On this degree you’ll learn how to apply cutting-edge technology to traditional humanities and cultural heritage research, providing you with expertise that can be applied in further academic research and a wide range of careers.

You will build a portfolio of the skills that the humanities graduates of tomorrow will use – from AI models that read centuries-old handwriting to digital maps that reveal the landscapes of the past.

Why Lancaster?

• Open doors to exciting professional roles or PhD study through our MA in Digital Humanities
• Learn from experts with an international reputation in Digital Humanities research and teaching
• Study in a faculty that specialises in the development and use of data science and artificial intelligence techniques in humanities research
• Collaborate with your peers in our Digital Scholarship Lab, a state-of-the-art research space

A global leader in the field

You’ll learn from globally recognised experts in the field and engage with cutting-edge research in digital humanities. We particularly emphasise the analysis of historical texts in a digital environment and the use of geospatial technologies to map the geographies of the past.

You may learn about: the use and creation of digital assets and databases; interdisciplinary theories and methods as to how these can be applied; and applications of artificial intelligence (AI) such as natural language processing, machine learning, and computer vision.

Digital skills and contexts

Computational skills can be used to study societies and cultures of the past, present and future. You will gain digital skills tailored to working with digitised humanities sources such as historical newspapers, books, maps, oral histories and more. As you acquire the technical competencies required to work with these sources, you will place these methods in the context of key debates around the history, ethics and cultures of today’s digitised world.

Assuming no prior knowledge other than a conventional ability to work with computers, our modules will give you the skills to develop your own digital humanities research project. This, in turn, provides the knowledge for a rewarding career in a job market where demand for technical abilities is ever increasing.

You will learn state-of-the-art methods including:

• Textual Analysis: Approaches from corpus linguistics, natural language processing and AI that give you the skills to analyse large collections of digitised texts.
• Spatial Humanities: Shows how geographical information system (GIS) and other technologies enhance your understanding of the geographies of the past.
• Digital History: Explores the ways in which digital methods are changing how we understand the past.
• AI for the Humanities: Cutting edge methods such as Handwritten Text Recognition, large language model (LLM) applications for historical text and computer vision for maps and manuscripts.

You can apply these skills to a range of disciplines from across the humanities including History, Literary Studies, Media Studies, Linguistics and more.

A digital community

The MA in Digital Humanities is embedded in Lancaster’s Centre for Digital Humanities. In this thriving community you will have access to a range of seminars and other events and will have opportunities to co-design new initiatives with students and staff. You will learn about developments in Digital Humanities at Lancaster and beyond and can meet and chat to PhD students and staff working in this exciting field. The Library’s Digital Scholarship Lab hosts many events and is a key space for collaborative activities. Lancaster’s Data Science and AI Institute offers further opportunities for interdisciplinary learning and collaboration.

Take a look at some of our recent and current projects:

• Encyclopedia of Shakespeare's Language Project: Drawing on Lancaster’s expertise in using Corpus Linguistics to study the past, this project reveals what Shakespeare’s language meant to the Elizabethans through the analysis of millions of words written by his contemporaries.
• Mapping the Lakes and Lancaster: Streets of Mourning: Focusing on Lake District writing and Lancaster’s experience of the First World War, these projects give two contrasting examples of how geospatial technologies can be used to visualise and better understand the geographies of the past.
• Unlocking the Colonial Archive: Works with cultural institutions to make collections on colonial Latin America more accessible and explores how digital scholarship can enhance our knowledge of this period. The project draws on a range of AI-based approaches including Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), natural language processing (NLP), and automated analysis of images.
• Lancaster Digital Collections and Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive: Two examples of projects that demonstrate the potential of using digital tools to make cultural heritage collections more accessible and understandable.

This and other research at Lancaster allow us to give you access to some of the best digital humanities collections available anywhere. These include:

• Early English Books Online: Contains much of the content published in English before 1800.
• Newspaper Corpora such as The Times from the 1790s to the 2000s and the British Library’s Nineteenth Century Newspaper collection, around 50 billion words take from around 50 continuous series of British and Irish newspapers
• Literary works such as a variety of collections of Shakespeare’s works
• The Corpus of Lake District Writing: Landscape writing including Wordsworth and many others

and much more.