Dr Zoe Alker

I am a digital historian of crime, justice, and punishment in Britain from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. My research has taken advantage of the opportunities opened up by digitisation and explored youth justice, custodial death, interpersonal violence, and femicide. I am currently writing a monograph on violence against women and girls in Victorian England, and I am also interested in what criminal records, alongside hospital and osteoarchaeological evidence, can reveal about bodies — from convict tattoos to the impact of the Industrial Revolution on the body.

With colleagues, I have co-created a series of freely accessible digital archives that open up these histories to the public. These include The Digital Panopticon, which traced the lives of over 90,000 convicts sentenced to transportation or imprisonment from 1790; Convict Tattoos, which analysed more than 75,000 convict tattoos; and Skin and Bone, which recorded the injuries of over 40,000 Londoners between 1760 and 1901. I use these resources in my teaching on the History BA and Digital Humanities MA, where I encourage students to develop digital skills alongside traditional historical methods. I believe History degrees should prepare students to work in a world of data, and those competencies need to be re-inserted back into degrees, while using the same techniques to write every more powerful histories.

Research Interests

• Digital methods, including machine learning, natural language processing, and data visualisation
• Digital archives and public engagement

Any aspect relating to crime, justice, and punishment in Britain or the historical body (1750–1950)

Professor Ian Gregory

I convene the MA Digital Humanities and supervise the module 'Digital Texts in the Humanities'.

I work in Digital Humanities and am particularly interested in using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) with texts as well as the more traditional quantitative sources. I have used these approaches to study a range of topics from historical demography to Lake District literature. I am also co-director of Lancaster's Digital Humanities Hub, which draws together the university’s expertise in spatial humanities and corpus linguistics.

My particular interests include:

• The use of conventional Historical GIS techniques to study long-term change in Britain and Ireland in particular through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
• Using GIS to explore textual sources, especially large corpora, through the combined use of geo-parsing, spatial analysis and corpus linguistics techniques
• Developing an understanding of what GIS has to offer to the humanities and developing the use of these technologies in disciplines including history and literary studies
• Using digital technologies across the humanities and social sciences to gain a better understanding of the past.

This research has been the subject of a number of major projects, including the European Research Council funded Spatial Humanities: Texts, GIS, Places and the Leverhulme Trust funded Geospatial Innovation in the Digital Humanities. For much more on my research see my web profile.

Dr Nicholas Radburn

I am a historian of the Atlantic World, with a particular focus on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, currently investigating slave-trading merchants in Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and how their profit-motivated decisions shaped the experiences of the enslaved people who they bought and sold.

I am a co-manager of the National Endowment for the Humanities funded project Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, a digital memorial to the 12.5 million Africans who were forcibly transported through the slave trade. I am also developing a digital model of a slave ship, and a database of British slave trading merchants, including several thousand individuals in north-west England.

Professor Deborah Sutton

I co-convene the MA module 'Critical Heritage Studies'. My research work explores the extraordinary capacity of digital technologies to rethink the resonances and meanings of the past in the present. I co-created a dedicated software platform, safarnama, that allows complex heritage to be mapped out across Indian urban space and explored using a mobile phone. I have recently begun an AHRC-funded project that will use a digitised corpus of texts and cartographic materials to explore water scarcity in Coimbatore in South India. This project is a collaboration with the National Library of Scotland and it aims to create both trusted data relating to water scarcity and innovative visualisations relating to local strategies of water management.