A holistic approach to collection digitisation of an 18th century amber cabinet from the Victoria and Albert Museum

The talk was delivered on 26th Match 2025 by Kira Zumkley, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

This lecture will highlight work carried out at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London between 2023 and 2025. It focuses on the journey of an 18th century amber cabinet through various digitisation stages including documentary and studio photography, x-ray and reflectance transformation imaging. Such a holistic approach to collection digitisation is a rare occurrence within a very busy museum environment, yet it can often inspire further research and unforeseen engagement and collaboration which brings additional benefits to both the museum and the public – as has been the case with this cabinet.

Kira Zumkley is the Head of Photography and Digitisation at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London. Her research focuses on how digital imaging assets of historic objects are perceived and understood and how these assets can enhance engagement with the physical object. Prior to working at the V&A, Kira Zumkley was the Photography Manager at the Science Museum Group and Chair of the Association for Fine Art and Historical Photography (AHFAP). Since 2018 she is also an honorary lecturer at the University College London Centre for Digital Humanities.

The intersection of book conservation, codicology and digital humanities

The talk was delivered on 19th Match 2025 by Alberto Campagnolo, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

This lecture explores the intersection of book conservation, codicology, and digital humanities, focusing on how we investigate the material aspects of historical books and manuscripts through advanced digital tools. At the Book Heritage Lab at KU Leuven, we examine structural and visual elements of documentary heritage, applying methodologies that capture details essential for both conservation and scholarly research. Examples from ongoing projects—including methods for visualizing manuscript gathering structures—will demonstrate how digital tools document, preserve, and reveal new perspectives on the physical narratives embedded in historical texts. This session covers emerging methodologies and considers both challenges and possibilities for those working at the crossroads of traditional and digital approaches to heritage.

Alberto Campagnolo (ORCID: 0000-0002-8672-8400) trained as a book conservator in Spoleto, Italy, and has worked at institutions such as the Vatican Library. He holds a degree in Conservation of Library and Archive Materials from Ca’ Foscari University Venice and an MA in Digital Culture and Technology from King’s College London. He completed his PhD at the Ligatus Research Centre, University of the Arts London, focusing on the automated visualization of historical bookbinding structures. Currently, he is Assistant Professor and Director of the Book Heritage Lab at KU Leuven and Senior Researcher on the ERC-funded PRIMA project, investigating modern manuscript codicology. Alberto collaborates with Dot Porter on the VisColl project, a tool for modeling the gathering structures of books in codex format. Additionally, he serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Paper Conservation and is on the Executive Board of the IADA (International Association of Book and Paper Conservators).

Talk Title: UK Heritage Institutions’ Repatriation Practices

The talk was delivered on 12 February 2025 by Rachel Gatehouse, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

This paper addresses gaps in understanding of UK heritage institutions’ repatriation practices by compiling and analysing a comprehensive database of repatriated items from 2010 to 2022. While recent literature focuses on practical repatriation guidance, there is limited information on the broader trends and patterns in repatriation conducted by UK heritage institutions. This study provides a new overview by quantitatively examining repatriated items over a twelve-year period, which reveals key insights into the general landscape of cultural repatriation in the UK. Our analysis shows that approximately 400 items, mainly human remains, have been returned predominantly to Indigenous communities in Australia. The findings highlight a trend of increasing repatriations with a slight diversification, mainly focused on items from British colonial contexts. Our research also identifies significant gaps in UK repatriation practices and debates concerning certain regions, including South America and Europe and many countries with colonial histories to the UK which are not preset in the database. It contributes to the broader discussions on cultural heritage and restitution by advocating for a re-evaluation of ownership, belonging, and responsibility in the global context of cultural heritage. Its implications extend beyond academia, which aims to influence policy, practice, and ethical considerations in the repatriation of cultural heritage worldwide.

Talk Title: Emotion Elicitation, Emotional Experience and Recognition of Emotion

The talk was delivered on 22 January 2025 by Daniela Romano, Honorary Lecturer at the Department of Information Studies, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

This talk presents Professor Romano’s latest research findings in Digital Affective Science at the crossroads between psychology and computer science, and the qualitative, quantitative and AI methods used in this area illustrated with various research projects. The talk presents an artistic robotics installation that induces mindfulness, an investigation into the Autonomous sensory Meridian response phenomenon, emotions and behavioural tendencies triggered by extensive video game play, and emotions recognition from WiFi signals.

Professor Daniela Romano received her PhD in supporting naturalistic decision-making with an intelligent serious game in 2002 at Leeds University, Lecturer in Computer Science (2004) & Senior Lecturer (2010), & Virtual Reality Theme Leader at Sheffield. Professor in Computing (2015) & Head of Innovative Research and Enterprise, Manager of Virtual Reality at Edge Hill, Senior Teaching Fellow at UCLIC in 2017, Senior Teaching Fellow at UCL Information Studies in 2019, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at de Montfort University and Director of the Institute of Digital media, Artificial intelligence, Responsible innovation, Ethics and Cybersecurity.

Ethical Data use in Irish public policy: the role of the Data Governance Board

The talk was delivered on 11 November 2024 by Clare Thornley, Honorary Research Associate at the Department of Information Studies, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

The Data Governance Board was established in Ireland in 2021 under the Data Sharing Act 2019 and it plays a key role in developing and guiding the Public Service Data Strategy in Ireland. This seminar will introduce the role and remit of the Data Governance Board. Its focus will be on the work of its Data Safeguarding and Transparency Committee which works to ensure that any transparency, privacy or data protection concerns that arise around the sharing or governance of data are managed in an ethical way. This includes the development of a Data Sharing Ethics Framework to assist public servants in implementing ethical standards in all aspects of data use. It is an interesting example of efforts to integrate ethical values into processes and methods and this will be discussed considering wider work in information and data ethics. The role of the Data Governance Board in shaping the next Public Service Data Strategy will also be discussed examining emerging challenges of technology such as AI as well as persistent trade-offs that need to be managed.

Clare Thornley is Board Member of the Data Governance Board, Ireland.
Clare Thornley has an MA (Hons) in Philosophy from the University of Edinburgh, an MSc in Information Management and a PhD in Information Retrieval from the University of Strathclyde. She has been an Honorary Research Associate at UCL since 2011. She started her career as an Information Officer in the UK voluntary sector at The Volunteer Centre UK before completing her PhD and moving into research. She has lectured on Information Retrieval at University College Dublin and Dublin Business School and currently teaches on the online Information Systems MSc at the University of Liverpool. As well as being a Data Governance Board member since 2021 Clare works as an independent consultant on EU and international digital skills and IT capability development projects with a focus on developing ethical standards and guidelines. Her recent publications include an EU Ethics Framework for ICT Professionals and a research paper on the use of Science Fiction to inform responsible innovation. She has also served on the Ethics Advisory Board of two EU H2020 Research Projects on AI and law enforcement.

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.

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.

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.

(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.