My research combines "traditional" archival work and new digital
approaches.
I am particularly interested in the issue of born-digital archives, with a
focus on literary and publishers' archives. The transition from print to
digital has created huge challenges, and we urgently need to find solutions to
(1) preserve born-digital records such as emails (2) make them
accessible (3) produce new knowledge.
- Since 2020, I have led four AHRC-funded international projects on Archives and Artificial Intelligence: (1) the LUSTRE project on Unlocking our Digital Past with AI, in partnership with the Cabinet Office. LUSTRE started in August 2022; (2) the EyCon project on visual AI applied to early conflict photography. Eycon started in February 2022 and is a collaborative project with French researchers; (3) the AEOLIAN network (Artificial Intelligence for Cultural Organisations) which ran from February 2021 to December 2023. AEOLIAN was funded by the AHRC in the UK and the National Endowment for the Humanities in the US; (4) the AURA network (Archives in the UK/ Republic of Ireland & AI) which ran from August 2020 to January 2022.
- I also completed a project on UK poetry publishers, focusing particularly on the issue of born-digital archives. This project was funded by a major Leadership Fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2018-20).
*See the project website HERE *
- This AHRC project built on my British Academy Rising Star project (2017-18) to bring together archivists and scholars in order to find solutions to the issue of "dark" archives, closed to researchers for data protection or technical issues.
These projects aim to provide access
to archival data to a wide range of "users" (researchers, members of the
public) - without infringing the privacy of data producers and third
parties.
When I am not working on Digital Humanities projects, I spend
time working in good old paper archives. I have written two books on the
publishers that promoted "difficult" modernist literature (by James Joyce,
Virginia Woolf and others). I recently edited a collection of essays,
Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry
(Edinburgh UP). My third book, a history of creative writing programmes, was published in 2022 with Oxford University Press.
*If you'd like to know more about my publications, abstracts and PDFs
can be found on my
Academia.edu
webpage*