UCLDH at 15: Highlights, Milestones & What’s Next

• Annual Susan Hockey Lecture UCLDH was honoured to host Professor Julianne Nyhan for the annual Susan Hockey Lecture. Her thought-provoking talk explored the intersections of digital humanities, oral history, and data, sparking lively discussion and reflection across disciplines. We’re grateful for her insights and the opportunity to celebrate the legacy of Susan Hockey through such a compelling and well-attended event.
• Voices Unbound Seminar Series From October 2024 to January 2025, we co-organised the Voices Unbound online seminar series, which explored emerging technologies in digital oral history. Topics ranged from text mining and linguistic analysis to metadata standards and critical reflections on AI. The series built on our earlier work around historical data and drew an international audience. Collaborators included TU Darmstadt, UCL, C²DH Luxembourg, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Recordings are available here: https://openlearnware.tu-darmstadt.de/collection/digital-oral-history-exploring-the-state-of-the-art/
• Hands-on Workshops In Term Two, we hosted two fully booked workshops: one on Automated Text Recognition and another on Text Mining.
  • The first, led by Dr Marco Humbel (UCLDH/TU Darmstadt) and Dr Alicia Hughes (The British Museum), introduced participants to OCR and HTR technologies, including a hands-on tutorial using Transkribus.
  • The second, co-led by Dr Humbel and Dr Jiajie Zhang (UCL DIS), explored tf-idf (term frequency–inverse document frequency) as a method for extracting distinctive keywords from large text corpora. Participants applied the technique to their own datasets using Google Labs Notebooks.
• Formalising International Collaboration In June 2025, UCLDH and the Chair of Humanities Data Science and Methodology (HDSM) at TU Darmstadt signed a memorandum of understanding to strengthen collaboration between our labs. This agreement promotes shared infrastructure, researcher mobility, joint projects, and sustainable knowledge exchange. While currently focused on UCLDH and HDSM, the initiative lays the groundwork for a broader international network of Digital Humanities Labs.
• Global Publishing Initiatives We launched the Routledge book series Digital Humanities and Intelligent Computing in collaboration with Wuhan University, with four more titles in the pipeline to celebrate global DH achievements.
• Celebrating Our People We congratulate our early-career board member Marco Humbel on his new permanent role at The National Archives. We’re proud of his contributions and look forward to future collaborations. We’ll miss him on the management committee—but we look forward to welcoming someone new in his place (please apply if you’re interested)!

As we look ahead, we’re especially eager to connect with new members of the UCL community—PhD students, new staff, and anyone curious about digital humanities. Whether you’re just beginning to explore this space or are already deeply embedded in it, we invite you to join us.

In the coming months, we’ll be:

• Hosting events and workshops to foster interdisciplinary dialogue
• Launching initiatives to support early-career researchers and postgraduate students
• Strengthening partnerships within UCL and beyond
• Exploring new formats for sharing research and engaging the public