The more things change - Digital Humanities in a tumultuous world

About the lecture

The field of Digital Humanities - which has come to mean research at the juncture of the computational sciences and humanities - has become established as a large, identifiable and succesful academic community over the past twenty years. In that time, both the world, and the digital environment, have changed significantly. Much early work in Digital Humanities remained independent from social and political aspects that characterise today’s information environment, with researchers focussing on the affordances of computing and how it could benefit their own specialised interests. Nowadays, we know better that networked, computational systems come with political and social biases, and are highly integrated into changing democracies and the fracturing of peace, and this cannot be easily divorced from the wider technological moment, however we chose to apply these tools. 

What does this mean for the Digital Humanities? In this talk, Terras will focus on the importance of community, and data and software sovereignity, arguing that the Digital Humanities have a relevance and importance in today’s increasingly locked down technology landscape. Work in the Digital Humanities often demonstrates the use of computing for the benefit of human society in a way that sidesteps the worst of late-stage capitalism: Terras argues that maintaining our independent and critical approaches to digital infrastructures, and training students to do so too, can provide alternative and more positive futures for technological innovation. This reframes Digital Humanities as not just a usage of computational tools to explore human creativity and culture, but as an important rejection of and opposition to surveillance, data, and platform capitalism, allowing alternative computation tools and business models to emerge. 

All welcome but please register to attend.

Accessibility

View the Accessibility Guide for the Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre. If you have other requirements you would like to let us know about please email the UCLDH coordinator, Lucy Stagg, lucy.stagg@ucl.ac.uk

About the series

This is the seventh lecture in the UCLDH Susan Hockey Lecture series, named after Susan Hockey, Emeritus Professor of Library and Information Studies at UCL, and a leading figure in the establishment of Humanities Computing as an academic discipline. 

About the organiser

This event is organised by UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH), part of the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies. UCLDH draws on UCL’s world-class research strength especially in information studies, computing science, and the arts and humanities. It supports and coordinates work in many institutional settings throughout the university, including the library services, museums and collections. The research facilitated by UCLDH takes place at the intersection of digital technologies and humanities. It produces applications and models that make possible new kinds of research, both in the humanities disciplines and in computer science and its applied technologies. It also studies the impact of these techniques on cultural heritage, museums, libraries, archives, and culture at large.

About the Speaker 

Melissa Terras: Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh

Her research contributions are in the area of digitisation of cultural heritage, covering three main areas: advanced digitisation techniques and approaches; understanding large-scale digitisation in the cultural heritage sector and how it can be best deployed for and by users as well as by institutions; and utilising the results of digitisation to undertake novel research and innovative projects in the arts and humanities. 

She previously directed UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (2012-2017), and was Vice Dean of Research in UCL’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities (2014-2017). She is the founding Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Data, Culture and Society, and was Director of Research for the Edinburgh Futures Institute (2017-2023). 

Find out more about Melissa Terras