UCL CENTRE FOR DIGITAL HUMANITIES

UCL Centre for Digital Humanities

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Doctorates at UCLDH

UCL Centre for Digital Humanities is host to a variety of students currently carrying out PhD or EngD research, both from the UK and abroad.

PhDs at UCL are normally designed to extend over three years full-time or five years part-time study (unlike, say, North American PhDs there are no taught components prior to writing a thesis). Further information about pursuing a PhD at UCL, and what it generally entails, can be found in the UCL Graduate School Research Programmes pages. Most PhDs at UCLDH will, depending on their supervisor, be formally part of the Department of Information Studies, and UCL DIS provides further information about Research Degrees. Those interested in more technical areas should also look at the UCL Engineering Doctorate (Virtual Environments Imaging and Visualisation) pages, where funded EngD places will be advertised.

We recommend that before you make a formal application you discuss your potential research project with a member of staff at UCLDH. When you do so, please send a brief description of the topic that you would like to work on- of about a thousand words- and a copy of your CV. Please also copy this to the PhD student tutor of UCL Information Studies (UCLDH's home department), Vanda Broughton (v.broughton@ucl.ac.uk): she is responsible for all PhD student admissions.

We are now receiving more enquiries from PhD students than we have places available. Therefore please be aware that admission is a competitive process, and be willing to take some time preparing your application, as a result. We make decisions about who to admit based on how well your proposed topic fits with UCLDH research and your academic track record. If accepted you will be matched with the members of staff whose interests most closely relate to your research topic: we cannot guarantee that you will be able to work with specific named individuals.

Funding for PhDs is limited and competitive, and potential students are expected to pursue all avenues themselves in attracting funding. There are limited scholarships available from UCL, and eligible UK students can also apply for AHRC funding through the Department of Information Studies. The Graduate School provides further information about fees, costs, and funding , and the Department of Information Studies has further information regarding deadlines when applying for AHRC funding.

Our Doctoral Students

• Rudolf Ammann examines 'the formative stages and emergence of blogging'. Supervisors: Melissa Terras [first] and Claire Warwick [second].
• Mateusz Dykiert explores 'ways to support the musical exploration of synthesisers' timbral and parameter spaces'. Supervisors: Nicolas Gold [first].
• Antonio García Castañeda works on the 'automatic reconstruction of fragmented frescoes and other cultural artefacts'. Supervisors: Tim Weyrich [first].
• Greta Franzini is creating a digital edition of the oldest surviving manuscript of S. Augustine's De Civitate Dei and in so doing examining best practice in the field of electronic editing. Supervisors: Melissa Terras [first] and  Simon Mahony [second].
• Paul Gooding works on 'Digitisation' with the British Library. Supervisors: Claire Warwick [first] and Melissa Terras [second – covered by Anne Welsh during leave].
• John Hindmarch works on '3D scanning of science museum collections'. Supervisors: Melissa Terras [first] and Stuart Robson [second].
• Robin Hunt looks at the 'mediation of two acts of terror: the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the attack on the World Trade Centre of September 11, 2001'. His thesis considers the relationship of media production and issues of trust. Supervisors: Claire Warwick [first] and Alison Shell [second] from the UCL Department of English Language and Literature.
• Christina Kamposiori works on 'personal research collections: examining research practices and user needs in art historical research'. Supervisors: Claire Warwick [first] and Simon Mahony [second].
• Kazim Pal works on 'scanning work of the Grand Parchment' with the London Metropolitan Archives. Supervisors: Tim Weyrich [first] and Melissa Terras [second].
• Lorna Richardson works on 'public archaeology in the Digital Age'. Supervisors: Melissa Terras [first] and Tim Schada-Hall [second].
• Vasileios Routsis works on 'information technology and social control mechanisms: The evolution of the concept of privacy'. Supervisors: Claire Warwick [first] and Simon Mahony [second].
• Claire Ross works on 'users' experience and information seeking behaviour of digital museum content'. Supervisors: Melissa Terras [first – covered by Ann Blandford during leave] and Claire Warwick [second].
• Christina Vona works on 'documentation of 3D scanning'. Supervisors: Melissa Terras [first] and Stuart Robson [second].

Affiliated Doctoral Students

Affiliated PhD Students are those whose first supervisor is not from within UCLDH, but whose secondary supervisor is linked to the Centre.

• Alejandro Giacometti is researching 'medical imaging methods and technologies and how they can be adapted in order to recover information from ancient documents'. Supervisors: Adam Gibson [first] and Melissa Terras [second]. Affiliation: Department of Medical Physics and Bioengineering.
• Susan Greenberg works on 'the poetics of editing in print and digital form'. Supervisors: Iain Stevenson [first] and Claire Warwick [second].

Completed PhDs

• Isabel Galina worked on Open Access and Institutional Repositories. She is now coordinator for of the ReDHD Digital Humanities network in Latin America and works at the Institute for Bibliographic Studies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). She was awarded her PhD in July 2009.
• Ernesto Priego worked on Comic books in the Digital Age, and was awarded his PhD in May 2011
• Henriette Roued-Cunliffe worked on 'a system to improve the interpretation of ancient documents', as part of the eSAD project for the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford. Supervisors: Alan Bowman [first] and Melissa Terras [second]. She was awarded her PhD in May 2012.