Research Talk by Kathryn Piquette

By p.vrikki, on 29 November 2024

What Lies Beneath: Tales from the UCL Multi-modal Digitisation Suite

The talk was delivered on 27 November 2024 by Kathryn Piquette, Research Fellow at the Department of Information Studies, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

In this brief presentation, Kathryn will discuss some of the work she is doing in the UCL Multi-Modal Digitisation Suite — a shared facility for teaching and research in digitisation technologies. She will focus on the advanced imaging techniques of Multispectral Imaging and Reflectance Transformation Imaging and share some of the particularly interesting results emerging from her research and selected projects with UCL Advanced Imaging consultants (UCLAiC). She will showcase the ways in which advanced digital imaging can shed light on the life histories of ancient documentary evidence and the materiality of text and image. Kathryn will also highlight how her research and consulting inform her teaching in the areas of digitisation and digital heritage management.

Kathryn Piquette is a Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Information Studies and freelance Senior Researcher in Cultural Heritage Imaging with the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. In addition to receiving her PhD (2007) and MA (2002), both from the UCL Institute of Archaeology in Egyptology, she specialises in computational imaging techniques including Reflectance Transformation Imaging and Multispectral Imaging. She contributes to teaching for the MA in Digital Humanities as well as provides consulting services through UCL Advanced Imaging Consultants (UCLAiC). In addition to being a founding member of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (2010), she has held post-doctoral positions at the Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH); Freie Universität Berlin, the University of Oxford, and Trinity College Dublin. Her academic research focusses on Egyptian and Near Eastern writing and art, and the development and application of advanced imaging techniques for the elucidation of ‘visual’ culture from wider ancient world and beyond. Her publications include the eBook “An Archaeology of Art and Writing: Early Egyptian labels in context” with supporting database (2018, Modern Academic Publishing) the co-edited Open Access volume “Writing as Material Practice: Substance, surface and medium” (2013, Ubiquity Press). Further publications are available to download via Academia.edu.

Research Talk by David Pearson

By p.vrikki, on 24 November 2024

Book Owners Online

The talk was delivered on 13 November 2024 by David Pearson, Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Information Studies, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

Book Owners Online (https://bookowners.online/Main_Page) is a freely available online database hosted at UCL, developed by David Pearson, providing a reference point for book historians, collectors, dealers and anyone interested in historic book ownership. It offers an opportunity to consider the rationale, challenges and prospects for digital humanities resources like this, and David will explore these themes in his talk. Bio: David Pearson retired in 2017 as Director of Culture, Heritage & Libraries for the City of London Corporation, after a long career managing libraries and collections, mostly in London. He now focuses on his academic work as a book historian, with particular interests in the ways that books have been owned, used and bound, and his books include Provenance Research in Book History (new edn 2019), English Bookbinding Styles 1450-1800 (2005), Speaking Volumes: Books with Histories (2022) and Cambridge Bookbinding 1450-1770 (2023). He is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London, was Lyell Reader in Bibliography at Oxford in 2018, and Sandars Reader at Cambridge in 2023. He is a Past President of the Bibliographical Society and teaches regularly at the Rare Book Schools in London and Virginia.

Research Talk by David Finkelstein

By p.vrikki, on 24 November 2024

British Colonial Periodicals in Context

The talk was delivered on 20 November 2024 by Prof. David Finkelstein, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, at the Department of Information Studies, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

The history of the British colonial press over two centuries of colonial expansion and contraction is one of contestation, negotiation, accommodation, and interpretation. It is a history of the acquisition and use of print communication tools for a range of purposes, including the publishing and circulation of colonial knowledge across imperial networks; the communication of information about economic activities and political events in both English and indigenous languages; the dissemination of metropolitan culture; the provision of entertainment; the creation of communities of readers; the constitution of individual and group identities; and the mobilisation of collective resistance to colonialism. This presentation, based on work emerging from a recent edited collection on the British colonial press, briefly examines the complex histories of such periodicals to gain a sense of how they functioned under colonial rule between 1800-1970.

Professor David Finkelstein is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at University College, London, and a cultural historian who has published in areas related to print, labour and press history. Recent publications include Finkelstein, David, David Johnson and Caroline Davis, eds. Edinburgh Companion to British Colonial Periodicals (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), Movable Types: Roving Creative Printers of the Victorian World (Oxford University Press, 2018), and the Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 2: Expansion and Evolution, 1800-1900 (Edinburgh University Press ,2020), winner of the 2021 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize for its contribution to the promotion of Victorian press studies.

Information Studies Research Open Day 2024

By Antonios Bikakis, on 28 June 2024

On the 4th of June 2024, the UCL Department of Information Studies organised its first Research Open Day at the Institute of Education. The event started with a keynote speech from Prof. Elizabeth Shepherd. The programme included 19 research talks and 6 poster presentations from researchers and doctoral students of the department, organised into six thematic sessions: “Understanding human and machine cognition”, “Knowledge Organisation and Digitisation”, “Impacts of Technology”, “Diversity and Inclusion in Information Studies”, “Digital approaches to Cultural Heritage” and “Data-empowered Societies”. The video of the keynote speech and the presentation slides are available on the event page.

Research Talk by Ann Borda

By Antonios Bikakis, on 21 March 2024

The Imitation Game: Advancing guidance on AI ethics and governance in practice

The talk was delivered on 19 March 2024 by Dr. Ann Borda, an Ethics Fellow in the Public Policy Programme at The Alan Turing Institute. and an Honorary Senior Research Associate in the Department of Information Studies, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

AI is having a significant impact on public policies and services around the world, but government use of AI has a steep learning curve, and the purpose of AI within government and public sector contexts present numerous challenges. To help UK civil servants learn about and explore AI in an effective and ethical way, the Alan Turing Institute’s Public Policy Programme developed a series of workbooks that promotes the understanding of the UK Government’s official Public Sector Guidance on AI Ethics and Safety published in 2019, in collaboration with the UK’s Office for Artificial Intelligence and the Government Digital Service. Co-developed with public sector groups, this guidance outlines how AI project teams in the public sector can put ethical values and practical principles into practice across the AI project lifecycle, ensuring that AI is produced and used ethically, safely, and responsibly. Complementary to this initiative, the Turing is growing a societal Readiness, Skills, and Knowledge platform which further includes guidance on AI ethics and skills tracks for early career researchers and community audiences, supported by a publicly accessible repository of resources for those seeking to explore and apply the ethical and responsible use of data. These initiatives, including the underlying ethical values and frameworks which underpin them, are the key focus of this seminar. Challenges of the evolving AI landscape are also touched on, particularly in the development and deployment of guidance for multiple stakeholders.

Research Talk by Rebecca Roach

By Antonios Bikakis, on 22 February 2024

Conversation Machines, Missing Secretaries, Bad Readers

The talk was delivered on 21 February 2024 by Dr. Rebecca Roach, Associate Professor of Contemporary Literature and Principle Investigator (Digital) of The Stuart Hall Archive Project at the University of Birmingham., as part of the DIS research seminars series.

‘Giant electronic brains’: it was an early model for understanding computers, one that has been enormously generative, spurring advances in cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence across the decades. In this talk I want to tell a different story. There is another metaphor about computers that is just as prevalent in our culture, but much less commented upon: computers as talking machines. Conceived as interactive, as ‘conversational’, computing technologies start to look very different and the relations that they posit across disciplines (the inherent value of literary studies in particular) very different too. Taking as my case study the ‘ur-bot’ ELIZA (1965), I will pull out some of the methodological and conceptual implications of conceiving of computers as conversational. Call it a back-history of ChatGPT if you will.

Presentation of the Sloane Lab project

By Antonios Bikakis, on 9 February 2024

Sloane Lab: Looking back to build future shared collections

The talk was delivered on 7 February 2024 by Dr. Andreas Vlachidis, Dr. Marco Humbel and Dr. Alda Teracciano, members of the team working on the Sloane Lab project, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

Funded by the ‘Towards a National Collection’ (TaNC) Program of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), UK, the ‘Sloane Lab: Looking back to build future shared collections’ devise automated and augmented ways that mend the broken links between the past and present of the UK’s founding collection in the catalogues of the British Museum, the Natural History Museum and the British Library. The project develops new technologies, including the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), to open up the contents of museums and collections in ways that are more intuitive and relevant to the way the public and academics want to discover and use them. The task of integrating these disparate records and facilitating interoperable access to them poses significant challenges. Sloane’s historical catalogues are especially difficult to represent digitally, because the descriptions of the objects are often incomplete or inaccurate. Therefore, it is crucial to adopt a critical digital heritage approach since the semantic representation of Sloane’s historical catalogues may produce datasets that contain uncertainty and biases. The project addresses such biases and absences, allowing for certain worldviews and answerings to this challenge of ‘multivocality’ by adopting a data modelling approach that focuses on the record than on the object, viewing records as different perspectives over the object. Moreover, the project employs a participatory research design methodology that unpacks the latent challenges in international collection data infrastructure development. The participatory design delves into research questions that address experiences of heritage organisations of participating in national and international digital infrastructure projects, explore factors that enable and impede heritage organisations in unifying siloed collections and investigate how these factors differ between institutions and countries.

Research Talk by Abul Hasan

By Antonios Bikakis, on 25 January 2024

Incorporating Dictionaries into a Neural Network Architecture to Extract COVID-19 Medical Concepts From Social Media

The talk was delivered on 24 January 2024 by Dr. Abul Hasan, a postdoctoral research fellow at the UCL Institute of Health Informatics, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

We investigate the potential benefit of incorporating dictionary information into a neural network architecture for natural language processing. In particular, we make use of this architecture to extract several concepts related to COVID-19 from an on-line medical forum. We use a sample from the forum to manually curate one dictionary for each concept. In addition, we use MetaMap, which is a tool for extracting biomedical concepts, to identify a small number of semantic concepts. For a supervised concept extraction task on the forum data, our best model achieved a macro F1 score of 90%. A major difficulty in medical concept extraction is obtaining labelled data from which to build supervised models. We investigate the utility of our models to transfer to data derived from a different source in two ways. First for producing labels via weak learning and second to perform concept extraction. The dataset we use in this case comprises COVID-19 related tweets and we achieve an F1 score 81% for symptom concept extraction trained on weakly labelled data. The utility of our dictionaries is compared with a COVID-19 symptom dictionary that was constructed directly from Twitter. Further experiments that incorporate BERT and a COVID-19 version of BERTweet demonstrate that the dictionaries provide a commensurate result. Our results show that incorporating small domain dictionaries to deep learning models can improve concept extraction tasks. Moreover, models built using dictionaries generalize well and are transferable to different datasets on a similar task.

Research Talk by Photini Vrikki

By Antonios Bikakis, on 19 January 2024

(Re)Shaping Digital Humanities through Environmental Justice

The talk was delivered on 29 November 2023 by Dr. Photini Vrikki, member of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

As a field in constant transformation and expansion, Digital Humanities takes a broad shape to accommodate interdisciplinarity yet be grounded in the Humanities. This interdisciplinarity allows us the space to question some of the practices and processes we often consider fixed in academia. In this talk I will refer to a dual shift in DH as a call to shape and reshape the field vis-à-vis environmental justice. First, shaping includes building common, sustainable, intentional, and collective connections and speaking up for how things could be different, and how uncommon and complex tasks such as demanding for more resources and institutional changes can benefit the field. Second, I point towards the need for action in the face of parts of Digital Humanities that need to be reshaped, such as innovation and global education, to discuss the entanglement of the field with the ecological crisis. Ultimately, the paper promotes environmentally aware DH practices that bring environmental justice into play.

Research Talk by Anthony Hunter

By Antonios Bikakis, on 19 January 2024

Towards Computational Persuasion for Behaviour Change Applications.

The talk was delivered on 22 November 2024 by Prof. Anthony Hunter, Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science, University College London, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

The aim of behaviour change is to help people to change aspects of their behaviour for the better (e.g., to decrease calorie intake, to drink in moderation, to take more exercise, to complete a course of antibiotics once started, etc.). Recent developments in computational modelling of argument (a subfield of AI) are leading to technology for persuasion that can potentially be harnessed in behaviour change applications. Using this technology, a software system and a user can exchange arguments in a dialogue. So the system gains information about the user’s perspective, provides arguments to fill gaps in the user’s knowledge, and attempts to overturn misconceptions held by the user. Our work has focused on modelling the beliefs and concerns of the user, and harnessing these to make the best choices of move during the dialogue for persuading the user to change their behaviour. We have also been investigating how we can harness recent developments in large language models to provide a natural language interface to this technology. In this talk, I will provide an overview of our approach together with some promising preliminary results with participants.