[Department of Digital Humanities]

1. Current research interests

I work on computing across the humanities, arts and human sciences. For the last few years I have devoted my research to the effects of the smart machine on language and thought, and to the potential of a relation with it attuned to its fundamentally anomalous nature. For help I look to the historical, anthropological, psychological and philosophical disciplines primarily while keeping an eye on the natural sciences. Seemingly far from my discipline of origin (English literature) I struggle to understand them from the inside. Hence my work raises questions of interdisciplinary research across the board. Recently, thanks to a developing workshop series at Cambridge, "Science in the Forest, Science in the Past" (see below), anthropology and cross-cultural enquiry as a whole have become central. For the last few years my focus has been on the relation of computation to divination. Not so recently, but continuing to the present moment, is Humanist, my "electronic seminar", part research forum, part information exchange. I stand behind my 2010 inaugural lecture: see "Attending from and to the machine" [X], with slides [X].

2. Other appointments & involvements present and past
• 2026. Co-organizer, with Marilyn Strathern and Aparecida Vilaça, "Science in the Forest, Science in the Past", Darwin College, Cambridge.
• 2017, 2019, 2022 and 2024. Co-organiser, with G.E.R. Lloyd and Aparecida Vilaça, "Science in the Forest, Science in the Past", Needham Research Institute, Cambridge.
• 2016, 2018, 2020. Member, Advanced Grants Panels SH5 (Cultures and Cultural Production), European Research Council
• 2015-16. Convenor (with Matthew Jockers), Institute in Digital Textual Studies, National Humanities Center, U.S. [X]
• 2015--. Advisory Editor, Information and Culture: A Journal of History [X].
• 2014. Member, Starting Grants Panel SH5 (Cultures and Cultural Production), European Research Council [X].
• 2012--. Fellow, Royal Anthropological Institute, London [X].
• 2008-2024. Editor-in-Chief, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews [X].
• 2007-2010. Academic staff member, Centre for Language, Discourse & Communication [X], King's College London.
• 2007-10. Professor of Humanities Computing, King's College London.
• 2005-7. Reader in Humanities Computing, King's College London.
• 2005-8. Core Resource Faculty, "Contextualizing Classics. Renewal of Teaching Practices and Concepts", University of Sofia, St Kliment Ohridski, Sofia, Bulgaria (Open Society Institute, Higher Education Support Program, Regional Seminar for Excellence in Teaching) [X].
• 1996-2005. Senior Lecturer in Humanities Computing, King's College London.
• 1987--. Editor, Humanist [X]
3. Honours and awards
• 2014. Meymandi Visiting Fellow, National Humanities Center [X].
• 2013. Roberto Busa Award, Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations [X]; lecture: [X].
• 2006. Richard W. Lyman Award, National Humanities Center and the Rockefeller Foundation, U.S. [X].
• 2005. Award for Outstanding Achievement, Computing in the Arts and Humanities, The Society for Digital Humanities / Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs, Canada [X].
4. Doctoral supervision
• Former students:
  • Dr Marinella Testori, with Professors Andrew Prescott and Marco Passarotti; Index Thomisticus Treebank project, Centro Interdisciplinare di Ricerche per la Computerizzazione dei Segni dell’Espressione (CIRCSE), Milano.
  • Dr William Garrood, with Professor Charlotte Roueché; Head of Global Strategic Planning and Performance at WaterAid;
  • Dr Gabrielė Šalčiūtė-Čivilienė, Senior Lecturer, Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London;
  • Dr Luke Blaxill, Lecturer in History, Hertford College, Oxford University;
  • Professor Dr Øyvind Eide, Digital humanities, Universität zu Köln;
  • Dr Adam Crymble, Lecturer, Department of Information Studies, University College London;
  • Dr Matteo Romanello, Ambizione SNF Lecturer, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne;
  • Thomas Salyers, MPhil., software developer, Sheffield University
5. Publications and invited lectures
• 2024. "Past Celebratory, Future Subjunctive". Editorial, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 49.5 [forthcoming]
• 2024. "Preface". In Digital Humanities in the India Rim: Contemporary Scholarship in Australia and India, ed. Hart Cohen, Ujjwal Jana and Myra Gurney. London: Open Book Publishers. [X]
• 2024. "Steps towards a therapeutic artificial intelligence" and "Afterword", Science in the Forest, Science in the Past III, ed. Willard McCarty, Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd and Aparecida Vilaça. Thematic issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 49.1. [X].
• 2024. "The analogy of computing". Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 39, 242–257. [X].
• 2023. "Centrum ubique, circumferentia nusquam: Perspectives of and from digital humanities". April Conference Fifteen: Humanity/Humanities, 20-22 April, Kraków, Poland. [X].
• 2023. "Pursuing a combinatorial habit of mind and machine". In On Making in the Digital Humanities: The scholarship of digital humanities development in honour of John Bradley. Ed. Julianne Nyhan, Geoffrey Rockwell, Stéfan Sinclair and Alexandra Ortolja-Baird, eds. 251-266. London: UCL Press.
• 2022. "The Analytical Onomasticon Project. An auto-ethnographic vignette". Textual Cultures 15.1: 44-52.
• 2022. "Towards a purpose and a direction". Keynote for the European Association for Digital Humanities, Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, September 2021. Journal of Siberian Federal University, Humanities & Social Sciences 15.6: 752-61. [X]
• 2021. "With the Hedgehog or the Fox?" In Toward Undogmatic Reading: Narratology, Digital Humanities and Beyond, ed. Marie Flüh, Jan Horstmann, Janina Jacke and Mareike Schumacher. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. [X]
• 2021. "As perceived, not as known: Computational enquiry, experimental science and divination". Science in the Forest, Science in the Past II, ed. Willard McCarty, Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd and Aparecida Vilaça. Thematic issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 46.3.
• 2020. "Making and studying notes: Towards a cognitive ecology of annotation". In Annotations in Scholarly Editions and Research: Functions, Differentiation, Systematization. Ed. Julia Nantke and Frederik Schlupkothen. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
• 2019 and 2020. "Modelling, ontology and wild thought. Toward an anthropology of the artifically intelligent". Special issue, "Science in the Forest, Science in the Past", ed. Geoffrey E. R. Lloyd and Aparecida Vilaça. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2019.1: 147-61. Chicago: HAU Books. In book form: Chicago: HAU Books.
• 2018. "Modelling the actual, simulating the possible". In The Shape of Data in Digital Humanities: Modeling Texts and Text-based Materials, ed. Julia Flanders and Fotis Jannidis. London: Routledge.
• 2018. "Modelling what there is". Historical Social Research, Supplement 31. [Revised version of a paper for the workshop Thinking in Practice, Universität Köln), 19-20 January. [X] and [X]
• 2018. "What happens when we intervene?". Paper for the conference, "Computational Methods for Literary-Historical Textual Scholarship", De Montfort University, 3-5 July [X]
• 2017. "The Analytical Onomasticon: An auto-ethnographic vignette". Unpublished paper. [X]
• 2017. "The programmer and the scholar". Studia Digitalia 62.2: 7-24. [X]
• 2017. "What are studia digitalia?" Studia Digitalia 62.1: 5-6. [X]
• 2016. "The contradiction of computing". Lecture for Worlds of Contradiction, Universität Bremen, 7 July.
• 2016. "Becoming interdisciplinary". In A New Companion to Digital Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth. Chichester: Blackwell/Wiley. [X].
• 2015. "The analogy of computing". Paper for the Workshop, "Analogy in Literature", Churchill College Cambridge, 3 September.
• 2015. "The Big Picture: Where digital humanities has been & where you might take it". Workshop for the Digital Humanities Conference, Siberian Federal University, Krasnoyarsk, 25 September. [X]
• 2015. "Fictions of possibility: Simulation for the humanities from its history in the technosciences". Invited keynote for the Digital Humanities Conference, Siberian Federal University, Krasnoyarsk, 21 September. [X]
• 2015. "The Big Picture: The two things you can do with a computer". Lecture for the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Western Australia, 6 August, broadcast as "Digital humanities", 15 September, on "Big Ideas", National Radio, Australian Broadcasting Corporation. [X]
• 2015. "Risky, experimental, emergent: the timeliness and genius of CURIA and CELT". In Clerics, Kings and Vikings: Essays on medieval Ireland in Honour of Donnchadh Ó Corráin. Ed. Emer Purcell, Paul MacCotter, Julianne Nyhan and John Sheehan. Dublin: Four Courts Press.
• 2014. Humanities Computing. Rev. edn. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
• 2014. "Getting there from here. Remembering the future of digital humanities". Roberto Busa Prize lecture 2013. Literary and Linguistic Computing [X]; subsequently in Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories. Ed. Paul Longley Arthur and Katherine Bode. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
• 2013/2006. "Tree, turf, centre, archipelago - or wild acre? Metaphors and stories for humanities computing". In Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader. Ed. Melissa Terras and Julianne Nyhan. London: Ashgate.
• 2013/2005. Humanities computing. Rev edn. (London: Palgrave).
• 2013. "What does Turing have to do with Busa?" In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Annotation of Corpora for Research in the Humanities (ACRH-3). Ed Francesco Mambrini, Marco Passarotti and Caroline Sporleder. 1-14. Sofia: Institute of Information and Communication Technologies, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. [X].
• 2013. "The essential contradiction". Innovative Information Technologies for Science, Business and Education, IIT-2013. 14-16 November. Vilnius Business College, Vilnius, Lithuania. [X].
• 2013. "The digital and the human. Remembering the future of digital humanities". [See the Busa Award Lecture, above.]
• 2013. "Special Effects; or, The Tooling is Here. Where are the Results?" Studies in Honour of Yaacov Choueka. Ed. N. Derschowitz and E. Nissan. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 8002. Part II. 103-117. Berlin: Springer Verlag. [X].
• 2013. "The uncanny valley goes on and on". Invited talk for the Science Forum, Robotics Meets the Humanities, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Karlsruhe, Germany, 10 May: paper [X] and slides [X].
• 2013. "The future of the digital humanities are a matter of words". In Companion to New Media Dynamics, ed. John Hartley, Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns. 33-52. Oxford: Blackwell [X].
• 2012. "The PhD in Digital Humanities". In Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics, ed. Brett Hirsch. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers [X].
• 2012. "Machines of demanding grace". Paper for the London Seminar in Digital Text and Scholarship, 18 October [X] and slides [X].
• 2012. "The residue of uniqueness". Controversies around the digital humanities, ed Manfred Thaller. Historical Social Research - Historische Sozialforschung 37.3: 24-45. Text [X] and podcast [X].
• 2012. Introduction, in Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities: A volume in honour of Harold Short on the occasion of his 65th birthday, September 2010, ed. Marilyn Deegan and Willard McCarty. London: Ashgate. [X].
• 2012. "A Telescope for the Mind?" In Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press [X].
• 2011. "Mimesis to poiesis in the digital humanities" [X], for THATCamp Switzerland 2011 [X].
• 2011. "Beyond chronology and profession". Keynote lecture for Hidden Histories: Symposium on Methodologies for the History of the Digital Humanities c.1949-1980, 17 September, University College London: paper [X] and slides [X].
• 2011. "Foreword", in Language Technology for Cultural Heritage: Selected Papers from the LaTeCH Workshop Series, ed. Caroline Sporleder, Antal van den Bosch, and Kalliopi A. Zervanou. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence / Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin: Springer Verlag [X].
• 2011. "Doing interdisciplinary research". Keynote for Interdisciplines, Transdisciplines, Swinburne University of Technology, Faculty of Design, 22 July [X].
• 2011. "Working Digitally". In Alternative Academic Careers for Humanities Scholars, ed. Bethany Nowviskie. alt-acacdemy, mediacommons [X].
• 2010. "Attending from and to the machine". Inaugural lecture, King's College London, 2 February [X], ppt slides [X] and podcast (with introduction and appreciation by Principal Rick Trainor) [X].
• 2010. Text and Genre in Reconstruction. Effects of Digitalization on Ideas, Behaviours, Products and Institutions (edited volume). Cambridge: Open Book Publishers [full text online: X].
• 2010. "In the age of explorations" [X] and slides [X]. Closing keynote address for Exploring the Archive in the Digital Age [X], King's College London, 8 May.
• 2010. "Computing and reading". A series of 5 invited lectures, as Distinguished Visitor, Office of Interdisciplinary Studies, Faculty of Arts, University of Alberta, 7-14 April. Summary [X]; podcasts and slides:
1. A Pisgah-sight of readers and texts. Podcast [X], slides [X]
2. The profits of anxiety and failure: Critics and computers 1949-1991. Podcast [X], slides [X]
3. Emergent theory: Writing a recent history of the present. Podcast [X], slides [X]
4. Excitement elsewhere: Cybernetics and complementarity. Podcast [X], slides [X]
5. The Future: What's going on?. Podcast [X], slides [X]
• 2010. "Making friends, or before the science". Invited lecture, Undergraduate Research Conference 2010: UG Research in Computer Science -- Theory and Applications [X] , 24 March. Paper [X] and slides [X].
• 2010. Roundtable discussion, "The Past's Digital Presence", Yale University, 20 February [X (with podcast)].
• 2010. "Pasts, present and futures of the digital humanities". Digital Humanities Lecture Series, Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, Texas A&M University, 16 February.
• 2009. "Literary enquiry and experimental method: What has happened? What might?" In Storia della Scienza e Linguistica Computazionale: Sconfinamenti Possibili, ed. Liborio Dibattista. 32-54. Milano: Francoangeli. Paper from the International workshop, Crossing boundaries: History of science and computational linguistics, Università di Bari, Italy, 28 April 2008 [X] and ppt slides [X].
• 2009. "That uneasy stare at an alien nature". Festschrift in honour of Ian Lancashire. Digital Studies / Le champ numérique [X].
• 2009. "Quondam et futurus". Workshop on Problems and Futures, Tools for Collaborative Scholarly Editing over the Web, Institute for Textual Scholarship and Scholarly Editing, University of Birmingham, 25 September 2009 [X].
• 2009. "Imagining the hunt: Cutting-edge, collaborative, digitally human & reciprocal" [X] and slides [X]. Keynote lecture for InferFace 2009 [X].
• 2009. Two for the Alumni College, Reed College, 4 June [X]: (1) a lecture, "Without its machinery not more than a machine", notes [X] and slides [X]. (2) a seminar, "A counterfeit life? The humanities in a technoscientific world" [X];
• 2009. "Exploring the archipelago of disciplines", a seminar for the Interdisciplinary Leadership Seminar Series at King's.
• 2009 (2005). "Being reborn: the humanities, computing and styles of scientific reasoning". New Technology in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 1: 1-23 [X]. Invited paper originally delivered at the Renaissance Society of America conference, Clare College, Cambridge, 7 April 2005.
• 2009. "Attending to and from the machine". Inaugural address, King's College London, 2 February 2009. [X] and slides [X]
• 2008. Review of Mind Technologies: Humanities Computing and the Canadian Academic Community, ed. Raymond Siemens and David Moorman (Alberta, 2006). University of Toronto Quarterly 77.1: 138-40. [X].
• 2008. "Evidence in and evidence of 'Evidence of Value'". AHRC ICT Methods Network Expert Seminar, 5 November [X]
• 2008. "What's going on?" Literary and Linguistic Computing 23.3: 253-61. Originally given as a plenary lecture for "Countries, Cultures, Communication: Digital Innovation at UCLA" [X], Institute for Digital Research and Education, University of California at Los Angeles, 10 May 2007 [X], [X].
• 2008. "Response: Perspectives of Literary Theory". Journal of Literary Theory 1.2: 458-60 [X].
• 2008. Three very closely related talks on literary computing (and another listed above, "Literary enquiry and experimental method", 2009):
  • "Digitising is questioning, or else". Long Room Hub Lecture Series, Trinity College Dublin, 16 April 2008 [X] and ppt slides [X]
  • "Can we build it? Lessons and speculations on literary computing". Talk for the An Foras Feasa seminar, National University of Ireland, Maynooth, 8 April 2008 [X] and ppt slides [X]
  • "Neglected, not rejected: Is there a future for literary computing?" Talk for the School of Humanities 20/20/20 Lecture Series, 12 March [X] and ppt slides [X]
• 2008. "Knowing...: modeling in literary studies". Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Oxford: Blackwell [X, 21].
• 2007 (published 2008). "An Anomalous End-Maker Conversation: Foreward for Digital Humanities and the Networked Citizen". Text Technology 15.1: 1-10 [X].
• 2007. Two closely related talks touching on the relation of computer science and the humanities:
  • "'Steaming down the sunlight'". Keynote lecture for the first conference of Humanities Serving Irish Society, Galway, Republic of Ireland, 17 November [X] and ppt slides [X]
  • "Beyond retrieval? Computer science and the humanities". Keynote lecture for the CATCH Midterm Event, Den Haag, Netherlands, 30 November [X] and ppt slides [X]
• 2007. "Four views of computing: disciplinary, cultural, philosophical, historical". Presentation for Thinking through Computing [X], Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, 2-3 November [X].
• 2007. "Looking backward, figuring forward: Modelling, its discontents and the future". Paper for Digital Humanities 2007 [X], 2-8 June. Paper [X] and ppt slides [X]
• 2007. "Teaching the classics digitally". Annual conference of the Classical Association, University of Birmingham, 12 April [X].
• 2005. Humanities computing (London: Palgrave [X]); note also the Bibliography [X].


6. The Analytical Onomasticon (no longer in development; see [X]).