Training

We offer a variety of training, with options for students, researchers, practitioners, and anyone who’s interested in learning more about Digital Humanities methods.

Upcoming Training Opportunities

Test event

June 30

PhD Students

Funding Opportunities

We have a thriving community of PhD students and are actively looking to recruit more. PhD students can be based in any department within the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences or the School of Computing & Communications, they are frequently inter-disciplinary and have supervisors from more than one department. Many also involve working with the very large collection of digital resources that we have available. For more information please contact Ian Gregory or any member of the DH group.

Masters Students

Funding Opportunities

Lancaster offers an MA in Digital Humanities within the Department of History and we have plans to expand this further. For any enquiries into the MA programme please contact Ian Gregory.

Summer Schools

In recent years, we have run a Spatial Humanities Summer School and we also offer short courses as part of the Lancaster Summer Schools series. These are held in Lancaster every July. Staff also contribute to a range of other summer schools including the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria, Canada, and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Cork, Ireland.

Workshops and Seminars

We also run a range of shorter workshops and seminars for people who think they might be interested in certain approaches or methods. Please check back for information about future events.

Resources

We are lucky to have access to some major digital collections and the software tools to analyse them.
Most of these can be made available to students.

Textual Sources

Newspapers

We have access to newspapers and similar sources covering almost the entire period from the beginning of printing in 1473 until the 20th century. These are usually available through CQPweb to allow corpus-based analysis, rather than simply through standard web interfaces. These include:

Newsbooks at Lancaster

This specialised corpus of 17th century material consists of … Click here to learn more about the corpus.

Histpop Collection

This textual collection consists of the printed reports which accompanied the British and Irish censuses from 1800-1937. As well as being in CQPweb for corpus analysis, this has also been geoparsed to allow geospatial analysis.

Corpus of Lake District Writing

The Corpus of Lake District writing is also available in formats that make it suitable for both corpus and geospatial analysis.

Quantitative Sources

Great Britain Historical GIS

We have access to the Great Britain Historical GIS, a major historical GIS that includes most of the recurrent census, vital registration, and other data published in the 19th and 20th centuries linked to the boundaries used to publish them.

Ireland Historical GIS

Containing similar material to that of the GB Historical GIS, this dataset was used in our Troubled Geographies: A spatial history of religion and society in Ireland project.

Integrated Census Microdata (ICeM)

A database containing the anonymised Integrated Census Microdata (ICeM) of all of the individual-level census data from 1851 to 1911 is also available.

Migration data

Migration data from a large sample of genealogical data of migrations within Britain by people born from 1750-1930. This was the data set that was used to produce Colin Pooley and Jean Turnbull’s (1998) Migration and Mobility in Britain since the Eighteenth Century. (UCL Press). These are suitable for analysis within GIS.

Agricultural Returns data

Agricultural Returns data (The National Archives series MAF68) which provide detailed information on crops and livestock on a parish-by-parish basis. We have transcriptions of this for a range of counties for 1870, 1881, 1891, 1901 and 1911. These can be geo-referenced for mapping and spatial analysis.

Subaltern Recogito datasets

The Subaltern Recogito project annotated a corpus of maps produced in sixteenth-century Mexico for a series of reports known as the Relaciones Geográficas de Nueva España (RGs). These annotated maps and associated data will be made available here soon.

Pelagios in the Indian Subcontinent data

The Pelagios in the Indian Subcontinent project annotated a corpus of colonial maps produced in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries in India. The gazetteer produced as a result of this project, featuring automatically and manually assigned place-names, will be made available here shortly.

Software

As well as a wide range of commercial and free open source packages, we also have a range of software packages that have been developed or enhanced at Lancaster that are highly relevant to digital humanities. We also have a range of tools for conducting Geographic Text Analysis, please contact Ian Gregory for more details.

AntConc

AntConc is a free corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis.

CQPWeb

CQPweb provides a corpus analysis system that enables us to work with very large corpora, in excess of a billion words.

#LancsBox

#LancsBox provides another corpus analysis program that allows the analysis of large corpora.

Geoparser

We have also developed a version of the Edinburgh Geoparser suitable for concordance geoparsing. This enables us to get textual sources into a form suitable for geospatial analysis.

Recogito

Recogito is an online platform for the semantic annotation of place references in images, texts and tables. Exported data can be mapped or connected to geospatially related content elsewhere on the Web.

Peripleo

Peripleo is a search service for geospatially annotated online content in the Humanities.

WMatrix

WMatrix is a tool for corpus analysis and comparison that provides a web interface to the English USAS and CLAWS corpus annotation tools.

Geographical Text Analysis

Geographical Text Analysis combines Computational Linguistics and Geographical Information Sciences to explore, analyse, and extract information from large text corpora.