Unlocking your Archive Collections using Digital Humanities

Join Dr Joe Nockels for a webinar exploring how Digital Humanities can benefit archive and records management, research, and collections

How Can The Digital Humanities Benefit Archival Management And Research?

With archives increasingly adopting digital workflows, whether through using digital catalogues or presenting material online, Digital Humanities (DH) plays a critical role in critiquing and innovating technology for archival management and research. As such, this talk demonstrates how DH methods can make archives accessible as ‘data’, as well as the benefits and limitations such techniques have in engaging archival audiences.

The University of Sheffield’s Survey of English Language and Folklore (1964 - ) (https://archives.shef.ac.uk/agents/corporate_entities/58) forms our case study, first envisaged by linguist and folklorist John Widdowson (1935 - ). The first national data collection of local folklore, the survey remains significant by breaking with ideas that ancestral custom was inherently rural, instead also engaging those in urban centres.

In automatically transcribing aspects of the survey, this talk presents a critical approach to making folkloric heritage accessible using DH methods. Key individuals, events and places are also networked and mapped, across the survey, to provide local customs greater interactivity. Therefore, this talk highlights how to digitally interpret diverse and often contradictory collections, with folklore being dynamic and influenced at the individual, family, community and national level. Finally, it demonstrates how close collaboration with folklorists, archivists and those working in the DH domain aids the authentic representation of culture, away from distorting local customs as digital ‘fakelore’.

Indeed, do the Digital Humanities also create new customs, reimagining cultural archives through greater digital dissemination, synthesis, and interpretation?

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Dr Joe Nockels is a Research Associate at the University of Sheffield’s Digital Humanities Institute (DHI), responsible for developing and supporting the research theme - Digital Representation of Cultural Artefacts, which sets out to advance the state of the art in the digital capture, interpretation and representation of physical culture. In August, he will join the University of Glasgow as a Lecturer in Digital Humanities, co-leading their new MSc programme in the subject.

Joe is a trained archivist, with stints working at the National Trust, Greenpeace International (International Institute of Social History) and Library of Congress. In 2024, he received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh, supported by the National Library of Scotland and University of Glasgow, focusing on how AI-enabled transcription is changing access to our collective past, libraries, and user relationships with collections.