Members, research centres and projects – May 2010
Members of the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH)
Claire Warwick,
Director
Reader in Digital Humanities,
UCL Information Studies
(Photo: Naomi Woddis)
Claire’s research is on the use of
digital resources in the humanities,
especially electronic texts and
digital libraries, and on reading in
physical and digital environments.
Claire is:
x lead researcher of the User Experience group of the
Implementing New Knowledge Environments project (INKE),
funded by the Canadian Social Sciences & Humanities Research
Council (SSHRC), which aims to produce new digital
environments for reading and research in the humanities
x Associate Director of the JISC-funded LinkSphere project,
studying the use of social networking applications by humanities
researchers
x Co-Principle Investigator of the Humanities Information Practices
project, funded by the Research Information Network
x a member of the editorial board of ‘Informatica Umanistica’, the
new Italian digital humanities journal
x on the advisory boards of several digital humanities research
projects, including the Synergies project, an electronic
publication infrastructure for Canadian humanities and social
sciences
x a member of the UK Arts & Humanities Research Council Peer
Review College
x Vice-Dean (Research) for UCL Arts & Humanities.
Claire has been:
x Principle Investigator of the AHRC-funded Log Analysis of
Internet Resources in the Arts & Humanities project (LAIRAH)
x Associate Director of the JISC-funded Virtual Research
Environments for Archaeology (VERA) project
x Co-Investigator of the EPSRC-funded User Centred Interactive
Search of Digital Libraries project (UCIS)
x co-investigator of several research projects funded by SSHRC’s
Image Text Sound Technologies programme to study users of
digital resources and the institutional context of digital humanities
research
x Chair of the International Programme Committee for the Digital
Humanities 2009 conference.
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Melissa Terras,
Deputy Director
Senior Lecturer in Electronic
Communication, UCL
Information Studies
Melissa’s research interests
include digitization and digital
imaging, image processing,
artificial intelligence, palaeography,
knowledge elicitation and internet technologies.
Melissa is:
x Co-Investigator of the AHRC/EPSRC/JISC-funded Image, Text,
Interpretation: e-Science, Technology and Documents project
x Associate Director of the JISC-funded Linksphere project
x General Editor of ‘Digital Humanities Quarterly’
x Secretary of the Association of Literary & Linguistic Computing
x on the executive of the Alliance of Digital Humanities
Organizations
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x a member of the editorial boards of ‘Interdisciplinary Science
Reviews’, ‘Literary and Linguistic Computing’ and the Text
Encoding Initiative’s Extramural Journal (TEI-EJ).
Melissa has been:
x Associate Director of the JISC-funded Virtual Environments for
Research in Archaeology (VERA) project
x Principal Investigator of the ReACH (Researching e-Science
Analysis of Census Holdings) project
x Co-Investigator of the Log Analysis of Internet Resources in the
Arts and Humanities
x Co-Manager of TEI By Example
x Vice-President of the Association for Computing in the
Humanities.
Melissa has written two books: ‘Image to Interpretation’ and ‘Digital
Images for the Information Professional’.
Tim Weyrich,
Associate Director
Lecturer, UCL Computer Science
Tim is a lecturer in the Virtual
Environments & Computer
Graphics group in UCL Computer
Science. Prior to coming to UCL,
he was a postdoctoral teaching
fellow of Princeton University,
working in the Princeton Computer Graphics Group, having received
his PhD from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 2006. Tim’s research
interests are appearance modelling, 3D reconstruction, cultural
heritage acquisition and point-based graphics.
Ulrich Tiedau,
Associate Director
Lecturer, UCL Dutch
Ulrich is a lecturer in modern Low
Countries history and society, and
a learning technologist. He has
worked on and across the borders
of humanities and communication
technologies for most of his
professional life and published widely on Belgian, Dutch and German
history, as well as on distance education and information science.
Ulrich is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and holds a
development grant within the individual strand of the Open
Educational Resources programme of JISC and HEA.
Simon Mahony,
Teaching Fellow
UCL Information Studies
Simon’s research interests are in
the application of new technologies
to the study of the ancient world,
using new web-based mechanisms
and digital resources to build and
sustain learning communities,
collaborative and innovative working. He is also active in the field of
distance learning and a member of the University of London’s Centre
for Distance Education. Simon is one of the founding editors of the
Digital Classicist, organising its summer seminar series and various
conference panels, and is also an editor at the Stoa Consortium
weblog. He currently teaches electronic publishing, legal and social
aspects of electronic publishing, and XML in UCL Information
Studies.
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Kathryn E Piquette,
Research Associate
UCL Information Studies
As Research Associate for the
User Experience group of the
Implementing New Knowledge
Environments project (INKE),
Kathryn is conducting research on
the experiences of student,
researcher and leisure readers using traditional paper-based and
digital technologies and environments. Her research interests also
encompass digital humanities as it intersects with archaeology. She
is particularly interested in the application of digital technologies to
the study and visualisation of the technological, material and
environmental aspects of ancient reading and writing. She is
currently co-editing ‘Writing as Material Practice: Substance, Surface
and Medium’. She is an Honorary Research Assistant at the UCL
Institute of Archaeology, where she contributes to courses on
Egyptian archaeology. She also lectures at Birkbeck College and the
London Rare Books School.
Claire Ross,
Research Assistant
UCL Information Studies
Claire is a Research Assistant on
the JISC-funded Linksphere project
in collaboration with the University
of Reading. It aims to develop a
Virtual Research Environment
(VRE) with web 2.0 features, which
will allow cross-repository searching across various digital collections
and archives. Claire’s research interests include usability studies,
web 2.0 applications, social media, museum e-learning, digital
heritage and digital repositories. She focuses on user evaluation and
user-centred design of social media applications, online collections
and cross-repository searching in order to produce a useful user
interface for the VRE. Before coming to UCL she was E-Learning
Development Project Manager of a collaborative project with the
University of Exeter and Geevor Tin Mine Museum. She is a member
of the committee of the Digital Learning Network.
Anne Welsh
Lecturer, UCL Information
Studies
(Photo Naomi Woddis)
Anne’s research includes the
health information needs of the
elderly population (HOPE Project,
led by Andy Clegg, Dunhill Medical
Trust Fellow), assisting on the
LinkSphere Project (UCLDH) and
establishing the provenance of Walter de la Mare’s library and its
impact on his writing. A regular presenter at international web 2.0
conferences, Anne is particularly interested in the application of new
technologies to traditional information skills. She teaches cataloguing
and historical bibliography on the UCL MA in Library & Information
Studies. Until 2009, when she came to UCL, she had been a librarian
for nearly 15 years, working in cataloguing, taxonomy design and
special collections. Anne is a member of the collection management
group of the Feminist Library and was recently appointed a trustee of
the Poetry Archive, a free internet library of poets reading their own
work.
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PhD students
UCLDH welcomes PhD students interested in working on all aspects
of digital humanities research. The list below gives an indication of
the diversity of our students’ interests.
Rudolf Ammann examines the formative stages and emergence of
blogging.
Antonio García Castañeda’s research is concerned with the
semi-automatic reconstruction of fragmented frescoes and other
fragmented cultural artefacts.
Alejandro Giacometti, Affiliate PhD student, is researching medical
imaging methods and technologies and how they can be adapted in
order to recover information from ancient documents.
Robin Hunt looks at the mediation of two acts of terror: the
Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the attack on the World Trade Centre of
September 11, 2001. His thesis considers the relationship of media
production and issues of trust.
Martes Paris is undertaking research on web archiving of online
news media archives in Malta.
Ernesto Priego’s thesis discusses the changing nature of comic
books in the digital age.
Henriette Roued, Affiliate PhD student, is working on a system to
improve the interpretation of ancient documents, as part of the eSAD
project.
Timothy Scully’s research involves enhancing techniques to make
realistic images of human skin models rendered in an interactive
time-frame.
For the contact details of our members, see www.ucl.ac.uk/dh
Research centres
AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural
Diversity (CEDC) at UCL
The CECD is a Phase Two AHRC Research Centre (2006–2010),
building on the earlier work of the AHRB Centre for the Evolutionary
Analysis of Cultural Behaviour (CEACB). The CECD exploits the
CEACB’s established position as a world leader to accelerate the
development of the new discipline of cultural evolutionary studies.
This is emerging in the interstices of several existing fields, including
archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, human genetics and
mathematical modelling, with the aim of understanding the evolution
of human cultural diversity.
UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis
(CASA)
UCL CASA is an initiative to develop emerging computer
technologies in several disciplines which deal with geography, space,
location and the built environment. As an interdisciplinary research
centre, its expertise is drawn from archaeology, architecture,
cartography, computer science, environmental science, geography,
planning, remote sensing, geomatic engineering and transport
studies. This generates a unique blend of personnel who operate
from UCL CASA and associated UCL departments.
UCL Centre for Human Communication
(CHC)
People are social animals, putting communication at the very heart of
what it means to be human. The UCL CHC is a virtual centre that
brings together leading research across UCL focused on human
communication in all its forms, and particularly on language. It aims
aims to encourage and facilitate cross-disciplinary interaction among
the full spectrum of UCL staff involved in research on human
language and communication, in order to understand better normal
function, and improve remediation of various communication
disorders.
UCL Centre for Sustainable Heritage (CSH)
The UCL CSH is the university’s leading multidisciplinary heritage
academic research group. Its staff and associates are actively
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involved in undertaking new research which meets the needs
identified in the centre’s research strategy. Research forms a key
part of the UCL CSH’s activities and has done so since its inception.
A significant proportion of the centre’s activities have involved
research projects focussing on developing existing knowledge and
expertise in an interdisciplinary environment.
UCL CIBER
UCL CIBER is a policy-led, consumer-driven, interdisciplinary and
independent research group comprising research artisans, who are
skilled in all the necessary crafts – analysis, evaluation, presentation,
communication and engagement. UCL CIBER’s particular expertise
lies in making sense of how very large numbers of people behave
and consume in the digital environment. To this end we map, monitor
and evaluate digital information systems, platforms, services and
roll-outs, using robust, big-picture, advanced and innovative research
methods, in particular deep log analysis (a bespoke methodology for
evaluating the digital footprints consumers leave behind them when
they move around the virtual space), bibliometrics and digital
surveying.
UCL Cultural Informatics Research Centre
for the Arts & Humanities (CIRCAh)
The UCL CIRCAh research group undertakes research on the
application of computing and digital technologies to the arts and
humanities. UCL CIRCAh brings together expertise in digital
humanities, user studies, digital libraries, human-computer
interaction and e-Science. Our location within UCL Information
Studies allows for collaboration with colleagues in library and archive
studies. This association is vital in the study of cultural informatics,
since libraries, archives and museums will be the future repositories
for digital information. Thus they have a vital role to play in the
understanding of such materials.
ESRC Deafness Cognition & Language
Research Centre (DCAL) at UCL
DCAL started its research in 2006 and is now the largest European
research centre in this field, with nearly 40 staff and research
students, about a third of whom are deaf. The vast majority of
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research studies on language and thought are based on languages
which are spoken and heard. DCAL’s research provides a unique
perspective on language and thought based on deaf people’s
communication. DCAL places sign languages and deaf people in the
centre of the general understanding of how language and
communication work within linguistics, psychology and child
development.
UCL International Centre for Archives &
Records Management Research & User
Studies (ICARUS)
UCL ICARUS is located within UCL Information Studies. It was
established in recognition of the need to develop a significant body of
research which seeks to identify, understand and meet the rapid
social, technological and intellectual changes sweeping through the
discipline of archives and records management. To this end ICARUS
seeks to develop knowledge and to enhance understanding of the
creation, management and use of records and their role in society,
as well as to map, monitor and evaluate significant changes in the
archives and records domain using robust evidence-based methods.
UCL Slade Centre for Electronic Media in
Fine Art (SCEMFA)
UCL SCEMFA opened in 1995 and has provided the opportunity to
focus on research into electronic media and fine art, contributing to
debate on a national and international level. It brings together artists
and researchers based at the UCL Slade School of Fine Art, each
interrogating the material of the digital from a range of perspectives.
UCL Survey of English Usage
The UCL Survey of English Usage was founded in 1959 by Randolph
Quirk. Based in UCL English Language & Literature, it carries out
research in English linguistics and was the first centre in Europe to
carry out such research using text corpora; many well-known
linguists have spent time researching there.
UCL Interaction Centre (UCLIC)
UCLIC is a leading UK centre of excellence in human-computer
interaction (HCI), working collaboratively with industry and the
research community, and drawing on the best scientific traditions in
computer science and the human sciences. UCLIC is the only UK
HCI centre with formal interdisciplinary support.
For links to our centres, see www.ucl.ac.uk/dh
Current and recent research projects
Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts
(CELM)
EuropeanaTravel
Digital Lives
Humanities Information Practices
CELM will be a free online record of surviving manuscript sources for
more than 200 major British authors of the period 1450–1700. It will
incorporate descriptions of many thousands of manuscript texts,
many hitherto unrecorded, found in several hundred public and
private collections worldwide. It will provide a new research tool for
those interested in particular authors and works, in the literary culture
of the early modern period, in manuscript production and
dissemination, and in the history of literacy and readership.
Digital Lives is a path-finding study of personal digital collections. It
focuses on personal digital archives and their relationship with
research repositories. It brings together academics, expert curators
and practitioners in digital preservation, digital manuscripts, literary
collections, web archiving, history of science and oral history from
the British Library.
E-Curator
The E-Curator project explored the use of 3D colour scanning and
e-Science technologies to capture and share very large 3D colour
scans and detailed datasets about museum artefacts in a secure
computing environment. This project drew on UCL’s expertise both in
curatorship and in e-science, on UCL’s world-class collections across
a range of disciplines and on a state-of-the-art colour scanner, the
quality of which is unequalled in the UK.
e-Science and Ancient Documents (eSAD)
The eSAD project aims to use computing technologies to aid experts
in reading ancient documents. The four-year project, being
undertaken at the University of Oxford with input from UCL will run
until the end of 2011.
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EuropeanaTravel is funded by the EU’s eContentplus Programme to
digitise a substantial number of resources from major university
libraries and national libraries of Europe to make them available via
Europeana. The materials will include books, maps, manuscripts,
photos, film negatives, postcards and other types of objects related
to the theme of travel and tourism, one of the priority content types
identified by Europeana. It is supported by the EDL Foundation and
by two of its founder members: the Conference of European National
Librarians and the Association of European Research Libraries.
Humanities Information Practices is a Research Information Networkfunded study, which aims to develop a sense of the range of
information behaviours in the humanities. Through case studies,
observations, and interviews, this study will aim to understand how
humanities scholars appropriate both analogue and digital resources
in their work. It will highlight issues in the current information
environment which affect user information-seeking behaviour in the
humanities.
Implementing New Knowledge
Environments (INKE)
INKE is funded by the SSHRC Major Collaborative Research
Initiatives Program, and involves 35 researchers and 20 industry
partners. Its aim is to design new digital environments for reading
and research in the humanities, and for the general public. It seeks to
document the features of previous textual forms, to advance our
understanding of how reading texts and using information are
affected by digital multimedia delivery, to develop tools to produce
accessible, flexible information architecture and to create dynamic
interface prototypes for new knowledge environments.
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Log Analysis of Internet Resources in the
Arts & Humanities (LAIRAH)
The LAIRAH project investigated the use of online digital resources
in the humanities to determine whether they are sustainable, and
how and why they are used. LAIRAH was the first systematic study
to provide comprehensive, quantitative, qualitative and robust
measures for evaluation of real-time use of digital resources in the
humanities, using deep log analysis techniques on automatically
recorded server data. Its findings have had a significant impact on
the way that digital humanities resources are funded by JISC and the
AHRC, and have provided evaluatory measures for new projects
developing digital online resources for the humanities.
LinkSphere
The aim of LinkSphere is to create a single virtual interface for
searching across the repositories and collections held by the
University of Reading. This will not only make the data and
information more readily available, but ensure that all the resources
that need to be accessed will be easy to find and interact with. The
project will also integrate a social network for researchers that will
show that such a system can help researchers get to know each
other, enable collaboration and ensure that it is possible to work
more closely together on cross-disciplinary projects.
Livingstone Online
Researching e-Science Analysis of
Census Holdings (ReACH)
e-Science allows large datasets to be searched and analysed quickly,
efficiently and in complex and novel ways. Little application has been
made of the processing power of grid technologies to humanities
data, due to lack of available datasets and to poor understanding of
or access to e-Science technologies. The ReACH workshop series
investigated the potential application of grid computing to a large
dataset – historical census records – of interest to historians,
humanists, digital consumers and the general public.
Reassembling the Thera Frescoes
This is an international project involving archaeologists and computer
scientists from Belgium, Greece, the UK and the US, in which UCL
plays a lead role. Its goal is to assist archaeologists and
conservators by digitising excavated fragments of wall paintings
which have been preserved in volcanic ash since the 16th century
BCE. Computer algorithms are used to search semi-automatically
the fragments for matches. By creating an interface that bridges
automated match retrieval and the intuition of an experienced user,
the aim is to reduce greatly the time that is currently spent manually
testing large numbers of fragments for matches.
TEI by Example
Livingstone Online provides access to the medical and scientific
writings of the missionary, doctor and African explorer David
Livingstone (1813–1873). The project provides detailed transcriptions
of many of his letters and aims to make all his medical and scientific
writings freely available online. It has also created a catalogue of
Livingstone’s letters and has published a collection of essays
concerning the historical contexts of his life, works and writings.
TEI by Example is concerned with developing an online resource for
teaching TEI (Text Encoding Initiative). Featuring freely available
online tutorials, walking individuals through the different stages in
marking up a document in TEI, these online tutorials will provide
examples for users of all levels. Examples will be provided of
different document types, with varying degrees in the granularity of
markup, to provide a useful teaching and reference aid for those
involved in the marking up of texts.
The Montefiore Testimonials Project
TranscriBentham
This is a collaborative project involving the Montefiore Endowment
and UCL Hebrew & Jewish Studies, UCL Special Collections and
UCL Learning & Media Services, to digitise, transliterate and, if
necessary, translate into English the complete set of the Montefiore
Testimonials. The Montefiore Testimonials consist of a collection of
several hundred documents addressed to Sir Moses Montefiore
(1784–1885) between the late 1830s and 1884. Sent by Jewish
congregations, communities, associations and individuals from all
over the world, they represent a unique source of 19th-century
Jewish cultural history.
Open Learning Environment for Early
Modern Low Countries History
This project is part of the individual strand of JISC’s and the Higher
Education Academy’s Open Educational Resources programme. The
project aims to turn a comprehensive survey course in early modern
Low Countries history into a multimedia and web 2.0 enriched Open
Educational Resource. The project will focus particularly on relations
between the Low Countries and the Anglophone world.
The Bentham Project is preparing a new definitive edition of the
collected works of Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian philosopher, jurist,
economist, political theorist and social reformer. The project has also
produced an online database containing a detailed catalogue of the
Bentham Papers. TranscriBentham is a highly innovative project to
aid in the transcription of Bentham’s work. A digitisation project will
provide high-quality scans of the papers, while an online transcription
tool will be developed which will allow volunteers to contribute to the
transcription effort: providing a crowdsourcing tool which will be used
to manage contributions from the wider audience interested in
Bentham’s work, including school students and amateur historians.
Virtual Environments for Research in
Archaeology (VERA)
The VERA project produced a fully fledged virtual research
environment for the archaeological community. UCLDH’s role in the
research was to address user needs and thus enhance the means of
efficiently documenting archaeological excavation and its associated
finds, and create a suitable web portal that provides enhanced tools
for the user community. VERA developed utilities to help encapsulate
the working practices of current research archaeologists unfamiliar
with virtual research environments.
For links to our research projects, see www.ucl.ac.uk/dh
Cert no. SGS-COC-004224
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How to get involved
If you would like to get involved with UCLDH look out for our
announcements of forthcoming events on our blog or follow us on
Twitter (details below).
UCLDH events are a great way to find out more about the field, to
meet people working on digital humanities research or in cultural
heritage, to discuss your work and to think about new opportunities
to collaborate.
If our events have inspired you, and you would like to discuss an
idea for a new research project, would like help putting together a
funding bid or would like to discuss a consultancy project, please
email us to arrange a meeting.
If you already run a centre or project that is doing research in digital
humanities or a seminar or conference in the area and would like
more people to find out about it, we would be happy to link to your
website, publicise events on our blog or arrange a Digital Excursion.
If you are a researcher who would like to be affiliated to UCLDH,
please contact us. We welcome research associates and honorary
research fellows.
If you are interested in doing a PhD in Digital Humanities, please
also contact us, and we can help you find a supervisor who would be
interested in your work.
UCL Centre for Digital Humanities
UCL, Gower Street, London, WC1E 6BT
Email digital-humanities@ucl.ac.uk
Web www.ucl.ac.uk/dh
Blog www.ucl.ac.uk/dh-blog
Twitter #UCLDH
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