Events

DH Seminar: Living with Machines: Analysing Digital Heritage at Scale

Digital Humanities Lab seminar series. Federico Nanni, Kaspar Beelen, Mariona Coll Ardanuy (Alan Turing Institute): "Living with Machines: Analysing Digital Heritage at Scale". Location: online.

Event details

Abstract

Living with Machines is a large-scale research project that rethinks the impact of technology on the lives of ordinary people during the Industrial Revolution, by bringing together historians, data scientists, geographers, computational linguists, and curators. It is a collaboration between The Alan Turing Institute, the British Library and the Universities of Cambridge, East Anglia, Exeter and London (QMUL). In this talk, we will present the results of a series of collaborations at the intersection of digital history, computational linguistics and software engineering focused on the use of our large digital collection of 19th Century newspapers.

Please join the seminar online using the following link:

https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/j/94836037576?pwd=QWZzeGZqb2F3NlhoQ2FHWXJ2QmEwQT09

Meeting ID: 948 3603 7576
Password: 152668

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Federico is a Senior Research Data Scientist at The Alan Turing Institute, working as part of the Research Engineering Group. Prior to joining the Institute, he completed a PhD in History of Technology and Digital Humanities at the University of Bologna focused on the use of web archives in historical research and has been a post-doc in Computational Social Science at the Data and Web Science Group of the University of Mannheim. He also spent time as a visiting researcher at the Foundation Bruno Kessler and the University of New Hampshire, working on Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval.

Kaspar Beelen is a digital historian, who explores the application of machine learning to humanities research. After obtaining his PhD in History (2014) at the University of Antwerp he worked as postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. As researcher on the Digging into Linked Parliamentary Data (Dilipad) project, he published several papers situated at the interface of data science, political science and history, which explored a wide range of topics, including: the representation of women in Westminster, the evolution of public health discourse, and the use of affect in parliamentary language. In 2016, Kaspar moved to the University of Amsterdam where he first worked as a postdoc for the "Information and Language Processing Systems" group, and later became assistant professor in Digital Humanities (Media Studies). Since February 2019, he works at the Turing Institute as research associate for the Living with Machines project.

Mariona is a computational linguist at the Alan Turing Institute. She received her PhD from the Computer Science department of the University of Göttingen (Germany), where she worked on developing language-independent methods for exploring and mining collections of digitised historical documents. Mariona has worked as a researcher at the Center of Digital Humanities in Trier and the Centre of Digital Humanitites in Göttingen, in close collaboration with historians and data scientists. After completing her PhD in 2017, she worked as a computational linguist in an artificial intelligence company in Barcelona, prior to joining The Alan Turing Institute as a Computational Linguistics Post-doctoral Research Associate on the Living with Machines project.