Professor Patricia Murrieta-Flores

Professor in Digital Humanities

Profile

I am the Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Hub at Lancaster University. My interest lies in the application of technologies for Humanities and my primary research area is 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, Machine Learning and Corpus Linguistics approaches. 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 Corpus Linguistics, spatial technologies and interactive visualisation to explore the relationship between places, topics, and concepts in Medieval Romances.
Geographical Text Analysis to examine 19^th Century historical and literary corpora;
Spatial analysis with GIS to study Early Medieval landscapes;
Text, data mining and network analysis to explore the History of Science and the Medical Humanities;
Image Processing techniques to record and analyse historic graffiti.

See examples of my work:

https://lancaster.academia.edu/PatriciaMurrietaFlores

Research Grants

I have directed several projects, some of them now based at the Digital Humanities Hub:

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.