FINAL WORD
History Scotland talks to Professor Lorna Hughes following her recent appointment to the Academia Europaea, one of Europe’s former senior research bodies
Congratulations on your appointment to the Academia Europaea. What excites you most about being part of this eminent academy?
Thank you! This is an important recognition of Scottish research by one of Europe’s foremost senior research bodies, emphasising the connections between Scottish universities and our European partners. It is vitally important that Scottish researchers have a voice in the Academy of Europe: as an organisation it promotes research and education, as well as interdisciplinary and international collaboration – but also has an important advocacy role. It is a space that helps us share the ways that our research has an impact, especially in a time when society faces systematic changes and pressures. On a personal note, I am delighted that this election reinforces the University of Glasgow’s outstanding reputation in Digital Humanities, in which Glasgow has been a world leader since the establishment of the field. In the early 1990s, I studied for a Masters in History and Computing at the University of Glasgow, which at the time was a unique programme but it opened my eyes to the tremendous potential of new methods in history. I was fascinated by the possibilities, so it is wonderful to come full circle and be able to make a contribution to the development of this field at Glasgow.
How would you sum up digital humanities? ‘Digital Humanities’ is the use of digital content, tools and methods to let us ask questions we never could dream of before. It helps us do traditional research more effectively – for example through the rapid text searching and visualisation possible through the use of online sources (such as the University of Glasgow’s Historical Thesaurus of English, https://ht.ac. uk/). But it also helps us to envisage new and exciting research questions, through the visualisation of data, and by linking sources across time and space to reveal previously unseen patterns of information. Digital Humanities also helps bridge gaps in our historical knowledge, by offering potential to reconstruct lost treasures: for example, the
Beyond 2022 project (https://beyond2022.ie/) is creating a an open-access, virtual reconstruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland’s Record Treasury, destroyed in 1922.
Digital humanities offers opportunities for research to pervasive, global, and inclusive: international collaboration has certainly been a foundational aspect of my own research. I work with researchers from almost every academic field you can name, plus curators and archivists and experts in cultural heritage, all the way to computational researchers exploring the potential of emerging technologies and approaches, including Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
What do digital techniques offer to the study of history that a more traditional, paper-based approach doesn’t?
It helps us understand primary source materials in a greater degree of detail: whether it’s using advanced imaging techniques to look at manuscripts, or using data mining to see patterns in source materials – text, images, or multimedia objects – at scale. As my focus is primarily on creating and using digital collections I am excited by digital potential to make humanities sources more accessible, whether a large scale archive of historical data like The Welsh Experience of the First World War (http://Cymru1914.org): this project complemented official archives with personal collections.Working with communities to make their collections accessible is a wonderful opportunity to build a greater understanding of our multilingual and multicultural histories by making previously hidden material more accessible and better linked to related material from around the world, and I enjoyed it hugely.
What do you think this fast-changing field will look like in 5 years’ time?
There is tremendous potential around access to primary sources in digital format, and the ability to discover and use this material for research using emerging computational approaches like AI to reconstruct the past, and fill the gaps in the historical record.