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.
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。
