Unlocking 18th-Century Playbills with AI | Collaboration

We are undertaking a national conversation about the future of English alongside our colleagues in the Institute for English Studies and the School of Advanced Study, building resources with our communities to share.

Our project for the next three years has several aims:

• to move from defending to ‘thinking forwards’;
• to understand how the subject is already changing, with so much imaginative and creative thinking about teaching and skills happening, and to collect and share best practice;
• to support our commitment to English as a levelling up subject, with excellence in all kinds (and size) of school, college and university department;
• to explore opportunities for collaboration and new ways of working.

Thinking Forwards will begin with Collaboration. We’ll collect examples of innovative practice, teaching, and research, in schools and universities, so that we can see and help shape a narrative about English Studies and its contribution to change. Our Skills for the Future of English project will feed into these conversations.

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Collaboration

Do you want to know why scientists want to work with us? Or community leaders? Or Arts organisations? Do you also want to know how to build a collaborative project, and the challenges and opportunities? If so, then join us for the lunchtime slot (13:00 - 14:00) on the final Friday of each month.

Unlocking 18th-Century Playbills with AI, Fri 30 January 2026

How can innovative AI methods for information retrieval aid the digitization of large historical datasets? Equally, how can the intricacies of 18th- and 19th-century print corpora help to reveal the shortcomings and implicit cultural biases embedded in AI models? In this talk, we'll discuss our attempts to use large language models to analyse performance data from British theatre playbills from between 1750 and 1850. We'll reveal how AI helped us to analyze textual traces of performance in new and unexpected ways. We'll also reflect on the challenges and benefits of STEM and English collaborations, especially in regards to interpreting results and co-authoring publications.

Deven Parker is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English at the University of Glasgow.

Joemon Jose is Professor of Information Retrieval in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow.

Find out more about Thinking Forwards

Explore the other Thinking Forwards: collaboration talks