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.

Professor Patricia Murrieta-Flores

I supervise the MA module 'Spatial Technologies for Humanities Research'.

My interest lies in the application of technologies for the 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 Geographical Information Systems (GIS), Natural Language Processing (NLP), machine learning and corpus linguistics approaches. I am 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 am 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 nineteenth-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

I am also the Co-Director of the Digital Humanities Hub at Lancaster University, and Principal Investigator on the Transatlantic Platform (T-AP) funded project ‘Digging into Early Colonial Mexico: A large-scale computational analysis of 16th century historical sources’, as well as Co-Investigator in multiple projects.

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 (the safarnama app is available from the Google Play Store). 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.

Dr Zoe Alker

Dr Zoe Alker is Lecturer in Historical Social Data Science