approaches and findings is required” (https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/JD-02-2021-0032/full/html). We hope our article will be useful for researchers and heritage professionals who seek to use NER on the abundance of digitised sources available for the early modern period.

Discussion of paper:

What is the state of the art of NER as applied to early modern documents? Our frank response is that we currently know only how a particular NER system performs on a specific corpus. We have surveyed 9 projects dating from 2002 to 2019 and found that a number of factors limit the possibilities for a simple comparison. Historical documents of the early modern period present a heterogeneous set of resources consisting not only of different types of material including: manuscripts, collection catalogues, encyclopaedias, or pamphlets. But also, within one corpus, or even one document, we might find various languages (e.g.: Latin, English and French), an unstandardised spelling, and errors in their transcriptions made by scribes, or through text recognition software like OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Our case-study on Sloane’s catalogues also showed extensive XML (Extensible Markup Language) annotation preceding the NER process can hamper performance, particularly when presentational and semantic tags co-occur. NER systems are thus ideally should be applied before annotating a corpus with standards like TEI (Text Encoding Initiative).

All of these factors can impact the accuracy of NER. But the generalization of NER approaches to early modern documents and the transferability of projects’ outcomes is impeded further through an under-reporting of selected approaches like the human labour required for data processing.

Different methods for measuring NER systems’ effectiveness are also used. (for an example see Goldfield, 1993). The inter-annotator agreement score of human annotators sets the benchmark of what should be expected from automated systems (Sperberg‐McQueen, 2016). Inter-annotator agreement scores of 95% and more can be reached for historical corpora (McDonough and Camp, van de, 2017; Erdmann et al., 2016). If we compare the project reports by McDonough et al., 2019 and Won et al., 2018, which are in our survey the most comparable ones, we see that NER systems reach on early modern documents in the best cases accuracies of about 70%. These results make significant human post-processing efforts inevitable, and hold back the benefits that would come with automating the repetitive parts of annotation tasks.

Human domain expertise will also be required in the future because what constitutes an entity can’t always be reduced to a binary yes/no. We discussed these challenges in regard to Sloane’s catalogues in Ortolja-Baird et al., 2019. Our survey shows also that so-called rule-based NER systems are only gradually being superseded by machine learning techniques. This is because machine-learning techniques require huge amounts of training data, which typically are not available to digital humanities projects. Yet, promising results were recently demonstrated on highly structured early modern marriage records (Toledo et al., 2019).

Rule-based NER systems are dependent on authority files and gazetteers (look-up lists for identifying entities). The prevalence of rule-based systems in our survey motivated us to map-out the landscape of authority files for scholarship on the early modern period. These resources could also form the basis for training data for future machine-learning NER techniques. The authority files we have surveyed were created by a number of different actors (heritage institutions and researchers) and are due to the lack of a central registry difficult to find. As others have argued, specialized authority files for the early modern period are rare (Nelson, 2014; McDonough et al., 2019). Authority files seem commonly to be viewed as mere tool for working with source material. But it is known that authority files are often incomplete and as McDonough et al. 2019 observed that general purpose authority files can be inaccurate and at worst insensitive to past and present local languages, reinforcing hegemonic world-views. It is thus necessary to develop critical frameworks for interrogating authority files. The creators of authority-files could support this development by providing more documentation about their compilation rationale.

What is the way forward? In order to support more robust reporting on the capabilities of NER we propose a forum where tools are evaluated according to standards formulated by the early modern research community. Possible models for the nature of such a forum could be corpora and conference series like ConLL (Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning), as they are established within the wider NER community. We also acknowledge that NER is not a neutral intervention, neither are authority-files. A digital tool criticism, as proposed by Koolen et al. (2019) could foster a more critical understanding of NER, its biases and its ethical implications.

The full article is available from the Journal of Documentation. We are grateful to the Leverhulme Trust, which provided the research project grant (rpg-2016-239) for Enlightenment Architectures. Thank you to the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies, UCL for funding part of this work.

We hope that the following list of resources is useful for any colleagues who are interested in applying NER to early modern documents. All links were last accessed on 05.07.2021.

 

NER tools

Name Link
CLAWS http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/claws/
Edinburgh Geoparser https://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/software/geoparser/
GATE https://gate.ac.uk/
MorphAdorner http://morphadorner.northwestern.edu/morphadorner/
NER-Tagger software package https://github.com/glample/tagger
Perdido http://erig.univ-pau.fr/PERDIDO/
Polyglot https://polyglot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
SpaCy https://spacy.io/
Stanford Named Entity Recognizer https://nlp.stanford.edu/software/CRF-NER.html
TextCat http://www.let.rug.nl/vannoord/TextCat/
USAS http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/usas/
VARD http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/vard/about/

 

Authority files

 

Name Scope Link
Alexandria Digital Library Project Gazetteer Online global place name

dictionary. Exists now only

on a development server, but

research team can be

contacted for use

https://www.library.ucsb.edu/geospatial/alexandria-digital-library-gazetteer
Biography Portal of

the Netherlands

Prominent figures from the

Dutch History

Prominent figures from the

Dutch History

http://www.biografischportaal.nl/en/
CERL Authority file for names

found in material printed

before the middle of the 19th

century

https://data.cerl.org/thesaurus/_search?lang5en
Compendium of office

holders and civil

servants 1428–1861

Compendium of office holders

and civil servants 1428–1861

on the present-day Dutch

territory

http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/repertoriumambtsdragersambtenaren1428-1861/index_html_en
Early Modern Letters

Online

Finding aid for early modern

correspondence

http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
GeoCrossWalk UK, succeeded in Digimap https://digimap.edina.ac.uk/
GeoNames Global https://www.geonames.org/
Getty Thesaurus of

Geographic Names

Gazetteer developed by the

Getty Research Institute

http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/tgn/index.html

 

GND Authority file developed by

the German National Library

https://www.dnb.de/DE/Professionell/Standardisierung/GND/gnd_node.html
Library of Congress Names Authority file developed by

the Library of Congress Names

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names.html
Pleiades Ancient World https://pleiades.stoa.org/
VIAF Authority file hosted by Online Computer Library Center Inc. http://viaf.org/
World Gazetteer Global https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=346ce13fa2d4468a9049f71bcc250f37#!

 

References

Dyer-Witheford, N., Kjøsen, A. M. and Steinhoff, J. (2019). Inhuman Power: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Capitalism. London: Pluto Press.

Erdmann, A., Brown, C., Joseph, B., Janse, M., Ajaka, P., Elsner, M. and Marneffe, M.-C. de (2016). Challenges and Solutions for Latin Named Entity Recognition. Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Technology Resources and Tools for Digital Humanities (LT4DH). Osaka, Japan: The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee, pp. 85–93 https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W16-4012 (accessed 5 July 2021).

Goldfield, J. D. (1993). An argument for single-author and similar studies using quantitative methods: Is there safety in numbers?. Computers and the Humanities, 27(5–6): 365–74 doi:10.1007/BF01829387.

Koolen, M., Gorp, J. van and Ossenbruggen, J. van (2019). Toward a model for digital tool criticism: Reflection as integrative practice. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 34(2): 368–85 doi:10.1093/llc/fqy048.

Marrero, M., Urbano, J., Sánchez-Cuadrado, S., Morato, J. and Gómez-Berbís, J. M. (2013). Named Entity Recognition: Fallacies, challenges and opportunities. Computer Standards & Interfaces, 35(5): 482–89 doi:10.1016/j.csi.2012.09.004.

McDonough, K. and Camp, M. van de (2017). Mapping the Encyclopédie: Working Towards an Early Modern Digital Gazetteer. Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL Workshop on Geospatial Humanities  – GeoHumanities’17. Redondo Beach, CA, USA: ACM Press, pp. 16–22 doi:10.1145/3149858.3149861. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3149858.3149861 (accessed 24 January 2019).

McDonough, K., Moncla, L. and Camp, M. van de (2019). Named entity recognition goes to old regime France: geographic text analysis for early modern French corpora. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 33(12): 2498–522 doi:10.1080/13658816.2019.1620235.

Nelson, B. (2014). From Index to Interoperability: The Desideratum of Authority Files in Large-Scale Digital Projects. Scholarly and Research Communication, 5(4) doi:10.22230/src.2014v5n4a192. http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/192 (accessed 21 February 2019).

Ortolja-Baird, A., Pickering, V., Nyhan, J., Sloan, K. and Fleming, M. (2019). Digital Humanities in the Memory Institution: The Challenges of Encoding Sir Hans Sloane’s Early Modern Catalogues of His Collections. Open Library of Humanities, 5(1): 44 doi:10.16995/olh.409.

Piotrowski, M. (2012). Natural Language Processing for Historical Texts. Morgan&Claypool. Vol. 17. (Synthesis Lectures On Human Language Technologies) http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00436ED1V01Y201207HLT017 (accessed 4 June 2018).

Piskorski, J. and Yangarber, R. (2013). Information Extraction: Past, Present and Future. In Poibeau, T., Saggion, H., Piskorski, J. and Yangarber, R. (eds), Multi-Source, Multilingual Information Extraction and Summarization. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 23–49 doi:10.1007/978-3-642-28569-1_2. http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-3-642-28569-1_2 (accessed 9 May 2019).

Ravenek, W., Heuvel, C. van den and Gerritsen, G. (2017). The ePistolarium: Origins and Techniques. In Utrecht University, NL and Odijk, J. (eds), CLARIN in the Low Countries. Ubiquity Press, pp. 317–23 doi:10.5334/bbi.26. https://www.ubiquitypress.com/site/chapters/10.5334/bbi.26/ (accessed 8 June 2018).

Smith, D. A. and Cordell, R. (2019). A Research Agenda for Historical and Multilingual Optical Character Recognition. Northeastern University https://ocr.northeastern.edu/report/ (accessed 10 March 2019).

Smithies, J., Westling, C., Sichani, A.-M., Mellen, P. and Ciula, A. (2019). Managing 100 Digital Humanities Projects: Digital Scholarship & Archiving in King’s Digital Lab. Digital Humanities Quarterly, 13(1) http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/13/1/000411/000411.html#d3876770e516 (accessed 16 February 2020).

Sperberg‐McQueen, C. M. (2016). Classification and its Structures. In Schreibman, S., Siemens, R. G. and Unsworth, J. (eds), A New Companion to Digital Humanities. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley/Blackwell, pp. 377–93.

Toledo, J. I., Carbonell, M., Fornés, A. and Lladós, J. (2019). Information extraction from historical handwritten document images with a context-aware neural model. Pattern Recognition, 86: 27–36 doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patcog.2018.08.020.

Won, M., Murrieta-Flores, P. and Martins, B. (2018). Ensemble Named Entity Recognition (NER): Evaluating NER Tools in the Identification of Place Names in Historical Corpora. Frontiers in Digital Humanities, 5 doi:10.3389/fdigh.2018.00002. http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fdigh.2018.00002/full (accessed 14 May 2018).

 

 

Long View Seminar – Reflecting on our First Year

By Adam Crymble, on 27 July 2021

In a year dominated by a global pandemic and both remote working and teaching, we lost many of the traditional ways that we as scholars could stay connected. One of those, the traditional extra-curricular seminar series that was a coming together space for people at different stages of their career, had to go online. And that’s just where we went.

While elements of the seminar culture have not been easy to replicate online, the shift to virtual did present some opportunities, one of which was to work collaboratively across what would otherwise be prohibitively wide distances. In this case, it was a chance for the UCLDH team to work together with colleagues at Stanford’s CESTA (Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis) to co-host the Digital Humanities Long View seminar during the spring of 2021. It was a chance to share scholarly culture, to build new bridges, and to help postgraduate students get involved in networking and professional development opportunities that were increasingly difficult to arrange during a pandemic.

Logo of the Digital Humanities Longview seminar

Logo of the Digital Humanities Longview Seminar, with a world map showing the location of each of the seminar’s speakers and of the two co-host organisations (Stanford CESTA & UCLDH).

 

The Long View for us was about understanding that research happens in context. About asking questions of how Digital Humanities (DH) got where it is today. Our seminar series explored some of the key socio-historical, political and cultural contexts of DH research as a means of building understandings of how we all ended up here and what that means for the future of the field. It’s been an opportunity for newcomers to understand how the field has developed, and for established practitioners to consider their work as part of a larger movement with competing influences, ambitions, and blindspots.

Having finished our first programme of talks, we’re incredibly pleased with the Long View series. We were grateful to host 11 wonderful speakers from five countries and three different linguistic backgrounds. We had the support of 17 different postgraduate students and early career researchers who acted as respondents to the papers and co-hosted the proceedings. And we had tremendous and engaged audiences from around the world, reaching 650 people across the series.

Some of the talks have been video recorded and remain online on the CESTA website, and we invite you to watch them if you missed them live: https://cestastanford.github.io/schedule.html

And we’re pleased to announce that we plan to continue our collaborative seminar series next year, building upon what we’ve established with our friends at Stanford.

That means we’ll once again be on the lookout for postgraduate students who want to get involved and build both their skills and professional networks. If any UCL postgraduate students or offer holders for 2021-22 would like to represent UCLDH as a postgraduate respondent at next year’s events, please contact Dr Adam Crymble directly for an informal conversation.

Finally, a huge thanks to our speakers, convenors, colleagues, and respondents, who supported this seminar: Ian Milligan (Waterloo), Jessica Marie Johnson (Johns Hopkins), Zephyr Frank, Quinn Dombrowski, Mark Algee-Hewitt (Stanford), Riva Quiroga (Programming Historian), Scott Weingart (Notre Dame), Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara (Colorado), Amy Earhart (Texas A&M), Valérie Schafer (Luxembourg), Jane Winters (London), Agnieszka Backman, Amanda Wilson Bergado, William Parish, Daniel Bush, Giovanna Ceserani, Laura Stokes, Anna Toledano, Victoria Rahbar, Maciej Kurzynski, Yunxin Li, Lakmali Jayasinghe, Merve Tekgurler, Mae Velloso-Lyons (CESTA); Adam Crymble, Julianne Nyhan, Lucy Stagg, Hannah Smyth, Nenna Orie Chuku, Madeline Tondi, George Cooper, Jin Gao, Malithi Alahappruna, Opher Mansour, Marco Humbel (UCL) and Urszula Pawlicka-Deger (KCL). It has been a wonderful and collegial opportunity and we valued it tremendously.

 

MA / MSc Digital Humanities Applications Open for 2021-22

By Adam Crymble, on 3 February 2021

Image of UCL Campus

Caption: Photograph of UCL Campus in London.

UCL’s Department of Information Studies is currently accepting applications for the 2021-22 cohort of its MA in Digital Humanities and MSc in Digital Humanities programmes. Programme lead, Dr. Julianne Nyhan writes, ‘this exciting, interdisciplinary programme offers students a unique opportunity to explore and analyse the application of digital technologies to the cultural record of humankind and, in doing so, to reflect on how technology is impacting all aspects of how we live now, and in the future.’

Both programmes are taught by a range of staff, including members of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. Potential applicants are invited to contact the Admissions tutor with any questions. For 2021-22 applicants, this is Dr Adam Crymble (a.crymble@ucl.ac.uk).

UCLDH Lunch-hour lectures: Star Wars and Hillary Clinton

By Lucy Stagg, on 28 September 2018

UCLDH is delighted to have two team members giving UCL Lunch-Hour Lectures this term.

Team member Dr. Rachele De Felice will be discussing ‘What’s Really Going On in Hillary Clinton’s Emails?’ on 16 October 2018. Dr De Felice will explore questions of manners, who gets stuck with the boring tasks, and what kind of boss Clinton is.

Dr Oliver Duke-Williams will speak on 27th November on ‘What Can the ONS Longitudinal Study Tell Us about Time Travel and about the Force?’ Dt Duke-Williams will outline what the study is and explain how to apply to use it by drawing on two examples: the film Back To The Future; and the Star Wars films.

The UCL Lunch-Hour lectures are free and open to the public, but booking is recommended. Lectures are also live streamed. The UCL Events page explains:

Lunch Hour Lectures are an opportunity for anyone to sample the exceptional research work taking place at UCL, in bite sized chunks. Speakers are drawn from across the university, and lectures frequently showcase new research and recent academic publications.

Video abstract on imaging work within mummy cartonnage

By Lucy Stagg, on 24 August 2018

The journal Heritage Science has released a video abstract of the paper UCLDH team members co-authored on advanced imaging for investigating inscribed papyrus in mummy cartonnage.

The full original paper is also available to read online. The co-authors are all part of the Deep Imaging research project team.