Shellie Audsley is a PhD student at the Faculty of English working on Romantic genre-mixing and referentiality in the long nineteenth century. Shellie examines lyric-narrative synthesis and patterns of inserted ‘conceptual fragments’ across types of hybrid prose and verse narratives to address issues of selfhood and broader critical debates about novel supremacy, lyric subsumption, and genre (re)formation. Complemented by computational methods of text analysis, this research into the semiotics of genre perception seeks to understand—on a large scale—processes of associative sense-making and the unstable ideas of the generic (‘commonplace’) and otherwise.

As one of the Communications Fellows for the Keats-Shelley Association of America, Shellie has been responsible for designing a digital public engagement project/publication (the K-SAA Public Commonplace Book of Romantic Readers) that uses crowd-sourced inputs to create interactive ‘star charts’ (network graphs) for mapping global readerly networks as well as Romanticism’s lasting connections therein. Shellie will teach a Methods Workshop introducing the ancient yet evolving practices of commonplace bookkeeping and the ‘modernised’ digital tools and methods for extracting, indexing, sustaining and networking knowledge fragments for idea generation.

Dr Alexia Cardona joins us as an RSE Methods Fellow and is a Training Lead in the fields of Data Science, Data Management and Bioinformatics. She has set up and now leads the Data Science and Data Management Training Programme at the University of Cambridge as part of the Bioinformatics Training Programme.  She is the Course Organiser for the NST Part II BBS Bioinformatics course at the University of Cambridge and a lecturer in the NST Part IB Mathematical and Computational Biology. Her role involves the management of different aspects of training including design, development, coordination, and teaching of undergraduate and postgraduate courses. She is a leader in ELIXIR, an international intergovernmental organisation that brings together life science resources from across Europe, where – together with other leaders and partners – she drives the establishment of high-quality training. She is a Principal Investigator on the EC funded project for the development of learning paths and a co-Investigator in the development of training and capacity building in Data Management across Europe.

Claire Carroll is interested in the aesthetics of interactive fiction (IF) and how they might connect to broader digital behaviours. More specifically, she’s exploring how the normalised usages of the second person voice and the present tense in IF create slippage for players’ immersion as they are simultaneously readers and characters, thus balancing and bouncing between extra/diegetic modes of engagement. Her research methodologies include actor-network theory, disability studies, critical code studies, ad new media theory.

Last year, Claire co-hosted the Cambridge Theatre Hackathon, a fast-paced workshop and performance exploring the contours of digital interactive theatre around the theme of memory allocation. This year, she is co-convening the Cultural Politics of Code, a critical code studies reading group.

Claire is the recipient of the Judith E Wilson Studentship and is a 2023-2024 Methods Fellow affiliated with Pembroke College. Claire holds a B.A. from Yale University in English and Computer Science and has completed her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews. Claire plans to lead a workshop on writing Digital Interactive Fiction.

Eleanor Dare is currently the co-convenor for Arts, Creativity and Education at the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education. They are also a Senior Teaching Associate for Educational Technologies, Arts and Creativity, lecturing and supervising on the Arts, Creativity and Education MPhil pathway, and the Knowledge, Power and Politics MPhil pathway, as well as the MEd in Transforming Practice. Eleanor is also module lead for AI and Education, a Personal and Professional Development course at Cambridge. With Dr Dylan Yamada-Rice, Eleanor is the co-founder of the storytelling studio and consultancy, X||rdinary Stories, working with industry and academia to research and develop experiential projects involving emerging technologies. They are an active developer of Games, AI and VR content, a computer programmer with an MSc and PhD in Arts and Computational Technology. Eleanor was formerly Reader in Digital Media and Head of Programme for MA Digital Direction at the Royal College of Art. Eleanor has extensive experience with investigation of AI, interaction design and digital education. Eleanor has taken part in numerous exhibitions and has published dozens of papers addressing computation,AI, Education, Games and digital interaction. These include chapters in MIT’s Leonardo, ACM Interactions, Routledge, Sage and Intellect Books. Eleanor will deliver a workshop addressing the development and use of virtual and extended reality spaces for research, pedagogy and collaboration.

Junaid Abdul Jabbar is a Geoinformatics Engineer with a Bachelor’s degree (2015) from the National University of Sciences & Technology, Pakistan and Master’s degree (2019) from the Institute of Space Technology, Pakistan. Since his graduation he has been a part of both industry and academia. Starting a professional career in 2015, Junaid has worked on spatial datasets from different application areas including urban planning, vehicle tracking, rescue services, archaeology, heritage, and more. For his first professional assignment, he worked on the spatial planning of two cities in the Punjab and Sindh provinces of Pakistan. Later, joining Pakistan’s first digital mapping and location-based services platform as the data lead, he worked to materialise a data development and management system using an open-source database, capable of handling the largest spatial dataset of Pakistan. Junaid is currently working as the Database Manager for the Mapping Archaeological Heritage in South Asia (MAHSA) project, where he is working on the design and deployment of Arches open-source database, developing field data collection system using ODK and coding data ETL pipelines. Junaid will teach end-to-end ODK form development, deployment, setting up on mobile device, and analysing collected data.

Amira Moeding is a student at Cambridge University in the history of Political Thought and Intellectual History. Amira’s PhD project focuses on the Intellectual History of ‘Big Data,’ how ‘Big Data’ as an approach to building artificial intelligence became thinkable, how data became foremost an economic resource, and how political imaginaries emerged from the possibilities associated with ‘data-driven’ technologies. Amira came to Cambridge to study the MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History developing her interests in histories and philosophy of law and race. Before coming to Cambridge, Amira studied philosophy and cultural studies at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, focusing on early critical theory and post-colonial critiques of private property. At Humboldt Universität, she also developed an interest in the philosophy of science (scientific models and representation) and mathematics (conceptions of proof). Amira’s workshop will look at how historical enquiry can help us understand the current hype around AI.

Emily Quin is a PhD Candidate in the Jerry Lee Centre for Experimental Criminology supervised by Dr Matthew Bland and Professor Barak Ariel. She specialises in policing: organisational behaviour, decision-making, and ethics. Emily is a former employee of the College of Policing where she worked in research and ‘Authorised Professional Practice’ within Forensics, Organised Crime, and Criminal Investigation.

She holds a BA (Hons) in Social Sciences; a PGCE; and an MA in Philosophy with a dissertation in Criminological Ethics, for which she received a Distinction. Emily’s research is entitled ‘The Copper’s Nose’ Project and is funded by the ESRC. Emily is looking forward to teaching methods for detailed assessment of the suitability of online platforms for the collection of research data. Considering not only general ethical issues, privacy, encryption, terms and conditions, but also inclusivity for neurodivergent and vulnerable participants.

Lidea Shahidi is a postdoctoral research associate based at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.  She studied for her PhD in the Applied Machine Learning Lab in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Duke University, where she developed speech enhancement strategies to mitigate the impact of reverberation on speech intelligibility outcomes for cochlear implant recipients. Prior to her PhD, she studied cell and molecular biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Biology.

Lidea’s current research investigates novel cochlear implant speech coding strategies, with the aim of improving clinical outcomes for cochlear implant recipients. This work involves computational analyses and behavioural experiments to measure speech perception and psychoacoustic phenomena, with the aim of understanding the mechanisms by which coding strategies may improve the transmission of speech information to the auditory nerve. Outside of cochlear implant research, her research interests include auditory scene analysis, speech enhancement, and speech processing. She has taught several lectures and workshops on programming, command line tools, psychoacoustics, and signal processing, and she looks forward to contributing to the Best Practices in Coding for Humanities Research series as an RSE Methods Fellow.

Methods Fellows 2022/23

Estara Arrant is a Postdoctoral Research Associate based at the Cambridge University Library in the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit. Estara is a linguist and medievalist whose research interests centre around using data science, applied mathematics, and computer science tools to solve long-standing problems in the fields of Semitic linguistics, religious textual studies, and medieval Middle Eastern History. In her PhD of Hebrew and Jewish studies she developed a methodology using machine learning and pioneered the methodological combination of a specific group of algorithms to complement each other and elicit the greatest amount of insight. Estara plans to teach the use of three fundamental, complementary machine learning algorithms appropriate for categorical data, which are useful for scholars in the Humanities who want to get the most out of complex, multifaceted data.

Leah Brainerd / Alex Gushurt-Moore.

Leah Brainerd is a PhD researcher with the Department of Archaeology (Newnham College). She is a member of the ERC Encounter project where her research project focuses on the impact paleoclimate had on the introduction of agriculture in Japan through ecological modelling. She also has a MSc in Computational Archaeology from UCL where she learned numerous computational methods and her research involved agent based modelling. Her research interests include computational archaeology, cultural evolution, and anthropological archaeology. Particularly, Leah is interested in questions about human decision-making processes and cultural transmission, be it in past environments or modern ones.

Alex Gushurst-Moore finished her PhD on late Victorian art and literature in 2021. She is currently Research & Impact Coordinator of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Coordinator of the research network Cambridge Visual Culture, and Co-Convenor of the Paul Mellon Centre’s ECR Network for 2022/23. Her research interests include fantasy studies, interdisciplinary literature and arts research, and the role of women in fin-de-siecle art cultures. Her preferred research methodology has a heavy structuralist bent, which forays into the pattern-mapping territory of cultural evolutionary theory. Building on the work of scholars such as Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorov, and Mieke Bal, she is interested in the observation of recurring themes, motifs, and other patterns in cultural products. She was the University of Florida’s Louise Seaman Bechtel Fellow in February 2022, during which time she conducted research on the Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature.

Leah and Alex will jointly deliver a workshop focusing on methodologies that align with the field of cultural evolution, helping participants to develop an awareness of technologies that could enhance their own research of cultural history, increase the computational literacy of participants, and provide learners with knowledge of the methodological discourses required to pursue further study with those who have technical expertise.

Orla Delaney is a second-year PhD student in the Faculty of English and holds an undergraduate degree in English Literature and German from Trinity College Dublin and an MSc in Digital Humanities from UCL. Her research consists of the development and implementation of an ethnographic methodology for the critical study of museum databases, which aims to give a richly detailed and situated perspective on collections. Orla plans her workshops to give participants an overview of qualitative techniques and methods for data analysis, particularly within the cultural heritage sector. The workshops are aimed at researchers in the cultural heritage space, but also at data science researchers interested in adding a critical dimension to their statistical work.

Tom Kissock is a PhD student at the Department of Sociology. Tom has fifteen years’ experience as a Director and Executive Producer working and researching with digital video outside of academia for the BBC, YouTube, NBC, Cisco, and CBS. He also has seven years under his belt researching video witnessing and human rights abuses in the fourth sector. In 2019 whilst pursuing his MSc at UCL Tom used Video Data Analysis to track how populist political actors in Brazil build misinformation and election campaigns by strategising the cross-sharing video assets to avoid journalistic questioning as a symbolic accountability mechanism. In his PhD he is again using video analysis as a method to explore how activists use video streaming platforms and ultimately he is interested in how video can produce knowledge and subsequently how we value different knowledges through the process of video witnessing. Tom is looking forward to offering Video Data Analysis for social science and humanities students.

Dita N. Love is an interdisciplinary social scientist and education researcher specialising in creative arts practice and youth education, social justice, and creative research methods. As an ESRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow, her research focuses on the live and digital circulation of the popular art form known as spoken word poetry, youth education and wellbeing, as part of a project titled Poetic Justice Values at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, where she completed her doctorate (Gates Cambridge Scholarship) as part of the Arts and Creativities Research Group. Afrodita’s workshop will focus interdisciplinary theory and research in the digital humanities titled ‘Creative-Critical Methods: Bearing Witness to Personal and Collective Trauma’.

RSE Methods Fellow

Giulia Grisot a visiting academic with a mixed background in Literary Linguistics, Psycholinguistics and Digital Humanities, has gained experience in both qualitative and quantitative approaches to texts and language in general, becoming familiar with several coding languages (R, python) essential for statistical as well as corpus investigations.

Giulia is currently working with a large corpora of Swiss German fictional texts, looking at sentiments in relation to represented spatial locations, using both lexicon-based methods and machine learning. Giulia will deliver an introduction to R Studio and R Markdown, the workshop will run through the functionalities and advantages of using R Studio and related tools for organising and analysing data, as well as for writing and referencing.

Archive of Tomorrow Methods Fellows

Andrea Kocsis has research experience in machine learning for misinformation research, archives and metadata analysis and visualisation along with GIS. From 2020-21 Andrea was a Research Fellow in Advanced Digital Methods at the National Archives. For Andrea’s work on the Archive of Tomorrow, she is aiming to understand how Covid-19 impacted the online filter bubble. The term describes the false belief that what we see on the internet is all the available information.

Chen Qu is a researcher specialised and interested in urban, health and digital studies, especially for vulnerable groups, currently focussing on digital health, DH governance and their policy impacts. Chen will work on the Archive of Tomorrow project posing the question, Viral vs Female: How health policy in the UK affects gender inequality during the pandemic?

Methods Fellows 2021/22

Mahmoud Abdelrazek
Mahmoud focused on two categories of teaching: ‘Databases’ discussed basic database concepts followed by an introduction to database management systems (DBMS) and database design; ‘Development Environments’ began with an introduction to the command-line interface (CLI) and the tools commonly used with it.

Tobias Lunde
Tobias is particularly interested in developing approaches to teaching digital cartography and how to communicate research ideas and conclusions effectively using maps. He designed and delivered a module at our data schools.

Meng Liu
Meng’s substantive research interest lies at the intersection of Applied Linguistics and Educational Psychology. She designed and delivered a module at our data school on Text-mining with R and doing bibliometric analysis with R.

Arild Stenberg
Arild will design and deliver a series of practical workshops in which participants will be able to rethink the graphic design of a musical score, and work with a novel set of principles to modify the spacing, layout, and position of its notes and signs for intelligibility purposes and/or artistic purposes. Delivery of workshops deferred to academic year 2022/23.

Siddharth Soni
Siddharth gave a comprehensive introduction and hands-on training for digital archival photography of a very high standard using a range of easily accessible and portable equipment.

Itamar Shatz
Itamar taught statistics in an intuitive and practical way that is accessible even for those with little or no quantitative background, giving students the confidence to engage with and use statistical methods.

Gabriel Recchia
Gabriel focused on how to communicate information in ways that support comprehension and decision-making. She taught a short course in fundamental principles of data visualisation.

Susan Qu
Susan’s research interests lie in human-environment relationships. She designed and delivered a thematic workshop on Good Data Visualisation and Graph Creation in Python.

Carleigh Morgan
Carleigh explores the historical convergences between computer science, new media, and film to investigate how the labour of animation, automation, and the material practices of film production come together at key historical moments. Carleigh will bring scholars of various disciplinary backgrounds together to explore transparency’s multidimensional logic. Delivery of workshops deferred to academic year 2022/23.

Spencer Johnston
Spencer’s work is interdisciplinary and involves developing modern formal reconstructions of interesting historical systems of logic from the medieval period. He developed teaching on topics related to computational linguistics, formal logic, and theoretical issues in computer science.

Isabelle Higgins
Isabelle ran a course titled: ‘Digital Humanities: Exploring critical, intersectional and decolonial methods’. Designed to be cross-disciplinary, theonline seminar series invited engagement from scholars from across the spectrum of disciplines that make up digital humanities.

Thomas Cowhitt
Thomas taught several different topics related to Social Network Analysis. The primary components of SNA are relational data collection, network visualisation, and modelling.

Methods Fellows 2020/21

• Chiara Capulli: cc826@cam.ac.uk
• Dr Anna Cermakova: ac2326@cam.ac.uk
• Dr Mary Chester-Kadwell: mec31@cam.ac.uk
• Dr Sami Everett: se365@cam.ac.uk
• Andrea Kocsis: ak2003@cam.ac.uk
• Dr Barbara McGillivray: bm517@cam.ac.uk
• Dr Peter McMurray: pm638@cam.ac.uk

Methods Fellows 2019/20

• Dr Julie Blake
• Dr Mary Chester-Kadwell: mec31@cam.ac.uk
• Dr Oliver Dunn
• Dr Leonardo Impett
• Dr Hugo Leal