Professor Patricia Murrieta-Flores

Professor in Digital Humanities

Profile

I am Professor and Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Centre at Lancaster University. My interest lies in the application of technologies for Humanities and my primary research areas are the the development of Artificial Intelligence for the study of Latinamerican colonial history and the Spatial Humanities. My main focus is the investigation of different aspects of space, place and time using a range of technologies including GIS, NLP, Computer Vision, other aspects of Machine Learning and Corpus Linguistics approaches. My most recent projects include: TAP/ESRC Digging into Early Colonial Mexico, AHRC/NEH Unlocking the Colonial Archive, and AHRC/LoC Implementing Artificial Intelligence to unlock the Library of Congress Spanish American historical collections; and starting in 2024 ESRC project The Fleets of New Spain. I am a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Centre for Apocalyptic and Postapocalyptic Studies at the University of Heidelberg.

I am PI on the Transatlantic Platform (T-AP) funded project ‘Digging into Early Colonial Mexico: A large-scale computational analysis of 16th century historical sources’, and also collaborator and Co-I in multiple projects funded by the ERC, ESRC, AHRC, HERA, and the Paul Mellon Centre among others. I have edited and contributed to multiple books on Digital Humanities, Cultural Heritage, the use of GIS and other technologies in Archaeology, History, and Literature, and I’ve published multiple articles exploring theories and methodologies related to space and place.

Research Overview

I’m very interested in interdisciplinary research, particularly looking at the intersections between Humanities and all sorts of technology. In collaboration with scholars in Computer Science, History, Archaeology, Geography, Natural Sciences, Literature, Linguists, Media, and Sociology, I’m currently working in a diverse range of topics that include:

The use of Machine Learning to carry out the automated transcription of large collections of Spanish American 16th and 17th century colonial documents.
Development of Natural Language Processing approaches for the annotation of thousands of documents related to the history of New Spain.
The history of disease and epidemics during the Conquest of America and the colonial period in Mexico.
Historical archaeology of plants, remedies, and diseases of early Colonial Mexico.
The social and economic history of the Fleets of New Spain from the 16th to the 18th centuries.

See my publications:

https://lancaster.academia.edu/PatriciaMurrietaFlores

Research Grants

I have directed several projects, the latest based at the Digital Humanities Centre:

2023-2024 (AHRC) Unlocking the Spanish American collections at the Library of Congress through Artificial Intelligence.
2022-2023 (CAPAS) Mesoamerican Apocalypse:A large scale analysis of the Indigenous perspective on the sixteenth-century epidemics of Colonial Mexico
2020-2024 (AHRC/NEH) Unlocking the Colonial Archive.
2018-2020 (T-AP/ ESRC-UK, CONACyT-Mexico, FCT-Portugal): ‘Digging into Early Colonial Mexico: A large-scale computational analysis of 16th century historical sources’
2018 (Manx Heritage): 'Creating the corpus of early medieval Manx stones'
2017-2018 (Paul Mellon Centre): ‘The Reception of English Saint’s Shrines as Tangible Art: A Digital Barometer’
2017 (Santander): ‘Mapping Intangible Places: Towards the analysis of vague and imaginary space in Literature with Spatial and Digital Technologies’
2016 (Society of Antiquaries of London): ‘Computational Approaches to Study Historical Graffiti’
2016 (ECR-UoC): ‘Mapping the emergence of folklore in the Victorian imagination: A Digital Humanities approach to the analysis of 19^th century public depiction of legends, myths and folktales’.

and I collaborate in different research projects including:

AHRC: Establishing a Chronotopic Ground for Imaginative Space: Innovative Data Visualisation for the Mapping of Texts
HERA: Deploying the Dead: Artefacts and human bodies in socio-cultural transformations
AHRC: Mobility of Objects Across Boundaries 1000-1700
ERC: The Past in its Place
ERC: Spatial Humanities
COST EU: Reassembling the Republic of Letters

PhD Supervision Interests

I'm happy to discuss possible supervision on a diversity of topics involving Digital Humanities research for multiple subjects/periods. I am especially eager to supervise students with interests in two main areas: the development geo-spatial technologies (Spatial Humanities theory and methods including Geographic Information Systems) for Humanities research in fields such as history, archaeology, literature, theology and modern languages; and the use and development of textual analysis, data analytics and text mining using Corpus Linguistics and Natural Language Processing approaches for Humanities. Feel free to contact me to discuss possible subjects and projects. I also collaborate in PGR supervision and advice other European universities and institutions. I'm currently co-supervising several MSc students with Prof Bruno Martins at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Instituto Superior Técnico in the University of Lisbon.