Media and material changes in culture and humanities research
My interdisciplinary research examines the cultural and historical significance of the media; I am interested in studying media as historical subjects and objects of inquiry, by investigating the interplay of materiality, technology and culture. Looking at a broad range of technologies, from microfilming to digital storage devices and the Cloud, I am exploring several different perspectives and eras from which to reflect on the nature of media change. Moving to the digital era, my research seeks to understand computational culture - and its social, political, and ethical ramifications - in historical and materialist context by reflecting or incorporating past technologies, practices, and ideologies. By working at the intersection of Media History, media archaeology, Cultural History and Digital Humanities, I am researching how technologies have been integrated into society, culture and research practice at different moments in time, by emphasising the dependence of particular technologies on the material circumstances within which they were developed and used and on the cultural affordances they have enabled.
Data-intensive research and emerging technologies in Digital Cultural Heritage
My everyday digital humanities work focuses on advanced computational methods for cultural heritage data, such as information architecture, data modelling and analysis, text mining and machine learning. In my practice-based research and through various cross-sectoral and interdisciplinary collaborations and projects, I am passionate about developing responsible research-ready data, by focusing on all aspects of the data lifecycle, from data wrangling, processing, documentation, analysis, linking, to long-term preservation, access and reuse, ensuring best practice in managing open access licensing, intellectual property rights and ethics, and developing innovative approaches to digital curation and responsible stewardship of cultural heritage data in digital spaces.
My current research explores the uses and futures of emerging technologies including AI, ML, and big data in cultural heritage, focusing on questions around ethics, copyright policy, fair sharing, reproducibility, transparency, and accountability. My hands-on research benefits also from a wide range of critical and theoretical perspectives, such as critical data studies and critical archival science, forcing notions of representation, materiality, access, power and memory to be re-shaped and negotiated by computational processes and tools.
Open, Responsible and Sustainable Research in the making: Software, Datasets, infrastructures
My interdisciplinary interests and expertise centre on the development of sustainable knowledge infrastructures and communities of practice around open, reproducible, equitable and transparent data and software in the Arts and Humanities and Cultural Heritage. Through my practical project- and policy-based roles as UKRI-AHRC Policy and Engagement Fellow in Digital Research and Innovation Infrastructure and as Software Sustainability Institute Fellow, as well as through my collaboration in large infrastructure investments in Arts and Humanities and Heritage sector such as the TaNC programme and the Digital Research Infrastructure for Arts and Humanities, I am actively involved in the all aspects of the development of key technical infrastructure considerations, including sustainability and data management plans, risk assessment exercises, mitigation measures and legacy management. Sustainable digital research infrastructures, including digital services, access equipment, facilities and expertise, will enable better science, support innovation and provide arts and humanities researchers with the resource and capacity to address, at pace and scale, the urgent questions of our time.
In my work I seek to bring to the forefront the humane aspect of infrastructure, by supporting the sustainable development of communities of practice and networks of stakeholders, including the wider scientific community, policymakers, business and enterprise, by actively promoting knowledge exchange, transfer and collaboration opportunities and a ‘training-as-infrastructure’ culture. My practical project- or policy- based research and experience is also supported by theoretical approaches and critical reflection on the concepts of ‘sustainability’ and ‘failure’ in digital scholarship, from technical obsolescence to management challenges of collaborative, interdisciplinary research projects, as well as environmental aspects of maximal computing and computationally intensive work.
Inclusive and reflective digital pedagogy
Through my formal teaching training (PGCertHE, Carpentries Instructor) as well as my research-informed, inclusive, flexible and accessible teaching ethos, in my pedagogy I seek to communicate and promote creative uses of digital technology to the arts, humanities, and the wider cultural heritage field as well as a critical reflection regarding their application for remediating the human past and memory. I am actively organising and delivering various workshops and courses via innovative training platforms, enabling open and distance learning (Carpentries, Programming Historian), for interdisciplinary, multicultural and multilingual audiences, and I am experienced while flexible in designing, structuring, adjusting and delivering lessons, while incorporating innovative teaching methods and current approaches on learning, assessment and feedback provision. I center my teaching approach on four core values: interdisciplinarity, creativity, classroom community-building, and transformative learning.