Prof Stuart Dunn is a Professor of Spatial Humanities as well as the Head of Humanities in the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at King’s College London. His research interests includes history of cartography, digital approaches to landscape studies, and spatial humanities.
1. How do you define Digital Humanities?
I see DH as any study of the human record which makes critical use of digital methods, and/or computational ways of thinking. Of course much of the human record itself is now digital, to a much greater extent than it was when I started out in the field. This has broadened DH’s focus from a discipline which simply uses the digital to understand the humanities better, to include study ofthe digital itself from a humanities perspective. For me, this makes the roots of the field in the way that humanists think about the digital world more important and interesting than ever.
2. How did you become interested in DH?
I came to DH relatively late in life, towards the end of my PhD. I was researching a very traditional, non-digital field, which involved reconciling different mechanisms for dating prehistoric events (if only I had known then what I knew now about the possibilities of, for example, network analysis). I discovered that a key need for my research was understanding relationships between different pieces of evidence from different locations – e.g. the relationship between deposits of the same type of pottery from Egypt and Cyprus, and how they relate to ancient layers of volcanic ash in the Aegean islands. This started me thinking about how such data could be systematically structured, compared and mapped. So having constructed a rudimentary database of all this data, I basically taught myself GIS so that I could analyse different concentrations of different types of evidence across different regions and at different times.
3. Tell us about one of your DH projects?
Over time, my interest in GIS and maps became my primary focus. A project which exemplifies this is the Heritage Gazetteer of Cyprus, which was funded by the A G Leventis Foundation. The HGC aims to provide a framework for thinking about place in Cypriot heritage, and a data resource to trace the evolution of placenames over time. Any toponyms occurring in literature before 1918 can be entered and associated with one or more existing locations, which enables us to build networks of references across the island. This allows us to ask, for example, what the differences are between the town of “Pano Calepia” described by Florio Bustron in 1549, and “Kallepia” described by George Jeffrey in 1918. How has its spatial footprint and relationships with other sites changed, and how do we document these changes?
4. And a DH project you particularly like?
There are so many! One I particularly admire is the Digital Periegesis project , which is using digital mapping methods to re-examine the work of Pausanias of Magnesia, and in the process asking exciting new questions about the relationships between text, time and place.
介绍 Stuart Dunn教授
个人简介
Stuart Dunn 教授是伦敦国王学院艺术与人文学院的人文学院院长兼空间人文学教授。他的研究兴趣包括制图历史、景观研究的数字方法以及空间人文学。
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.
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。
