This page has updates and news about the Computational Humanities research group at King’s College London 🔗

Activities 

We are excited to share the programme for our winter 2023/2024 seminars.

Our seminars will feature an array of international speakers who will present their current research. In our seminar series, we’re launching the idea of “reproduci-talks”: the last part of these talks is dedicated to going through your project’s code repository at a high level, to encourage reproducibility of the research. If you’d like to stay up to date with our activities, please sign up for our mailing list.

2024/2025 seminars

2023/2024 seminars

2022/2023 seminars

What are/is the Computational Humanities? 

Computational Humanities is devoted to the application and development of computational and quantitative approaches to humanities data in all its forms. Computational humanities has been an integral part of Digital Humanities since its beginnings, but recent years have seen a particularly favorable context, with increased interest and investment in research around the world.  

The group 

The Computational Humanities research group within the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London brings researchers active in Computational Humanities. The aims of the group are to build a research environment dedicated to CH research, particularly for early-stage career researchers, showcase computational research ongoing in the department of Digital Humanities and beyond via regular seminars and events, attract new research opportunities in the CH space, strengthen links with relevant groups and initiatives, and develop research funding applications. 

Our objectives/interests 

The group investigates how computational methods augment and transform humanities scholarship. The following themes and groups of questions are central to the group’s scope: 

  • Computational analysis of cultural and social phenomena: How can data science methods be applied to large datasets to study questions in the humanities, particularly in history, art history, geography, archaeology, literary studies, and media studies? 
  • Open humanities data: How can open research practices be embedded in humanities research? What are the advantages and peculiarities of open data and data publishing for humanities researchers?  
  • Critical technical practice and the calculation of meanings: how can we critically research and computationally intervene in the calculation of meanings in language, images, and symbols?  
  • Synthetic media and generative approaches in computational humanities: How to incorporate large general purpose computational models and the forms of synthetic media they produce as tools and objects of research in humanities computing?   
An illustration of a research question in the computational analysis of cultural and social phenomena. The word tablet originally referred to a sheet for writing on, usually made of clay or wax-covered wood (figure on the left), but nowadays it also refers to the electronic device (figure on the right). Can we use today’s computational techniques to trace this type of changes in the language?

Who we are 

Group lead: Barbara McGillivray 

Members: