Teaching & Training

Training

Staff in the Hub deliver a range of teaching and training in digital methods and approaches for humanities researchers. This includes training aimed at cross-disciplinary audiences delivered by the Hub, as well as teaching and training delivered in collaboration with other Institutes in the School for specific disciplinary communities in Classics, English, History and Modern Languages.

Postgraduate teaching includes modules in digital classics offered as part of the intercollegiate MA in Classics and modules in digital editing offered as part of the Institute of English Studies’ MA in the History of the Book. Short courses and summer schools are also offered in 3D imaging and modelling, digital epigraphy and papyrology, and digital scholarly editing.

The Hub delivers a number of free training sessions that offer introductions to subjects including concepts of digital humanities, online research methods, data visualisation and text encoding. The Sunoikisis Digital Classics series also offers free weekly research training taught collaboratively with scholars across the world. We host a collection of asynchronous training material on GitHub and contribute to tutorials on TEI XML for ancient texts at EpiDoc.

Our teaching and training are often delivered in collaboration with other universities and organisations in the UK and abroad, and we welcome opportunities to collaborate on bespoke training sessions or courses. The Hub is also developing a series of more intensive short courses in digital methods and approaches for researchers across the humanities, which will cover subjects including programming for humanists, software carpentry, and social media research for the humanities.

PhD Supervision

Staff in the Hub also supervise a growing number of doctoral researchers in DH, and welcome enquiries from potential applicants interested in pursuing research in relation to our areas of expertise detailed below.  Initial enquiries about potential research supervision should be sent to the relevant supervisor(s), and should include a CV and draft research proposal.

Please visit the School’s Postgraduate Study information pages to find out more about the application process, fees and funding.

Funded studentships for PhD students in the Hub are currently only available through the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP). Studentships are available for full- and part-time applications, and cover UK Home student tuition fees and an annual stipend for 3 years for full-time or 6 years for part-time students (in 2021-22 this was £17,609 for full-time students). While international students are eligible to apply, the AHRC will only fund the equivalent of the UK Home student fee in addition to the annual stipend. Our distance-learning PhD programme is also not eligible for LAHP funding.

Supervisors:

• Professor Jane Winters - I am currently supervising PhD students who are studying: online media coverage of the Olympic Games; online media coverage of European parliamentary elections in the early 21st century; using metadata to make museum collections more inclusive and accessible; the archiving of social media; and museum collections as networked images. I would be interested in supervising future PhD projects concerned with born-digital archives (particularly web archives), digital cultural heritage, digital publishing and open access, the impact of the digital on humanities research (especially history), and peer review and methods of evaluation in the digital environment.
   
• Dr Gabriel Bodard - I am currently supervising doctoral projects on the history of digital classical scholarship and impact of digital humanities on papyrological practice, and the history of Roman magic. I would be interested in hearing from potential students with an interest in working on: digital editions of ancient texts or corpora (especially epigraphy and papyrology); the application of digital humanities and computational methods to studying, teaching and learning ancient Greek or Latin; Linked Open Data and the study of structured data about the ancient world, especially prosopography and geography; the history of digital scholarship in classics or archaeology; and other areas related to my interests.
   
• Dr Christopher Ohge - Currently I am supervising PhD projects, including one on Ernest Hemingway, naturalism, and masculinity, and another a London Arts and Humanities Partnership-sponsored Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) with findmypast.com on the 1921 Census. I would be willing to supervise any project on digital approaches to literature and publishing, particularly those that relate to 19th and 20th century literature, scholarly editing, textual studies, book history, text analysis, and digital publishing.
   
• Dr Naomi Wells - I am currently supervising a PhD on archiving social media, and also provide postgraduate research training on qualitative and online research methods, including digital discourse analysis and digital ethnography. I would be interested in supervising social media and internet research, with a particular emphasis on themes including online multilingualism, born-digital cultural heritage, and migration and diasporic digital cultures. While my own expertise is in relation to Latin American, Spanish and Italian cultures and communities, I am interested in co-supervising digital research in relation to other linguistic and cultural contexts, and in particular research that addresses multilingualism in the Digital Humanities.

• Dr Kaspar Beelen - In general, I would be interested in supervising future PHD projects which combine humanities research with machine learning and statistics. More specifically, my areas of interest are computational methods for digital history, the study of bias in big historical data, the politics of big data, and the computational analysis of political text. I'd also be happy to support research on the Large Language Models and In-context Learning in the context of historical research or GLAM.