Close
I am a research fellow in participatory research and collections as data at the Sloane Lab, a Towards a National Collection discovery project. My main responsibility is to research, plan and facilitate a series of participatory events with communities and institutions and to conduct research on the history of the Sloane collections.
My PhD research was titled: The Digitisation and Open Access Politics of Social Movement Archives. For my project I collaborated with the Marx Memorial Library and I was supervised by Julianne Nyhan, Andrew Flinn and Antonis Bikakis.
For my master dissertation I investigated the capability of HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) on early modern museum catalogues. The project Enlightenment Architectures: Sir Hans Sloane's catalogues of his collections kindly provided images and transcriptions of the catalogues to develop an HTR model for Sloane's hand. The dissertation was awarded with the Stephen Robertson Prize.
Research Interests:
- Critical (digital) archival studies
- Archival activism and documentary practices of social movements
- Infrastructure studies
- Collections as data and Open Access to cultural heritage
- Digital tool criticism
- Participatory research methods
Articles:
Humbel, M., Nyhan, J., Vlachidis, A., Sloan, K. and Ortolja-Baird, A. (2021). Named-entity recognition for early modern textual documents: a review of capabilities and challenges with strategies for the future. Journal of Documentation, 77(6): 1223–47 https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-02-2021-0032
Die Umsetzung von Open Data an Wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken der Schweiz - Eine qualitative Untersuchung. Churer Schriften zur Informationswissenschaft Schrift 86 (March 2017). https://www.fhgr.ch/fileadmin/fhgr/angewandte_zukunftstechnologien/SII/churer_schriften/sii-churer_schriften_86-Umsetzung_Open_Data_an_wissenschaftlichen_Bibliotheken_der_Schweiz.pdf
Humbel, M., 2017. Open Data an Wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken der Schweiz. Informationspraxis 3. https://doi.org/10.11588/ip.2017.1.34621
Conference Papers:
Metilli, D., Vlachidis, A., Humbel, M., Pickering, V., Carine, M., Sloan, K. and Nyhan, J. (2022). Towards a Network Analysis of Hans Sloane’s Collection: A Preliminary Study. EUSN 2022 – 6th European Conference on Social Networks; London.
Humbel, M. (2022). Investigating the discourse on Open GLAM. Digital Humanities Congress. Sheffield https://www.dhi.ac.uk/dhc/2022/paper/209.
Humbel, M. (2022). Participatory Action Research for a Digital Humanities research project: Investigating Open GLAM in the context of Social Movement Archives. Proceedings of the Digital Humanities 2022. Tokyo, pp. 249–52 https://dh2022.dhii.asia/dh2022bookofabsts.pdf.
Nyhan, J., Vlachidis, A., Flinn, A., Pearlman, N., Humbel, M., Metilli, D., Sadek, J., Valeonti, F., Carine, M., Pickering, V., Terracciano, A. (2022). The Sloane Lab: Dealing with a challenging past. Belgium https://universeum2022.be/programme/.
Humbel, M. and Nyhan, J. (2019). The application of HTR to early-modern museum collections: a case study of Sir Hans Sloane’s Miscellanies catalogue. Digital Humanities 2019. Utrecht https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10072160/1/HTR_Sloane_MH_JN.pdf.
Teaching Experience:
2022
Guest Lecturer Technische Universität Darmstadt, Digital Approaches to Historical Research - Named Entity Recognition (NER) for historical research: capabilities and challenges
2019-2022
Guest Lecturer UCL London, Access and Use of Archives and Records - Digitization and ‘Open Access’
2018/2022
Teaching Assistant UCL London, Digital Resources in the Humanities
2019
Teaching Assistant UCL London, Introduction to Digitisation
Educational Background:
09.2018-01.2023
PhD in Information Studies, UCL London
09.2017-09.2018
Master of Science in Digital Humanities (Distinction), UCL London
09.2013-09.2016
Bachelor of Science in Information Science, HTW Chur (Switzerland)
08.2010-08.2013
Diploma as an Information Specialist (Fachmann I+D), main library of the ETH Zurich
Contact:
Email: marco.humbel.17[AT]ucl.ac.uk
External Number - +442031085696
Extension Number - 55696
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1861-162X