Welcome to the Digital Transformation project of the UK-China Humanities Alliance for Higher Education (UKCHA)! We are a partnership of universities in the UK and China working together to develop joint research projects and further connections in the humanities. UKCHA was founded in 2016 on the initiative of Tsinghua University and is currently led jointly by Tsinghua and the University of Exeter.
This website, hosted by the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College, is supported by the British Council grant (re)Connecting Research in China, meant to re-establish connections and create new links and areas of collaboration between UK and Chinese institutions in the post-pandemic period. The Department of Digital Humanities is leading the Digital Transformations strand of the grant, and this website is part of it – a place dedicated to exploring and mapping existing programmes in Digital Humanities in British and Chinese Universities, to showcase research, teaching, methods, and initiatives in this area.
该网站由国王学院数字人文系主办，并得到英国文化协会 资助 (re)Connecting Research in China 的支持，旨在重新建立联系并创造新的联系 大流行后时期英国和中国机构之间的联系和合作领域。 数字人文系正在领导该拨款的数字化转型部分，该网站是其中的一部分 – 一个致力于探索和绘制英国和中国大学数字人文现有项目的地方，以展示研究、教学、方法和举措 在这个区域。
Lei is a final-year PhD candidate in the SOAS History department. Her research focuses on the transformations in economic thought and practices in late Qing China, particularly the role of the intricate interconnections among the Qing central government, literati-officialdom, and comprador-merchants in the shift in economic thought, policies and the ownership of modern enterprises amid the global rise of neomercantilist ideas. Throughout her doctoral studies, she has presented portions of her work at several national and international symposiums and contributed to conference compilations. She is a member of the EACS, the EHS and the Association for the History of Chinese Economic Thought. Prior to her PhD, Lei completed her Master’s degree in Economic History at the London School of Economics and her Bachelor’s degree at the University of Liverpool. Lei aims to pursue a career in academia, combining digital humanities research methods with an economic perspective on ancient Chinese books.
1.How do you define Digital Humanities?
Digital Humanities (DH) is an innovative interdisciplinary approach that integrates traditional humanistic inquiry with modern digital and computational technologies. It enables scholars to explore questions that were previously unapproachable due to the scale, complexity, or inaccessibility of data.
2. How did you become interested in DH?
My interest in digital humanities methods was sparked by my academic supervisor and deepened after a 2024 academic symposium on Chinese economic thought where I presented a chapter focusing on the Huangchao jingshi wenbian collections, applying digital text mining and critical source analysis to quantify the use of key works and evaluate their significance. During the symposium, a chair recommended I apply the Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) technique.
3. Tell us about your dissertation
My research focuses on the transformations in economic thought and practices in late Qing China, particularly the role of the intricate interconnections among the Qing central government, literati-officialdom, and comprador-merchants in the shift in economic thought, policies and modern enterprises amid the global rise of neomercantilist ideas.
4. And a DH project you like?
One digital humanities project that impressed me was a digital scholarship initiative by the British Library. The number of early printed books involved is enormous—around 23,000 volumes published between 1908 and 2007. Moreover, PhD candidates who are interested in collaborating can propose their own projects and consult with the library’s teams. The scale of the collection and the flexibility in project design made me realize how efficient and innovative digital humanities can be.
介绍Lei Lei
Lei 是伦敦大学亚非学院（SOAS）历史系的一名博士毕业年级学生。她的研究聚焦于清朝晚期经济思想和实践的转变，特别关注清朝中央政府、士大夫官僚阶层与买办商人之间错综复杂的联系，在经济思想、政策及现代企业所有权转变过程中所起的作用，这一切都发生在新重商主义思想全球兴起的背景下。在攻读博士学位期间，她曾在多个国内外学术研讨会上展示过部分研究成果，并为会议论文集作出贡献。她是欧洲汉学学会（EACS）、经济史学会（EHS）以及中国经济思想史学会的成员。
在攻读博士学位之前，雷曾在伦敦政治经济学院 (London School of Economics) 获得经济史硕士学位，并在利物浦大学(the University of Liverpool)完成了本科学业。她计划在学术界发展职业生涯，将数字人文学研究方法与中国古籍的经济视角相结合。
Penelope Gia Bao Huu Nguyen is a UKRI Doctoral Fellow on the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network, CASCADE. She is working on the automation of concepts through time via the automatic construction of an English-language historical thesaurus. Penelope holds a bachelor’s degree in English Studies from Can Tho University in Vietnam, where she first developed her passion for linguistics, particularly in the field of pragmatics. As a Fulbright scholar, she completed her master’s in Linguistics at Purdue University (USA), focusing on impoliteness and emoji usage on Vietnamese Facebook pages. Her research integrates computational and corpus linguistics to address questions that advance linguistic theory and interdisciplinary fields.
1.How do you define Digital Humanities?
To me, Digital Humanities (DH) is using digital tools to study humanities. This encompasses a wide array of subjects, ranging from history and cultural heritage to language and literature. Digital tools can be used for all stages of research: data collection, data management, data analysis, result dissemination, etc. In other words, DH enables scholars to revisit familiar questions through innovative, data-driven methodologies.
2. How did you become interested in DH?
I first heard the term “Digital Humanities” when pursuing an MA in Linguistics at Purdue, where a graduate certificate in DH was advertised to graduate students. I took an introductory DH course called Computational text analysis there, and right away wished I had known about this area of research sooner as it opens up so many new and exciting interdisciplinary avenues for high-impact projects. I was amazed to see how literary scholars use computational tools for “distant reading” to study stylometry and authorship research. In the age of AI, DH provides researchers in various fields with opportunities and tools to communicate with each other and collaborate for ground-breaking works. Nowadays, it’s no longer uncommon to see a computer scientist and an archaeologist – or even a 3D-printing expert – working together in a DH project. Another interesting aspect of DH projects is that they’re usually accessible to the public, perhaps in the form of a web page or a software. In this way, knowledge isn’t gatekept in paywalled academic journals only.
3. Tell us about your dissertation
Discursive concepts are historically significant concepts that cannot be captured by a single lexical item (e.g., ethics or taxation) or collocational structures (e.g., climate change or generation gap), but can be pinned down using a method called concept modelling. First, a concept model of quads, or four words that are found to be strongly associated based on PMI (Pointwise Mutual Information) scores across a large span of text, is produced by a processor. Then, a series of pragmatic routines and encyclopaedic enrichment is applied when close-reading a number of texts containing those quads to arrive at the discursive concept. An example is the quads like day – hour – minute – moon; day – eclipse – minute – moon; etc. extracted from EEBO-TCP, which can refer to the practice of observing celestial bodies for practical purposes. However, this labour-intensive approach is still time-consuming, prone to biases, and computationally expensive, not to mention a lack of temporal factor (i.e., tracking how concepts change over time). I’m working to devise a new method for the automatic generation of a catalogue of zeitgeists, or historically significant concepts, from a collection of texts, across time, considering time, computational cost, human effort, and robustness. The catalogue, which is built using a bottom-up approach, can be used as a reference for historians, historical and/ or computational linguists, NLP researchers, etc.
4. And a DH project you like?
I might be biased because both of my supervisors were actively involved in this project, but I was very much drawn to Linguistic DNA (https://www.linguisticdna.org/) when researching for my PhD application. The idea is brilliant: we all want to effectively capture context in texts, and concept modelling offers a way to do so. I was more used to traditional corpus linguistic measures and techniques, so learning a completely new approach and workflow is eye-opening. You can try it yourself, by interacting with the Demonstrator and reading the accompanying blog posts. I hope you’ll be as excited as I was when I first played with it!
介绍Penelope Nguyen
Penelope Gia Bao Huu Nguyen是英国研究与创新署（UKRI）Marie Skłodowska-Curie 博士网络“CASCADE”项目的博士研究员。她目前的研究聚焦于概念在历史中的自动演变，具体项目是通过自动构建一部英文历史同义词词典。
Błażej Mikuła is a team member of the Cultural Heritage Imaging Laboratory (CHIL) at Cambridge University Library. He is involved in digitising manuscripts and creating short films for various projects.
Previously, Błażej worked as a photojournalist, capturing significant historical events such as the war in Afghanistan and the famine in South Sudan. Now, he is rediscovering the hidden past in books using modern technology like multispectral photography. He has contributed to several projects, including , Newton, Darwin, Genizah Project, and more. Currently, he is working on the Wong Avery project, where he creates 3D scans of Chinese oracle bones, allowing for the digital reconstruction of previously broken bones.
Spending long hours in the library had an unexpected side effect—he caught an interest in book collecting. Today, he owns a vast collection of “Klubówka” — pirated editions of science fiction and fantasy books printed in Poland during the collapse of communism, between 1980 and 1990. These were the first Polish editions of iconic works such as Conan, Star Wars, and I, Robot by Isaac Asimov. Often poorly translated, crudely printed, and unquestionably illicit, these books are relics of a time when literature slipped through the cracks of censorship — smuggled in ink and paper.
1. How do you define Digital Humanities?
This is where curiosity meets computation—using technology to deepen our understanding of culture, history, language, and society. Whether it’s exploring why 11th-century scribes in the Middle East chose specific inks or recovering erased text from an ancient palimpsest, Digital Humanities (DH) offers innovative ways to uncover answers. It brings together scholars, coders, librarians, photographers, and others to collaborate across disciplines. Tools like multispectral photography, reflectance transformation imaging, and 3D scanning reveal insights that would otherwise remain hidden. By bridging the past and the present through digital tools, DH not only transforms how we study the humanities—it redefines what’s possible when we ask new questions in new ways.
2. How did you become interested in DH?
It wasn’t love at first sight—mainly because I simply didn’t know what it was. At first, I was just a photographer, and my task was to make images. I joined the Parker on the Web project at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in the same year Apple introduced the first iPhone, Netflix launched its streaming service, Amy Winehouse’s Rehab played on the radio, and the Doomsday Clock moved from 7 to 5 minutes to midnight.
It took some time before I realized I could be more involved in Digital Humanities. When new technology came along, I jumped right on it. Today, I’m working with MSI, RTI, and 3D scanning, helping researchers uncover the mysteries of some of the most beautiful items in the library.
I consider myself lucky to have witnessed the growth of DH—from a time when barely anyone applied for the job. It was an amazing time—though today, we’re just 89 seconds to midnight.
3. Tell us about one of your DH projects
It’s dragons and magic. In 1899, when Wang Yirong—a Chinese scholar and official—visited a medicine shop, he noticed inscriptions on what were being sold as “dragon bones.” This marked the beginning of oraculology and the study of the earliest known form of Chinese writing.
Today, the Wong Avery Project—a collaboration between the University of Cambridge and UC San Diego—is cataloguing and digitising the Chinese Collection. We’ve already photographed all of the oracle bones and created several 3D scans with cross-polarised textures. There’s still plenty to do, and—as is typical in Digital Humanities—I’m waiting for someone to ask a new question—preferably one that would allow me to create a CT scan of CUL.52
4. And a DH project you like?
Small Performances is an interdisciplinary project exploring the history and future of printing through the unique collection of typographic punches made by John Baskerville (1707–1775), now housed at Cambridge University Library. Supported by the CHERISH Hub, it brings together historians, scientists, and craftspeople to reconstruct 18th-century punch-cutting using a combination of pioneering scientific and artisanal methods. These efforts benefit both modern industry and education. While my role is limited due to commitments with the Wong Avery Project, I’m contributing 3D models and a short film documenting stone letter carving.
这并不是一见钟情——主要是因为我一开始根本不知道它是什么。起初，我只是一个摄影师，我的任务就是拍照片。我是在苹果发布第一代 iPhone、Netflix 启动流媒体服务、艾米·怀恩豪斯的《Rehab》在广播中播放、末日时钟从午夜前7分钟拨到5分钟的那一年，加入了剑桥科珀斯克里斯蒂学院的“帕克网页项目”（Parker on the Web）。
Dr Jin Gao is a Lecturer in Digital Archives at the UCL Department of Information Studies, an Associate Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. She is teaching on the MA/MSc in Digital Humanities programmes and MA in Archives and Records Management programme. Jin is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum working on various collaborative research projects, such as the Chinese Export Watercolours (CEW) project. She has also been co-editing the book series Intelligent Computing for Cultural Heritage (Routledge, 2024), a volume that brings together international perspectives on digital humanities topics in cultural contexts.
1.How do you define Digital Humanities?
Digital Humanities offers the possibility to ask old questions in new ways, to ask questions that would otherwise be impossible to ask, and more importantly, digital humanities also has a role in interrogating computing and AI in society and culture, and vice versa. So we’re looking at the digital through humanistic lens and not only the humanistic through a digital lens.
2. How did you become interested in DH?
I think I can say that I am a digital humanist by training, and with seven years of working experiences within the museum sector, my background is more situated within the realm of digital cultural heritage. I became interested in DH when I realised the power of digital tools to surface hidden narratives, connect disparate collections, and engage broader communities. Over time, I’ve found DH to be a space where experimentation, interdisciplinarity, and social responsibility can come together, particularly in rethinking how we document, represent, and share cultural heritage.
3. Tell us about one of your DH projects
I’m currently leading a collaborative project between UCL and the V&A on Chinese Export Watercolours (CEW). We’re using digital tools, from cataloguing and image analysis, AR and interactive exhibitions, to explore the provenance and reinterpretation of this unique collection. It’s not just about digitisation but about understanding how digital storytelling and public engagement can open new pathways for research, access, and conversations. The project is still ongoing, and it also supports student researchers and is developing an AR exhibition for UCL East.
4. And a DH project you like?
I’ve always admired Transcribe Bentham for how it brings cultural heritage work into the public domain. It doesn’t just crowdsource transcription, it builds community, blurs the line between expert and volunteer, and shows how digital infrastructure can extend the life and relevance of historical materials. Projects like this remind me that DH is not only about technology but about trust, care, and imagination.
The UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH), part of the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, is a cross-faculty research hub that bridges digital technologies and the humanities. It supports a wide array of work across the Arts, Humanities, and Cultural Heritage sectors, offering services such as research support, hosting digital humanities events and courses, providing consultancy for digital projects, and facilitating teaching and research in digitisation technologies.
The centre draws on UCL’s expertise in information studies, computer science, and the arts and humanities, with its research influencing cultural heritage, museums, libraries, archives, and broader cultural sectors. It is home to a diverse network of affiliated scholars from across UCL, who teach and conduct research across multiple disciplines, contributing to a broad spectrum of digital humanities work, including library services, museums, and collections.
Teaching on DH
While the centre does not directly offer Digital Humanities (DH) courses, the Department of Information Studies, along with several other departments, provides a range of relevant short courses, undergraduate, and postgraduate modules. These include courses such as Digital Conservations and Marketing, Digital Geographies, and The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. Additionally, the department offers two postgraduate programs in DH: the MA/MSc in Digital Humanities.
DH academics
Professor Oliver Duke-Williams – Programme Director for the MA Digital Humanities and MSc Digital Humanities. Oliver’s work relates to the present, future and past of censuses in the UK. Within DH research, Oliver is interested in the development of publication and other linked networks of DH researchers, and the relationship between these and language networks.
Dr. Jin Gao– Lecturer in Digital Archives. Jin Gao is interested in the digital cultural heritage, museum provenance studies, history of Digital Humanities, social network analysis, and non-Western cataloguing standards.
Dr. Karen Stepanyan – Associate Professor. Karen’s research is centred on the interdisciplinary integration of information technologies with computational concepts of knowledge. His research interest lies in the advancement of the Semantic Web technologies and understanding of the social fabric behind the Web using Social Network Analysis.
Dr. Vassilis Routsis – Senior Research Fellow. Vassilis’s research interest encompasses technology’s cultural and socio-political impacts, focusing on privacy and interdisciplinary methods in humanities and social sciences research.
Dr. Foteini Valeonti – Sloane Lab Research Fellow. Expert in specialising in leveraging blockchain technology for culture. Foteino’s research focuses on the utilisation of emerging technologies for the benefit of our cultural heritage. Foteino is interested in the research and development of innovative digital products for the cultural heritage sector, relating to the following themes: the Open Content movement (OpenGLAM), the accessibility of art and digitised collections.
Professor Wang Xiaoguang is the Professor and Vice Dean of the School of Information Management and Executive Vice Dean of the Big Data Institute, Director of the Intellectual Computing Laboratory for Cultural Heritage, and Director of the Centre for Digital Humanities at Wuhan University. His research interests are digital asset management, knowledge organisation, semantic publishing, and digital humanities.
1.How do you define Digital Humanities?
Digital humanities is an emerging interdisciplinary research field, with a particular focus on research themes at the intersection of the humanities and digital information technologies. It consists of three main types of research. One is humanities research based on digital resources, including the construction and development of digital resources, as well as the use of these digital information resources and digital tools for traditional humanities research. The second is humanities research based on digital models, that is, the use of digital modelling techniques to model and statistically analyse humanities texts, images, audio and video, and other documentary materials. The third is the research on various emerging digital phenomena.
2. How did you become interested in DH?
After graduating from Wuhan University in 2007 with a degree in Management Science and Engineering, I stayed there to work. Later, I saw that the Kyoto Centre for Digital Literature and Arts at Ritsumeikan University was recruiting postdocs from all over the world, I applied for the position, and I was accepted. During my postdoctoral research at Ritsumeikan University, I learned that the Centre had been awarded a GCOE project by the Japanese government and was actively using digital technology to conduct research on the preservation and revitalisation of Kyoto’s arts and culture.,This is when I came to understand digital humanities as an emerging research area. In my professional sensitivity, I felt that this is a new and valuable research direction, and with the irreversible development of the digital society will be more and more attention, representing the trend of humanities research, but also the cutting-edge of library and information science research. I carried out a more in-depth bibliometric analysis of this research field, and also found that this field is developing rapidly worldwide, more and more research themes are beginning to emerge, and all of them are with obvious interdisciplinary characteristics, which is very attractive. As a result, I have become increasingly interested and engaged.
3. Tell us about one of your DH projects
After returning from Japan, under the support of Prof. Ma Feicheng, I established China’s first Digital Humanities Centre at Wuhan University to promote and publicise the concept of digital humanities research. I have done some digital humanities projects, my favourite of which is the deep semantic annotation of Dunhuang murals in collaboration with the Dunhuang Research Academy in China. We worked with Xia Shengping, the director of the Information Centre of Dunhuang Research Academy to explore how to model the deep semantics of cultural heritage images as an example, in order to reveal the themes and cultural knowledge embedded in historic images. We fused Pannovsky’s theory of iconography in the field of iconology and the theory of subject indexing in the field of information organisation to construct an integrated model of deep semantic annotation of images. Based on this, we developed the subject headings and a series of visual annotation tools for Dunhuang mural images to control the normality of the tagged words and implement deep semantic annotation of the images. On this basis, we also explored the theory of cultural heritage data enhancement and the construction plan of cultural heritage smart data.
4. And a DH project you like?
Currently, we are working on the Yangtze River Civilisation Platform project based on the Intelligent Computing Laboratory for Cultural Heritage (Philosophy and Social Science Laboratory of the Ministry of Education). We will develop a digital platform to support the archaeological and historical research of the pre-Qin and Qin-Han eras. Using 3D modelling technology, GIS technology, and AI, we have already constructed an online historical map compilation system, as well as an intelligent conjugation system for bamboo slips and an online geographic information platform for pre-Qin and Qin tombs. We have also built a digital deduction theatre for cultural heritage, which is used for digital intelligence experiments and displaying our scientific research outcomes. We hope to use these tools and platforms to integrate the historical data related to Chu culture, and in this way change the research paradigm on Chu culture and the Yangtze River civilisation, provide a novel type of research infrastructure for digital humanities research, and promote the research, teaching, and global dissemination of Chu culture.
The creation of CDH reflects the University’s recognition of Digital Humanities as a strategically important area. The centre’s definition of DH work revolves around 6 main themes: the cultural, social, and epistemic impacts of digital technologies; digital research methodologies; computational humanities; digital libraries and archival-based research; digital performance, and exhibition; and research exploring cultural and social impacts of emerging technologies (University of Cambridge, 2024).
CCH is dedicated to advance, expend and promote Digital Humanities (DH) research and scholarship. It conducts research and facilitates collaborations with international partners, particularly with the Global South (University of Cambridge, 2024).
Teaching on DH
In response to DH as both a growing field of research and as an area of teaching, CDH offers comprehensive DH training through core research programs and research learning programs.
Administered by the Faculty of English, the Centre launched the MPhil in Digital Humanities program in 2022. The program is designed to equip humanities/ social science students with DH methodologies and skills necessary to engage effectively with digital research endeavours. Starting October 2024, the university will be running a PhD in Digital Humanities, allowing students to pursue advanced interdisciplinary projects at doctoral level, leveraging digital methods and tools.
Additionally, CDH provides a variety of research learning programs, including the Method Fellow programme, which focuses on developing and delivering innovative teaching in digital methods. Additionally, CHD offers short courses and themed workshop series that equip participants with essential skills in various aspects of DH. The CHD also runs a Data Schools that aims at democratising access to tools and methods for digital data collection and analysis, and at promoting ethical practices in digital research. (Source: University of Cambridge, 2024)
Key academics
Dr Anne Alexander, Senior Research Associate; Learning Director. Interested in ethics of big data, activist media in the Middle East and the political economy of the Internet. She was a part of the Ghost Fiction project.
Professor Caroline Bassett, Professor of Digital Humanities, a member of the Faculty of English; Fellow Corpus Christi; and Director of Cambridge Digital Humanities. Interested in digital media arts/media practice fields, makerspaces and galleries, critical theory, automation anxiety and refusal, black history and the digital humanities, algorithmic subjectivities, feminism, big data and algorithmic justice, Science fiction, media archaeology, net histories and more. She was part of the Ghost Fiction; and Intersections: Feminism, Technology and Digital Humanities projects.
Dr Leonardo Impett, Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities and convenor of the MPhil in Digital Humanities. Interested in computational and quantitative approaches to art and cultural history; critical computer vision, critical AI studies; historical/critical/cultural studies of training dataset and neural architectures; AI in image generation, contemporary art, and curation. He led the AI Forensics project.
Dr Hugo Leal, Teaching Associate at CDH for the MPhil in Digital Humanities; Research Associate at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy (MCTD) based in CRASSH. His work focuses on the misinformation and conspiracy theories.
The Centre of Digital Humanities, Cultures and Media at the University of Manchester, previously known as the Centre for Digital Humanities (DH@Manchester), is one of the UK’s largest hubs for humanities scholars. Drawing on Manchester’s rich cultural and technological heritage, the centre fosters innovative collaborations between computational sciences and humanities disciplines. It employs advanced digital methods and technologies to address cutting-edge research at the intersection of digital technology, society, and culture. Key areas of focus include spatial humanities, digital media, humanities data visualisation, gender and sexuality studies, critical algorithm studies, platform studies, digital visual culture and art, and heritage digitisation.(Source: University of Manchester, nd)
Teaching on DH
The Centre offers a variety of Digital Humanities (DH) courses. Since September 2019, it has provided an undergraduate minor program in DH, teaching digital methods such as mapping, text mining, and data visualization to explore how digital media and technology shape our lives and future. This program allows undergraduate students on single honours degrees to choose a Minor in Digital Humanities. Upon completing two DH course units, students will receive a Certificate in Digital Humanities. The program is designed to help students develop new skills, integrating technical expertise, creativity, and critical thinking—essential abilities for success in the workplace.
In 2025, the school will welcome its first cohort of BA Digital Media, Culture, and Society students. This program is designed to foster a historical and global understanding of digital technology while developing the digital skills necessary to address major challenges in media. Additionally, the Centre offers a Master’s degree in Digital Media, Culture, and Society, which equips students with the skills and knowledge to critically engage with key debates and issues in the study of digital media and technology.(Source: University of Manchester, nd).
Key Profiles
Dr Giulia Grisot, Lecturer in Digital Humanities. She specialises in the investigation of cultures and identities in literary and non-literary texts, using NLP and machine learning to examine represented space and encoded sentiments.
Dr Sam Hind, Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture and Programme Director of the MA in Digital Media, Culture and Society. His research interests include digital navigation, machine vision, algorithmic decision-making, platform (auto)mobility, and mobile play. Whereas, his expertise lies at the intersection of media studies, science and technology studies (STS), and digital geographies.
Dr Ashley Mattheis, Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture. Her expertise lies at the intersection of critical media studies, visual rhetorical criticism, and digital cultural analyses through the lens of feminist STS and Black feminist theories.
Dr Claire Reddleman, Lecturer in Digital Humanities (Contemporary Art and Digital Culture). Her research and creative interests are in maps, contemporary art, photography and digital collage, surveillance, and the critique of capitalism
Dr Luca Scholz, Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities.His research is concerned with analysing and questioning data in historical and humanistic inquiry. He combines archival research, computational methods, and visualisation to study spatial history, intellectual history, and the representation of weather and climate.
Dr Łukasz Szulc, Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture, and Programme Director of the BA in Digital Media, Culture and Society. He specialises in critical and cultural studies of digital media at the intersections of gender, sexuality and transnationalism, with a particular focus on Central and Eastern Europe, especially Poland.
Dr Joanna Taylor, Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Digital Humanities, based in the department of English Literature, American Studies, and Creative Writing. Her research bridges the frontier between literary studies, digital and environmental humanities research.
Dr Shuaishuai Wang, Lecturer in Digital Media and Culture. His research lies at the intersection of platform studies, critical algorithm studies, digital economy, and queer media.
2025年，学校将迎来第一批数字媒体、文化与社会（BA Digital Media, Culture, and Society）本科生。该课程旨在培养学生对数字技术的历史性和全球性理解，并发展解决媒体领域重大挑战所需的数字技能。此外，中心还提供数字媒体、文化与社会（Digital Media, Culture, and Society）硕士学位课程，帮助学生掌握技能和知识，批判性地参与数字媒体与技术研究中的关键辩论和问题。
我所在的中国人民大学已经开展了数字人文本硕博三个层次的专业教育，为了给学生们提供丰富的学习资源，我们建设了多模态“数字人文案例库”，目前已输入近千个案例条目，260个优秀案例，其中很多项目我都很喜欢，比如中国历代人物传记资料库（China Biographical Database, CBDB）、“影谷”（THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW）、“上海年华”（上海图书馆）、“文都时空”（南京大学）等等。我想介绍一个我和很多学生感兴趣的项目——都铎网络（The Tudor Network）。
Professor Huiling Feng, is a Doctor of Management and a doctoral supervisor based at the Digital Humanities Research Centre at Renmin University of China. She has served as the Executive Vice-President of Renmin University and is currently the Vice President of the Society of Chinese Archivists. Her research interests include archival science, digital humanities, and archival education.
1. How do you define Digital Humanities
A definition involves delineating the connotations and denotations of a concept. In my view, the connotation of Digital Humanities can be succinctly expressed as the field where digital technology and the humanities intersect. Its denotation, however, has a distinct characteristic of openness, making it neither necessary nor feasible to define it precisely. On the one hand, neither “digital” nor “humanities” has clear boundaries—the digital world is ever-changing, and the world of the humanities is vast and boundless. As the I Ching says, “civilization halts and becomes humanities,” indicating that “civilization,” encompassing various cultural phenomena of human society, is part of the humanities, showcasing its vastness. On the other hand, the diverse interweaving and merging of multiple elements from “digital” and “humanities” continuously generate new phenomena and new entities, all of which gather under the large tent of Digital Humanities, making its content and forms increasingly rich. As the multidimensional development of Digital Humanities continues, our understanding of its essence will gradually deepen, leading to a more scientifically accurate and mature abstraction of its connotation. At least for now, maintaining the openness of the concept of “Digital Humanities” is both reasonable and beneficial.
2. How did you become interested in DH?
My field of expertise is Archival Studies, and several core concepts in Archival Studies are closely related to Digital Humanities, which drew me into this field. First is the concept of “archives.” After iSchools adopted Digital Humanities as a development direction, I noticed through relevant literature and academic activities that the term “archives” (Archives) is widely used in Digital Humanities. This usage overlaps yet differs from the concept of “archives” in Archival Studies, which revealed to me new meanings of the concept of “archives” in this new field. Second is “social memory,” which is a fundamental attribute of archives and is also a focus in disciplines like history, literature, philosophy, and art, making it part of Digital Humanities. Third is the digital transformation of “archival resource development,” where its principles, pathways, tools, methods, and forms of outcomes often align with those in Digital Humanities. As original records of social life, archives are often valuable resources used in Digital Humanities projects. These encounters of concepts, theories, and methods led me to develop an increasingly strong interest in Digital Humanities, drawing me into this broad and fascinating field.
3. Tell us about one of your DH projects
For over ten years, our team has been engaged in the research and construction of “digital memory.” Since 2013, we have been developing the “Beijing Memory” digital resource platform (http://www.bjjy.cn). The ancient city of Beijing has over 3,000 years of history and nearly 900 years as a capital. Its rich and long-standing cultural heritage has not escaped the erosion of time, and we hope to recreate the past of this great city as authentically as possible in the digital world. The basic structure of “Beijing Memory” includes a “front-end” and a “back-end.” The “front-end” uses a website cluster to conduct digital narratives, creating a cultural website for each topic. Based on extensive literature, we use methods like text, images, videos, animations, modeling, games, and data visualization to vividly present its historical context and features, akin to a series of digital thematic histories. The “back-end” involves building a multimodal database of relevant literature and materials. Following knowledge organization standards, we gather, process, organize, and store these resources to achieve the aggregation and intelligent retrieval of Beijing’s historical and cultural resources. This is a long-term and ongoing project that applies a variety of Digital Humanities methods. Currently, 23 thematic websites are online, and based on these, we have developed books, digital publications, digital collectibles (NFTs), offline light and shadow exhibitions, cross-temporal teaching scenarios, and other derivative products. The project has attracted dozens of teachers, hundreds of students, and several digital cultural companies, contributing significantly to the innovative exploration of preserving and transmitting the history and culture of a major city across time and space.
4. And a DH project you like?
At Renmin University of China, where I work, we have already launched a Digital Humanities program offering master’s and doctoral degrees. To provide students with rich learning resources, we have built a multimodal “Digital Humanities Case Library,” which currently contains nearly a thousand case entries, including 260 outstanding cases. There are many projects that I like, such as the China Biographical Database (CBDB), “The Valley of the Shadow,” “Shanghai Memory” (Shanghai Library), “Wendu Time-Space” (Nanjing University), among others. I would like to introduce a project that both I and many students find intriguing—the Tudor Network.
This project was a collaborative effort by researchers with different academic specialties from various universities in the UK and Germany. It involves data analysis of 120,000 letters from the Tudor period (15th-16th centuries) held by the UK National Archives. These letters span nearly a century and involve more than 20,000 people. The project conducted text mining on all the letters, using metrics like the number of letters received and sent, nodes, and other indicators to perform similarity sorting, overall trend line analysis, outlier analysis, and more. This revealed the characteristics of each person’s communication patterns, including their correspondents and frequency, as well as the complex relationships between correspondents. Further analysis of the content of the letters unveiled the hidden history within them. We appreciate this project for its unique historical and documentary value. The project team awakened letters that had been dormant for over 500 years, conducted rigorous scientific analysis and visualization of the data within, and reconstructed a little-known segment of history. Some of the intricate and surprising historical facts uncovered are truly astonishing.
Digital Humanities (DH) Hub at the University of Reading Library
Year
2022
Short Description
Originating from the Digital Humanities Project, spearheaded by Professor Roberta Gilchrist, the Digital Humanities Hub is a collaborative endeavour situated within the university’s library. Established under Professor Gilchrist’s leadership in 2022, the DH Hub at the University of Reading is committed to fostering research innovation in Digital Humanities (DH) while nurturing ambition and encouraging experimentation within the University’s Heritage & Creativity theme (Oliva, 2022). This hub defines DH as the intersection of digital technologies, Arts and Humanities, and scholarly communication. It offers a range of support towards digital research, from offering DH knowledge and skills to assistance in developing research proposals and grant applications. Moreover, the hub’s ‘Community of Practice’ provides a platform for university researchers, staff, and postgraduate students interested in DH to collaborate, share ideas, and discuss the challenges and opportunities of digital research. Its overarching objectives include elevating the quality of Arts and Humanities research at Reading and driving innovation through DH principles, digital tools, and methodologies. (Source: University of Reading, nd).
Key Profiles
Dr Mara Oliva, Digital Humanities Academic Champion, Associate Professor in History and Lecturer in Modern American History. She leads the Community of Practice and can provide mentoring and subject-specific advice for digital research projects. Expert in the political history of the US in the 20th century, with a particular focus on the interface between domestic and foreign policy.
Professor Roberta Gilchrist, Research Dean, Heritage & Creativity, Professor of Archaeology. Expert in medieval sacred heritage, religion and gender, monasticism, magic, death and burial, health and the life course, as well as key archaeological studies on Norwich Cathedral and Glastonbury Abbey. She established the DH hub at the University of Reading.
