The dialogical method: oral history, participation, and digital humanities

The talk was delivered on 14th May 2025 by Dr Alda Terracciano, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

In this brief presentation, Alda will discuss some of her work at UCL Information Studies department, focusing on a participatory research methodology developed over two decades of artistic practice research and archiving. She will focus on results from two projects: Mapping Memory Routes (2016-2017), developed with Moroccan communities living and working in Golborne Road, West London as part of her activities as co-leader of UCL Centre for Critical Heritage Studies; and Sloane Lab (2021-2024), A TaNC project led by Prof Nyhan, which employed computational and digital humanities approaches augmented by participatory co-design to reunite Sir Hans Sloane’s collection records online for the first time. Alda will discuss how the dialogical method employed in these projects advanced knowledge on digital heritage curation and management.

Alda Terracciano is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at UCL Department of Information Studies. She received an MA in Art, Design and Visual Culture at Guildhall University (1996) followed by pioneering research on black and Asian British theatre as part of her PhD at Middlesex University (2002). As part of her practice research method, in 2001 she co-founded Future Histories, an independent archive of African, Asian, and Caribbean performing arts in the UK (www.futurehistories.org.uk), exploring the emergence of the archive as a key concept and object of critical heritage studies through exhibitions, live art, and online publications. In addition to being co-leader of UCL Centre for Critical Heritage Studies (2016-2022), she was Visiting Researcher at the University of Gothenburg (2016-2018) and held post-doctoral positions at Queen Mary, University of London (2015-2016), and University of Sussex (2020-2021). Between 2022 and 2024 she was Participatory Co-design consultant at Sloane Lab: Looking Back to Build Shared Collections (www.sloane.org). Her interdisciplinary method is explored in a chapter by Astrid von Rosen in the edited volume “Women Experimenting in Theatre” (2024). Alda is currently working on a paper on participatory research in digital cultural heritage. Further publications are available to view on Research Gate

Digital Accessibility: Where Are We and What Might Come Next

The talk was delivered on 30th April 2025 by John Akeroyd, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

Accessibility to digital documentation for the visually impaired has developed rapidly over the past decade especially as more and more content is available in a native digital format. But there are still challenges such as scientific information and image data as well as legacy formats. This paper will look specifically at the problems posed for higher education and the challenges that still exist. It will address the legal framework in a European context and the technologies and tools available as well as speculate on future developments especially the potential of AI.

John Akeroyd has had a long career in the library and information field with a notable focus on the application of emerging technologies to create efficiency and solve user problems. He was a university librarian until 2010 when he became a consultant, researcher and interim manager with an Honorary position at UCL. Recent projects have included: how researchers go about publishing their work in the context of predatory publishing; “Emerging formats” – a review of new publishing formats on behalf of the British Library; market research for the British Council on its roll out of a Digital Library in Asia. He has presented at conferences in Italy, India and Asia on the development of digital libraries and authored papers and reports on these themes. Akeroyd has had a particular interest in digital accessibility since about 2015 and has worked pro bono to improve community understanding of the issue.

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: Repurposing in AI: A Distinct Approach or an Extension of Creative Problem Solving?

The talk was delivered on 26 February 2025 by Aissatou Diallo, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

Creativity is defined as the ability to produce novel, useful, and surprising ideas. A sub area of creativity is creative problem solving, the capacity of an agent to discover novel and previously unseen ways to accomplish a task, according to its perspective. While creative problem solving has been extensively studied in AI, the related concept of repurposing – identifying and utilizing existing resources in innovative ways to address different problems from their intended purpose – has received less formal attention. This paper presents a theoretical framework that distinguishes repurposing from creative problem solving by formalizing both approaches in terms of conceptual spaces, resource properties, and goal achievement mechanisms. We demonstrate that while creative problem solving involves expanding the conceptual space through transformation functions, repurposing operates within existing conceptual spaces by leveraging shared properties of available resources. This formalization provides new insights into how these two approaches to problem-solving differ in their fundamental mechanisms while potentially complementing each other in practical applications..

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: ECycles of knowledge: ‘discoveries’ in historical library collections

The talk was delivered on 5 February 2025 by Carlotta Barranu, teaching on the module ‘Manuscript Studies’ at UCL, as part of the DIS research seminars series.

This paper reflects on a recent ‘discovery’ in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle: an early 16th-century philosophy manual assembled for the students attending the Faculty of Arts at the University of Leuven. The existence of this textbook is mentioned in documents pertaining to the University, but was presumed ‘lost’ due to the lack of known copies. The volume in the Royal Library is therefore not simply unique but also potentially meaningful in contributing to our understanding of the impact of print on the early university. The paper will assess this potential by analysing the volume and by providing an initial scope of its significance for the history of higher learning. It will then reflect on this “lost&found” process: how the cycle of gathering, storing, forgetting, and rediscovering knowledge informs the creation of categories of importance, which in turn affects object survival.

Charlie Barranu is Curator of Books and Manuscripts at the Royal Library, Windsor Castle. She previously held research positions at the University of Cambridge after getting her PhD in medieval literature. She has been teaching on the module ‘Manuscript Studies’ at UCL since 2019.

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.

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.

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.