Dr Antonina Puchkovskaia is a Lecturer in Digital Humanities at King’s College London at the Department of Digital Humanities. Expert in spatial humanities, digital public humanities, as well as cultural heritage data representation and visualisation.
1. How do you define Digital Humanities?
I always define Digital Humanities through the community of digital humanists who are willing to experiment with interdisciplinary methodologies applied to humanities scholarship. By pushing the boundaries and working at the frontier, this approach helps to see the bigger picture and makes the research more transparent, accessible, and interactive.
2. How did you become interested in DH?
Being a cultural historian by training, I landed my first academic job at a very STEM-based university and found myself quite lonely among computer scientists and web developers. So, I started googling whether there was any intersection between humanities and information technologies. That’s how I first came across ‘digital humanities.’ I then participated in NYC DH Week, where I met the community and felt very inspired. This experience motivated me to propose the launch of a small DH centre to senior management. This initiative evolved into an international and interdisciplinary effort, culminating in exciting collaborative DH projects and the launch of the first MSc in Digital Humanities in Saint Petersburg.
3. Tell us about one of your DH projects?
My very first DH project as a PI was St. Retrospect, an interactive mapping project aimed at representing culturally significant landmarks in Saint Petersburg. The visualisation is structured around the relationships between locations and historical figures, supplemented by historical overviews of the sites and the notable people associated with them. To collect data, we applied machine learning algorithms, such as NER (Named Entity Recognition), to extract locations and names from openly available digitised and machine-readable sources and then verified this information through crowd-sourcing. As an open-source project, its mission is not only to raise awareness about culturally significant sites within the local community but also to engage the community in evaluating historic locations and collecting relevant data.
4. Tell us a DH project you particularly like?
This small-scale project, Pages of Early Soviet Performance, holds significant importance despite its size. The project utilises machine learning to generate multiple datasets from early Soviet illustrated periodicals related to the performing arts. The project’s importance lies in its attempt to answer crucial questions, such as: what if this collection could be accessed as data? what patterns—of words, phrases, or images—can be discovered across the entire collection? By employing computer vision techniques and training a YOLO (You Only Look Once) real-time object detection model, textual and image data are being produced to facilitate new avenues of research on Soviet culture during the first decades after the October Revolution. Although this may seem like a niche project, it significantly contributes to the methods and approaches for working with digitised sources, extracting valuable data, and making it publicly accessible to foster further research.
尽管这是一个小规模项目，但「早期苏联表演的页面」项目具有重要意义。该项目利用机器学习从与表演艺术相关的早期苏联插图期刊中生成多个数据集。其重要性在于试图回答关键问题，如：如果这个收藏能作为数据访问，会怎样？在整个收藏中可以发现什么模式——单词、短语或图像？通过使用计算机视觉技术和训练一个YOLO（You Only Look Once）实时对象检测模型，生成文本和图像数据，以促进对十月革命后最初几十年苏联文化的新研究途径。尽管这似乎是一个小众项目，但它在处理数字化资源、提取有价值数据和公开获取以促进进一步研究的方法和方法方面做出了重要贡献。
Dr Arianna Ciula is the Director & Senior Research Software Analyst of King’s Digital Lab. She is experienced in digital humanities research and teaching, research management, as well as digital research infrastructures.
1. How do you define Digital Humanities?
Digital Humanities is an interdisciplinary field that studies the integration of computational methods and software engineering processes in the arts and humanities research and education as well as in the cultural heritage sector and creative practices. Increasingly, it addresses wider issues around the design and use of digital technologies and their impact on digital cultures and societies.
2. How did you become interested in DH?
As a teenager, I enjoyed scientific disciplines – math in particular – but was also fascinated by ancient cultures and societies. I was lucky in high school to be part of an experimental programme that combined classics with STEM disciplines including computer sciences. I went on to get a degree in communications studies with a specialization in technologies to then follow up with a PhD that combined manuscript studies with software-intensive research. This is when I found out that an active international humanities computing community existed; I enrolled in an MA at KCL on those topics in parallel with my PhD and became active in Digital Humanities projects and networks.
3. Tell us about one of your DH projects?
I have been involved in many projects over the years, but one I would like to highlight relates to my research on one of the methodologies of cross and inter-disciplinary collaboration which I believe is foundational in DH, namely (data) modelling. This activity has been analysed mainly from a STEM perspective but it is the research in DH that makes emerge the epistemological value of modelling: by modelling objects and phenomena into data structures we know things differently. A collaborative project which resulted in a book (Modelling between Digital and Humanities: Thinking in Practice) reflected on the topic by making emerge the importance of language in modelling as well as its pragmatic dimension (modelling is creative and contingent). I hope the book demonstrated how humanities disciplines can give an important contribution to the conceptualisation of modelling specifically and more in general to how we shape our conceptual and physical world with the design and use of digital technologies.
4. And a DH project you particularly like?
This is a project I have bene involved in only tangentially to support its funding and delivery. It is called Digital Ghost Hunt. Led by KDL Senior RSE, Elliott Hall, it was a very inventive collaboration with theatre and performance professionals, schools and pupils, cultural heritage institutions and the public. By integrating digital technologies into well designed experiences, it showcases the imaginative power of collaboration across sectors and generations and the value of thinking creatively and of tinkering with digital technologies.
Founded in the 2020, the Centre for Digital Inquiry (CDI) is a cross-faculty research centre within the University of Warwick; it brings together humanities and social science research through critical digital research (Centre for Digital Inquiry, 2022). The centre develops and engages with digital research techniques and tools, and takes up the digital as a substantive critical topic, contributing to the existing knowledge of culture and society.
The CDI approaches the digital as a complex and multifaceted domain. On one hand, they acknowledge the vast array of computational technologies that fall under the umbrella of the digital, including smartphones, search engines, text mining software, and recommender systems. These technologies represent opportunities for innovation and research, offering exciting possibilities for exploration and development. On the other hand, the CDI recognizes that the digital realm is not without its problems. They view the digital as ‘problematic’, notably in its association with challenges such as e-waste, trolling, misinformation, surveillance, micro-tasking, platformisation, and drone warfare.
By approaching the digital as both a domain of technological advancement and a domain fraught with challenges, the CDI adopts a balanced perspective that acknowledges the opportunities and risks inherent in digital technologies. This approach allows researchers to engage with the complexities of the digital world and work towards solutions that promote positive outcomes for society. (Source: University of Warwick, 2023)
Key CDI People
Dr Bryan Brazeau, Associate Professor Liberal Arts, interested in the intersections between the digital, history of the book, early modern literature and poetics, ontological affordances, and digital pedagogy.
Dr Carolina Bandinelli, Associate Professor Media and Creative Industries, and Co-Director of the Centre of Digital Inquiry, is interested in the digital culture of love. Part of the Digital Love in the Time of Covid project.
Dr Godwin Yeboah, Senior Research Software Engineer. His background is interdisciplinary in nature cutting across research software engineering and the application of geospatial technologies in research or teaching, SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts for People and the Economy), computer science, GIS, geoinformatics and photogrammetry, geodetic/geomatic engineering, and industrial experiences in software/geomatic engineering.
Dr Michael Dieter, Associate Professor in the Centre of Interdisciplinary Methodologies, and Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Inquiry, interested in developing inventive methods for interface criticism, genealogies of media at the intersection of aesthetic and political thought, contemporary media art and publishing practices after digitisation. Part of the COVID-19 App Store and Data Flow Ecologies project.
Dr Nerea Calvillo, Associate Professor in the Centre of Interdisciplinary Methodologies, interested in the material, technological, political and social dimensions of environmental pollution.
Prof Mark Knights, Professor in the Department of History. Interested in the period 1600-1850.
Dr Naomi Vogt, Assistant Professor of modern and contemporary art history. Interested in art and visual culture of the late 20th and 21st century; moving image within history; documentary practices; the post-internet; visual anthropology; artists’ films; rituals; the circulation of tropes and iconographies; art and knowledge.
Beyond the centre, the university’s Digital Arts and Humanities Lab supports the use of technology in Arts and Humanities. Notably, it offers Digital Humanities Certificates for Post Graduate Researchers and Staff by offering hybrid courses that targets enhancing digital technologies in research, teaching, outreach and beyond the university.
Dr Barbara McGillivray is a Lecturer in Digital Humanities and Cultural Computation at King’s College London at the Department of Digital Humanities. Expert in computational and quantitative methods and research questions in the Humanities.
1. How do you define Digital Humanities?
For me, Digital Humanities are a methodological laboratory for the humanities, where researchers can experiment with new computational and quantitative methods to answer old and new questions in the humanities.
2. How did you become interested in DH?
I became interested in DH during my PhD in computational linguistics, when I worked on adapting techniques from computational linguistics to the study of the Latin language. I gradually realised the potential of using these methods beyond linguistics research, which has given the opportunity to work in many interdisciplinary projects.
3. Tell us about one of your DH projects?
One of my favourite projects took place in 2018-2019 and was funded by a small grant by The Alan Turing Institute (described here). I put together a team involving two statisticians, a digital humanist, and a classicist to study the change in meaning of words in ancient Greek using Bayesian statistics. It was the first time I led such a diverse team to study an old phenomenon with new methods.
4. Tell us about a DH project you particularly like?
I have worked on historical newspapers and I particularly like the Impresso project, which has digitized and enriched a vast collection of European historical newspapers, enabling researchers and the public to explore rich archives through advanced text mining and analysis tools. I like it because it democratizes access to valuable historical materials, fostering new ways of doing historical research.
In 2020, the university established the campus-level entity ‘Peking University Digital Humanities Research Center’ and simultaneously formed the Peking University Digital Humanities Open Laboratory. Starting from March 2022, it began accepting donations from ByteDance to engage in research on the intelligent information processing and utilisation of ancient book resources (Research Centre for Digital Humanities of PKU, 2024). Following this donation, the laboratory was renamed ‘Peking University-ByteDance Digital Humanities Open Laboratory’ and operates under the Institute of Artificial Intelligence at Peking University. Current research includes natural language processing, deep learning, ontology and knowledge graph, information visualization, interaction design, and user information behaviour research. In addition, the Research Center for Digital Humanities of PKU is an interdisciplinary research institution where research mentors from various departments of Peking University jointly guide students in the laboratory, such as History, Computer Science and Technology, Chinese Language and Literature, Foreign Languages and Literatures, Earth and Space Sciences, Philosophy, and Information Management.
Teaching
Peking University’s Digital Humanities Center primarily focuses on advancing research and education at the doctoral level, engaging PhD students with comprehensive supervision from a diverse pool of professors across various disciplines. While the center also hosts workshops and training programs open to a wider audience, including graduate and senior undergraduate students, and young teachers.
Doctoral students are jointly supervised by professors from various disciplines including the Department of Information Management, Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Department of Philosophy, Department of Chinese Language and Literature, Department of History, School of Foreign Languages, and others.
Key Academics
Prof Jun Wang, Professor at the Department of Information Management at Peking University. He also serves as the director of the Peking University Digital Humanities Research Center.
Dr Qi Sun, associate professor with a dual appointment at the Institute of Computational Linguistics. Her primary research interests lie in the fields of natural language processing, computational linguistics, and corpus linguistics.
Dr Hao Yang, assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and serves at the Center for Compilation and Research of Confucian Classics.
Dr Hong Wei, assistant professor with a Ph.D. in Computer Science. He holds positions at both the Department of Information Management and the Peking University Digital Humanities Research Center.
The ‘Song-Yuan Study Case Knowledge Graph System’ has carried out text processing and analysis on the 2.4 million characters of the ‘Song-Yuan Study Case’. It extracted entities such as people, time, locations, works, and their complex semantic relationships from the study case to construct a knowledge graph. This system provides functionalities such as visualization, interactive browsing, and semantic queries, enabling users to explore the relationships and information within the text in a more intuitive and structured manner.
A visualization analysis system for the relationships between similar books and bibliographies among catalogues of ancient Chinese texts, developed jointly by the Peking University Digital Humanities Research Center and the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Jointly undertaken by the National Library and the Peking University Digital Humanities Research Center, from August 2021 to August 2022.
This knowledge base system combines interactive visualization technology with semantic correlation techniques to enable multidimensional querying and exploration of the ancient texts included in the “National Catalogue of Precious Ancient Books.” It showcases the distribution of valuable ancient texts across different types of literature, scripts, historical periods, versions, and geographical regions. This aims to highlight Chinese culture, providing guidance and clues for the public to understand and study Chinese classics.
Jointly undertaken by the National Library of China Publishing House （NLP Press, nd） and the Peking University Digital Humanities Research Center, from August 2021 to August 2022. The overall goal of the ‘Yongle Encyclopedia’ High-Definition Image Database System is to utilise high-definition images and corresponding texts of the ‘Yongle Encyclopedia’ as its core materials. This is supplemented with information on the format, compilation process, historical context, and dissemination of the ‘Yongle Encyclopedia’ itself. By employing digital humanities techniques and leveraging the expressive power of multimedia dissemination, the system aims to fully present the cultural, literary, and artistic value of the ‘Yongle Encyclopedia’.
The platform gathers full-text data from over two hundred classic works of ancient Chinese philosophy, providing detailed information about their respective eras, authors, and more. Utilizing deep learning algorithms, it automatically segments and analyses vocabulary, identifies sentence structures, and thus explores the temporal and spatial dimensions of the literature. The aim is to elucidate the evolution of ideas and culture within the intricacies of words and sentences, serving as a valuable aid to humanities research.
Funded by the Publishing Bureau of the Central Propaganda Department, in 2020. Second Edition of the ‘China Biographical Database’ (CBDB) WEB Retrieval System, developed from 2010 to 2020. The China Biographical Database (CBDB) is a freely accessible relational database. As of May 2020, it contained approximately 470,000 biographical entries spanning from the 7th to the 19th century. Apart from serving as a reference for biographical information, the database also aims to facilitate statistical and spatial analysis.
An output of the ‘Peking University-ByteDance Digital Humanities Open Laboratory’ this platform is dedicated to the intelligent development and utilization of ancient book resources, aimed to develop a ‘Recognizing Classics’ reading platform based on intelligent processing of ancient texts. This platform will be freely accessible to the public, providing access to and utilization of digitized ancient book resources. The ‘Recognizing Classics’ platform aims to explore various aspects such as retrieval methods, variant character support, text quality, reading assistance, and browsing experience. The goal is to establish a platform for reading ancient texts that is characterized by high-quality text, rich functionality, and excellent reading experience.
Other info
Digital Humanities Summer Workshops, taking place every year on different topic. The most recent ones include:
Peking University, Harvard University, and Princeton University have jointly established the Digital Humanities Summer Workshop’. This program, open to students worldwide, is based on face-to-face teaching that rotates between the campuses of Peking University, Harvard University, and Princeton University. The first joint workshop was held at Peking University in early August 2023, with the theme ‘Humanistic Innovation in the Intelligent Information Environment’, with both humanists and artificial intelligence experts co-teaching sessions. The course was open to graduate students and senior undergraduate students with independent research capabilities, as well as young teachers interested in the subject. This session mainly used materials from Chinese history and ancient thought history as experimental materials.
The Peking University Digital Humanities Center and the Institute of Artificial Intelligence at Peking University held a ‘Digital Humanities Summer Workshop’ from July 18th to July 30th, 2022. The course included students from various disciplines, including literature, history, philosophy, art, archaeology, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, and software engineering. In addition to lectures, the workshop organized interdisciplinary seminars and research practices to cultivate interdisciplinary talents who possess both humanities literacy and information technology skills.
The ‘Peking University Digital Humanities Workshop’ is a specialized online training course offered by the Peking University Digital Humanities Research Center. The course taught commonly used methods and tools in digital humanities, aiming to cultivate awareness and capabilities in applying computational methods to solve problems in humanities research. The workshop series consisted of six sessions, with lectures delivered by six domain experts from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, the National Library of Berlin in Germany, National Taiwan University, and Peking University.
Specializing in history and cultural artefact research (CIGH Exeter, 2017), the University of Exeter established the Digital Humanities Lab in 2017. This state-of-the-art facility houses a Digital Humanities (DH) team, dedicated to offering expertise to advancing research and teaching through academic collaboration, training and research seminars, and sector-leading facilities for digital investigation and engagement. The lab offers expertise, equipment, and support for examining, preserving, and analysing historical, literary, and visual materials in alignment with the university’s expertise in international cultural heritage and creative past research. The lab’s establishment reflects the growing importance of humanities research and the integration of digital methods into scholarly practices.
While the DH lab is not an academic department, its collaboration with researchers from the Faculty of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences supports digital elements in traditional humanities research, fostering interdisciplinary exploration and innovation at the intersection of technology and humanistic inquiry.
The lab’s activities develop along four areas: collaboration on digital research projects and resources, grant development and data management support, website development and hosting, and digital skills training, including digitization services. In line with its goal of incorporating DH into teaching and research, the lab provides equipment, facilities, and digitization spaces for loans and supports off-campus use and specialist activities. Moreover, it offers skills training and digitalization experiences that can be integrated into teaching courses, along with internship, volunteering, and job opportunities for individuals interested in gaining digital and practical skills.
At the forefront of innovation, the lab encompasses new methods as they are developed, often deploying technological advances in science and engineering, and strive to contribute knowledge and best practice back to the global DH community.
Presently, in alignment with the College of Arts & Humanities Digital Strategy for 2021-26, the lab has been successfully driving digital literacy through various training and support programs. Additionally, its efforts to incorporate DH into teaching and research align with the key theme of ‘Nurturing Hybrid Humanists’ within the strategy. Themes such as ‘Intelligent analysis of documents, artefacts, and environment’ and ‘Telling New Stories with Data’ further align with the lab’s support for international cultural heritage and creative past research. Lastly, the lab’s development of inclusive and accessible digital resources, along with its emphasis on holistic approaches to digital labour, addresses the impacts of digitized culture, reflecting the strategy’s theme of ‘Addressing the Impacts of Digitized Culture’. (Source: University of Exeter, nd)
Teaching on DH
While the lab does not teach or offer regular undergraduate and postgraduate DH modules, it offers DH trainings in the form of training workshops, webinars, and research seminars. From ‘Managing Humanities Data’ and ‘Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI)’ workshops that run throughout the autumn and spring term, to the AI & Humanities, and the Space & Place in the Humanities Forum, to AHRC iDAH Digital Skills Training Workshops and Webinars Series.These resources cater to participants at all levels, from beginners to advanced (University of Exeter, nd).
The DH Team
Prof Leif Isaksen, Professor in Digital Humanities and Director of Digital Humanities at the University of Exeter, interested in the development of geographic thought and representation in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and the emerging role of the Web as a transformational medium for communicating and connecting complex information.
Dr Charlotte Tupman, Senior Research Fellow in Digital Humanities. Expert in Latin epigraphy and the application of digital technologies to study ancient texts. Interested in Machine learning for the analysis of ancient textual materials, Lettercutting processes in the Roman world, Roman funerary commemoration, and Linked Open Data for humanities source materials
Dr Elizabeth Williamson, Senior Research Fellow, Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, interested in the early modern archives and epistolary culture, especially in a diplomatic and governmental context; the practical and theoretical concerns of the Digital Humanities; and textual scholarship and digital publication.
Charlotte Tupman 博士, 数字人文高级研究员, 专攻拉丁铭文，擅长应用数字技术研究古代文本。 她对机器学习在古代文本材料分析中的应用、罗马世界的刻字工艺、罗马墓葬纪念以及人文学科源资料的链接开放数据感兴趣。她是由英国艺术与人文研究委员会（AHRC）和德国研究基金会（DFG）资助的研究项目“连接晚期古代”的联合调查员。
Elizabeth Williamson 博士, 人文、艺术和社会科学学院高级研究员。她在项目管理和数字资源创建方面拥有丰富的经验，并支持现有项目和未来招标开发。她特别关注早期现代档案和书信文化，尤其是在外交和政府背景下；对数字人文的实践和理论关注；以及文本学研究和数字出版。她对数字可视化、数字修复以及利用增强制造技术进行文化遗产保护感兴趣。
The Center for Digital Humanities at Wuhan University was established in 2011, making it the first digital humanities research centre in mainland China and one of the five founding members of the centerNet Asia-Pacific Alliance. In 2021, the Intelligent Computing Laboratory for Cultural Heritage (ICLCH) at Wuhan University was approved by China’s Ministry of Education among the first batch of Key Laboratory of Philosophy and Social Sciences, and it was the only one approved in the field of cultural heritage. The ICLCH dates to 2011 with the establishment of Centre for Digital Humanities at Wuhan University, which was incorporated into the Big Data Research Institute at Wuhan University in 2018. After 10 years development, the ICLCH has grown into a large-scale discipline-crossing research institution integrating culture-related disciplines such as information management, history, ancient literature, and intelligent computing technology disciplines such as surveying and mapping, computer science, and artificial intelligence. The ICLCH is dedicated to organising cutting-edge research on the digital and intelligent activation and utilisation of cultural heritage.
Adhering to a research philosophy that emphasizes the fusion of humanities and sciences, data-driven empowerment, collaborative contributions, and innovation through experimentation, the ICLCH consolidates the expertise of “Information Resource Management” and “Surveying and Mapping Science and Technology” – two of Wuhan University’s distinguished disciplines, along with other traditional fields. The ICLCH is structured into five specialized research divisions: intelligent data processing for cultural heritage, advanced organization and reconstruction of ancient texts, computational imaging and analysis of cultural artifacts, virtual representation of expansive archaeological sites, and GIS applications in cultural heritage. With a foundation in cutting-edge technologies like big data, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality, and grounded in digital humanities theories, the lab is dedicated to addressing challenges in cultural heritage, such as its insufficient protection, ambiguous interpretations, and untapped value. The ICLCH not only broadens the horizons of digital humanities but also bolsters original innovation in humanities and social sciences. Furthermore, it paves a viable route and offers a comprehensive model for the inventive evolution and growth of China’s rich traditional culture.
Senior Professor in humanities and social sciences at Wuhan University. He has held roles such as Dean of the School of Information Management and Director of the Information Resources Research Centre. His research is about Information science and management theory, big data analysis, knowledge organisation and networks, digital information resource management and digital economy, information behaviour, and informetrics.
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.
He served as the vice dean of the Big Data Institute at Wuhan University, vice-chair of the Database Professional Committee of the China Computer Federation, and member of the Big Data Expert Committee of the China Computer Federation.
Key Projects
Projects and achievements in the Center for Digital Humanities fall into four categories: Research Projects, involving digital restoration and geographical data integration of ancient Chinese sites; Platform Tools, focusing on the development of digital platforms for manuscript organization, image data integration, and AI-based knowledge graph construction; Data Resources, which includes the accumulation of extensive cultural heritage data, such as digital images, texts, historical maps, and 3D models; Digital Interpretation Theatre, an interdisciplinary space utilizing advanced technology for immersive cultural heritage experiences and research.
Research Projects
Research on Resources Development and Service of Cultural Heritage Smart Data
Research, Development and Application of Intelligent Exhibition Technology of National Archives of Publications and Culture Collection Digital Resources
Research on Construction of Digital Twin Data System and Data Mining Technology
Research on Digital Memory Reconstruction Project of Ancient Books
Research on Multimodal Knowledge Graph Construction of Dunhuang Mogao Caves
Platforms and Tools
Comprehensive Digital Platform of Bamboo and Silk Manuscripts
Cultural Heritage Image Data Integration Platform
Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graph Production Platform
Dunhuang Mural Thesaurus
Model Painter
Graphic Correlation Annotation System
Data Resources
The ICLCH accumulated various cultural heritage data, including digital images, ancient texts, historical maps, 3D relic models, and domain knowledge graphs. For example, Foundational Databases includes over 4,700 subject terms from Dunhuang murals and around 1.25 million RDF triples in the Chinese Poetry Knowledge Graph. And the Image Databases Contains 25,000 high-resolution images of murals from Mogao and Yulin Caves, movable relics, and over 200,000 images of Chinese cultural artifacts from overseas museums.
Digital Interpretation Theatre
The Digital Deduction Theatre for Cultural Heritage is an innovative, interdisciplinary cutting-edge experimental space designed and built by the ICLCH at Wuhan University. It also stands as the foundational methodology for the digital revitalisation of cultural heritage. With advanced imaging modelling, large-screen data interaction, three-dimensional immersive projection, and XR virtual storytelling technologies, this theatre integrates methodologies from humanities, information management, literary arts, and artificial intelligence. Its ambition is to establish a holistic innovation chain comprised of “Digital Incubation – Fusion of Virtual and Reality – Collaborative Deduction – Immersive Experience – Intelligent Services.” This initiative is dedicated to digitally documenting. deconstructing. artistically expressing. and intelligently interacting with China’s outstanding traditional culture, supporting the research, teaching, and dissemination of the revitalization of cultural heritage.
Teaching
The ICLCH offers a variety of teaching activities that blend traditional humanities scholarship with digital technologies, especially for PhD students. These activities include hosting forums, seminars, and workshops, such as the Global Forum for Chinese Doctoral Students in Digital Humanities and the Yuehu Frontier Forum on Digital Intelligence for Liberal Arts. The ICLCH also organizes specialised academic seminars, providing platforms for interdisciplinary research, design innovation, and the exploration of new methodologies in digital humanities.
King’s Digital Lab (KDL), it is a Research Software Engineering laboratory within King’s College London Faculty of Arts and Humanities (A&H)
Year of Foundation
2015
Short Description
Since the late 70s, King’s College London has applied computational methods to Humanities research becoming deeply rooted in the digital humanities sector from the 90s, initially with the establishment of the ‘Research Unit in Humanities Computing’, then ‘Centre for Computing in the Humanities’ (CCH) and later within the Department of Digital Humanities (DDH). To consolidate the development arm initially part of the department, in 2015 the Faculty of Arts & Humanities (A&H) founded King’s Digital Lab(KDL), a Research Software Engineering Laboratory now in its consolidation phase (Smithies, 2016; Ciula, Caton and Mellen, 2023). It consists of a team of Research Software experts with a critical understanding of the integration of digital technologies in arts and humanities scholarship, cultural heritage sector and creative practices. The team co-design, develop, maintain and extend software and associated products (from digital publications to data visualizations and immersive experiences) to enable diverse research and impact activities (Ciula, Caton and Mellen, 2023).
The lab’s primary focus is to increase capacity priamry in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities (A&H) and consolidate as a leading research facility for digital production, analysis, archiving, and consultancy within the A&H domain (UKRI, 2023).
Besides delivering its objective of supporting A&H’s digital research work, KDL supports a range of functions in collaboration with research and industry partners (UKRI, 2023). This includes designing and implementing systems, infrastructures, tools and processes necessary for producing a range of digital scholarly outputs (KCL, nd). Additionally, KDL offers expert consultancy as well as design and delivery of guest lecturers or other expert training and mentorship. In alignment with its objective to supporting the delivery of high-quality digital research, KDL also allocates a modest amount of resources to non-grant-funded activities within the Faculty and the college (KCL, nd)
Following a major infrastructure refresh in September 2021, when its founding director James Smithies left the role, KDL re-freshed the Lab Missions & Activities (2022-2025) in collaboration with Faculty senior management (Ciula, Caton and Mellen, 2023). The document summarised KDL’s ‘primary value and market position lie in its contribution to high-quality grant-funded projects with significant technical requirements’, leading KDL to continue to evolve and adapt to the changing digital research landscape (Ciula, Caton and Mellen, 2023).
At present, KDL website lists 67 projects the lab has worked on and contributed towards. However the list of resourcesd it maintains, including legacy is even more extensive (Archiving and Sustanability, nd). KDL is particularly interested in areas such as Digital Creativity, AI and Machine Learning, and Indigenous Digital Humanities (KCL, nd). With a diverse team comprising members from various backgrounds, KDL ensures the delivery of high-quality digital research across the A&H domain (KDL, 2015). Its collaborations extend beyond the Faculty and KCL, encompassing partnerships across the College and with other higher education institutions, libraries, museums, cultural heritage bodies, and the performing arts and creative industries sector (KCL, nd).
Key KDL people
Dr Arianna Ciula, Director & Senior Research Software Analyst , experienced in digital humanities research and teaching, research management, and digital research infrastructures.
In June 2017, over ten young faculty members from Nanjing University formed a ‘Digital Humanities’ group and organized a significant academic conference titled ‘Digital Humanities: Exploring the Frontiers in the Big Data Era’, which had a wide impact in China.
In January 2018, leading experts and scholars in the field of digital humanities convened at Nanjing University to discuss the establishment of the Digital Humanities Initiative (Centre) as an interdisciplinary and international research platform under the Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences (IAS). They decided to launch various teaching and research activities and collaborate with Nanjing University Press to publish a series of books on digital humanities. The centre aimed to promote, teach, research, and publish digital humanities activities by leveraging the resources of Nanjing University’s High-level Research Institute and its publishing house.
The DH centre offers regular general education courses, as well as workshops led by domestic and international experts to provide introductory training in digital humanities for humanities and social science students across various universities. They also aimed to publish an annual report on digital humanities research in China, conduct case studies, and enhance international cooperation and participation in conferences to promote Chinese digital humanities globally. For example, in April 2019 they held a workshop on ‘Spatial Humanities and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)’ involving scholars from different Chinese universities working on Chinese history, world history, archaeology, cultural heritage and museum studies, human geography, Chinese language, architecture, architectural history, art history, musicology, archival studies, and political science.
Teaching
Although these initiatives do not offer degrees, they provide online MOOC courses, and workshops that cater to learners seeking to augment their understanding of digital tools and methodologies within humanities research. Additionally, the International Programs at Nanjing University’s School of Information Management feature a track in Digital Humanities, emphasizing the application of emerging technologies to traditional humanistic inquiry.
Innovation Thinking and Methodology: Digital Humanities as New Approach to Humanities focuses on digital humanities as an emerging and potential-rich academic discipline. It introduces students to basic theories, classic cases, and practical methods in digital humanities. The course, taught by professors from different departments, encourages interdisciplinary learning and aims to develop innovative thinking and problem-solving skills in the context of humanities and arts research using digital tools and methodologies.
This DH center offers workshops, such as Spatial Humanities and GIS Workshop. It includes topics like spatial humanities, GIS in urban historical geography, and the reconstruction of historical spatial stages using GIS. The course integrates a wide array of map materials, showcasing various GIS interfaces and applications in historical and cultural studies. This initiative reflects the university’s emphasis on integrating digital technologies with humanities research.
The International Programs of the School of Information Management at Nanjing University includes an Information Resources Management (IRM) program, which offers two major tracks: Information Management and Data Analytics (IM&DA) and Digital Humanities (DH). The DH track focuses on applying emerging technologies to traditional areas of humanistic inquiry.
Key Academics
Dr Jing Chen, Associate Professor in School of Arts, specializes in areas related to the Digital Humanities Initiative.
Prof Tao Wang, Professor in the Department of History with interests in the History of Christianity, German History, and Digital History.
Dr Gang Chen, Associate Professor in the Department of Geographic Information Science, with research specialties in historical geographic information and applied GIS development.
Dr Chao Min, Lecturer, focused on Information Management Science.
Prof Zuming Cheng, Professor in the Department of History with specialization of the History of Social Economics in the Republic of China period, Standard of Living, Education Acquisition and Social Strata.
The project ‘Historical Geography of Six Dynasties Jiankang’ focuses on exploring fundamental scientific questions related to historical geographic information of the region and city. It aims to establish a specialised database and WebGIS system for Six Dynasties Nanjing, improve GIS models, and delve into the electronic compilation of ‘Nanjing Historical Atlas’. The project also includes systems for full-text search of ‘Jiankang Records’, historical place names, archaeological sites, cultural relics, and 3D displays of tomb inscriptions from the Six Dynasties period.
The ‘Digital Historiography’ project at Nanjing University, initiated in 2017, focuses on the intersection of digital technology and historical studies. It encompasses the promotion, research, and service aspects of digital historiography, with a teaching practice that started in 2016. The project is geared towards history students and adopts a project-oriented process in teaching. It aims to explore the network writing of history and involves various research topics. This project reflects the integration of digital tools and methods in historical research and education.
The ‘Chinese Commercial Advertisement Archive’ project at Nanjing University focuses on building an online archive of historical Chinese advertisements. This project includes over 18,700 high-quality digital images of advertisements from important commercial newspapers in five major Chinese cities. It aims to explore various aspects of advertisements, including their content, imagery, and the cultural and social norms they reflect. The project employs digital humanities tools like text mining and image analysis to understand historical consumer culture, gender norms, and the evolution of advertising language and styles.
King’s College London has a rich history of research in the digital humanities (DH) field, dating back to the early 1970s. During this period, computing centre staff at King’s collaborated with academics, providing assistance in tasks such as generating concordances and creating thesaurus listings, marking the start of ‘Humanities Computing’ at the university. The arrival of Professor Roy Wibsey, a Professor of German in 1971 played a pivotal role in the development of humanities computing at Kings (KCL, 2020; Dunn, 2020). In 1973, King’s hosted the inaugural meeting of the Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing (ALLC), where Wisbey was elected as the first Secretary of the ALLC. Holding the position of Vice-Principle at King’s in the 1980s, Wisbey proposed the formation of a ‘Humanities and Information Management’ group within the restructured Computing Centre.
The subsequent arrival of Professor Harold Short in 1988 as the Assistant Director of Computing Service for Humanities and Information Management further propelled the centre’s advancement (Short, Nyhan, Welsh and Salmon, 2012). In 1992, Professor Short officially founded ‘The Centre for Computing in the Humanities’ (CCH) as a joint initiative of the School of Humanities and Information Service & Systems (Centre for Computing in Humanities, 2018). In 2002, CCH became an independent academic department within the School of Humanities, serving as both a teaching department as well as a research centre (Dunn, 2020). King’s CCH is therefore among, if not one of the first institutes that offer DH courses, incorporating digital methods into humanities studies. Together with Professor William McCarty, they developed the PhD in Digital Humanities at King’s in 2005 (McCarty, 2012; KCL, nd).
By 2010, the interdisciplinary nature of Digital Humanities doctoral research gained recognition, and in 2011 the Centre became the Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) (McCarty, 2012). Since then, DDH has continuously grown in its research and teaching endeavours, encompassing areas beyond Digital Humanities. As of today, the department has a total of 70 staff and 57 academics (KCL, nd), and give main areas of expertise: digital cultures – past and present; Technology, media and participation; Data worlds; Digital economy and society, and Digital epistemology and methods (KCL, nd). While DDH’s research reaches beyond the 5 listed themes, at present, Digital Humanities-centric research is primarily conducted by academics in the Computational Humanities Research Group, who study computational analysis of cultural and social phenomena, open humanities data, critical technical practice and the calculation of meanings and synthetic media and generative approaches in computational humanities.
Teaching on DH
Since 2012, the department has consistently expanded its academic offerings to include a diverse array of Digital Humanities courses. Notably, its postgraduate master’s programs, which includes the Digital Humanities MA, Digital Culture & Society MA, Digital Economy MSc, Digital Asset & Media Management MA, and Big Data in Culture & Society MA, have garnered significant recognition during this period (KCL, nd). Today, DDH ranks third in the UK for research power and seventh overall in the latest Research Excellence Framework for the ‘Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management’ unit of assessment category. This achievement is shared with the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries (REF, 2021).
Key academics working in cultural and computational Digital Humanities
Dr Andrea Ballatore, Senior Lecturer in Cultural Data Science, interested in digital geographies, cultural analytics and the spatial humanities. He worked on a number of projects in the museum sector.
Prof Tobias Blanke, affiliated with DDH as Professor in Social and Cultural Informatics, and University Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Humanities at the University of Amsterdam, interested in computer science and philosophy. He has led the EHRI projects
Dr Laura Gibson, Lecturer in Digital Content Management Education, interested in Decolonisation, Digitalisation, Cultural Heritage, and Sub-Saharan Africa
Dr Mark Hedges, Reader in Cultural Informatics (digital impact on society), interested in Digital i.e., crowdsourcing, and other participatory methods, digital and computational methods in humanities, digital curation, digital archives and research infrastructures, social and cultural impact of digital technologies and information, particularly in a development context. He was a part of the Creative AI: machine learning as a medium in artistic and curatorial practice
Dr Barbara McGillivray, Lecturer in Digital Humanities and Cultural Computation, interested in the intersection between computational and quantitative methods and research questions in the Humanities. She was Co-Investigator of the Living with Machines project.
Dr Antonina Puchkovskaia, Lecturer in Digital Humanities, interested in Cultural heritage data representation, Cultural heritage data visualisation, Spatial humanities, and Digital public humanities
Dr Gabriele Salciute Civiliene, Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities Education, interested in cross-linguistic computing & modelling, aesthetic prototypes of computing, VR ethnographies, Data visualization and epistemologies, and semiotics of pre-/digital media
Paul Spence, Reader in Digital Humanities, interested in Culture, Digital and Languages. He was a part of the Language Acts and Worldmaking project where he analysed the power of language to disrupt digital monolingualism in knowledge infrastructures, methods and data.
King’s Digital Lab (KDL) also plays an important part in the department of digital humanities’ history. While the two are both actively involved in DH research today, before 2015 KDL operated as part of DDH/ CCH (King’s Digital Lab, 2023). At present, KDL stands as an environment where a team of Research Software engineers design and implement systems, infrastructures, tools, and processes necessary for producing a range of digital scholarly outputs (KCL, nd). The profile of KDL is here.
数字人文学部（DDH）是伦敦国王学院（King’s College London，简称KCL）艺术与人文学院的一部分。
成立年份
1992
简要描述
伦敦国王学院在数字人文（DH）领域有着丰富的研究历史，可以追溯到20世纪70年代初。在这一时期，国王学院的计算中心工作人员与学者合作，协助完成生成协调索引和创建词表等任务，标志着大学的「人文计算」起步。1971年，德国文学教授Roy Wibsey加入伦敦国王学院，为人文计算的发展做出了关键贡献(KCL, 2020; Dunn, 2020)。 1973年，国王学院主办了文学和语言计算协会（Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing，简称ALLC）的首次会议，Wibsey当选为ALLC的第一任秘书。在80年代担任国王学院副校长期间，Wibsey提议在重组后的计算中心内成立一个「人文与信息管理」小组。
1988年，Harold Short教授以人文与信息管理计算服务助理主任的身份加入成為伦敦国王学院, 进一步推动了中心的发展（Short, Nyhan, Welsh和Salmon, 2012）。 1992年，Short教授正式创办了「人文计算中心」（Centre for Computing in the Humanities，简称CCH），作为人文学院和信息服务与系统的联合倡议（Centre for Computing in Humanities, 2018）。 2002年，CCH成为人文学院内部的独立学术部门，既是一个教学部门也是一个研究中心(Dunn, 2020)。 因此，国王学院CCH可能是最早提供数字人文课程的学院之一。与William McCarty教授一起，他们于2005年在国王学院开设了数字人文博士课程(McCarty, 2012; KCL, 未提供日期)。
到了2010年，数字人文博士研究的跨学科性得到了认可，2011年，该中心成为数字人文学部（Department of Digital Humanities，简称DDH）（McCarty, 2012）。 从那时起，DDH在研究和教学方面不断发展，涵盖了数字人文以外的领域。 截至目前，该部门共有70名员工和57名学者（KCL,未提供日期），主要专业领域包括数字文化-过去和现在； 技术，媒体和参与； 数据世界； 数字经济与社会； 以及数字认识论和方法(KCL, 未提供日期）。 尽管DDH的研究超越了这5个主题，但目前数字人文中心的研究主要由「计算人文研究小组」的学者进行，他们研究文化和社会现象的计算分析，开放式人文数据，关键技术实践以及意义和计算人文中的合成媒体和生成方法。
