King's College London Digital Humanities – critical inquiry with and about the digital

Work-in-Progress Symposium for PGR Students in Digital Humanities

The Symposium is organised by Isaac Parkinson.

To attend, please register here.

We are excited to invite you to the Work-in-Progress Symposium for Postgraduate Researchers in Digital Humanities, where PhD Students will share the progress of their research and engage with their peers through constructive feedback and discussions.

Event Details:

• Date: 16th May 2025
• Time: 11am-3pm
• Location: Embankment Room (MB-1.1.4), Macadam
• Food: Light lunch and refreshments provided

This symposium is an excellent opportunity for students to present their research thus far, exchange ideas, and receive valuable insights from the academic community. Whether you are presenting or attending, your participation will contribute to a lively and supportive atmosphere.

If you are a PGR student in Digital Humanities at King’s College London and would like to present, please submit a brief abstract of your work (max 250 words, with your title, name and email address) to isaac.1.parkinson@kcl.ac.uk by 18 April 2025.

Diversity & Inclusion workshop organised by the Department – Crossing Boundaries: Celebrating Linguistic Diversity at King’s

On 31 March 2025, King’s College London hosted Crossing Boundaries: Celebrating Linguistic Diversity at King’s, a unique and vibrant event that brought together students from across the university to explore how languages shape our understanding of motion, space, and the world around us. This interdisciplinary initiative, funded by a Diversity & Inclusion Grant (£787.59) from the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, was organised by Andrea Farina and Dr Barbara McGillivray (King’s College London), with artistic direction by Gioele Morello (London Metropolitan University).

Set against the multicultural backdrop of London – a city where hundreds of languages are spoken, many at risk of disappearing – Crossing Boundaries aimed to raise awareness of the importance of linguistic diversity and inclusivity in academic and everyday contexts. The event drew together students from across faculties and departments, from Digital Humanities to Languages, Literatures and Cultures, in a dynamic, collaborative exploration of how different languages encode movement and spatial relationships.

Language, Motion, and Meaning

At the heart of the event was a compelling linguistic inquiry: how do different languages express motion through space? Participants examined and compared motion verbs in a wide array of ancient and modern languages, including English, Italian, Albanian, Chinese, Korean, and Latin. Through these comparisons, students uncovered fascinating insights into the cultural frameworks and cognitive patterns that underpin different linguistic systems.

With the help of Andrea Farina, attendees were able to explore how languages vary in their treatment of direction, path, and manner. For example, while English tends to express direction through dedicated verbs like enter/exit or go in/out, other languages use verb morphology or compound expressions to convey similar meanings. These nuanced differences provided a powerful lens through which to examine how language influences thought and perception.

Collaborative Creation: The Paths of Motion Installation

Beyond linguistic analysis, the event also invited students to engage creatively. A major highlight of the day was the collaborative development of Paths of Motion, a participatory art installation that visually represents the diversity of linguistic approaches to describing movement. Co-designed and co-created by participants under the guidance of Gioele Morello, the artwork served as a tangible expression of the day’s themes and a collective celebration of the languages spoken within the King’s community.

The installation, centred around the theme of an air balloon symbolising fluidity and travel, captured the unique ways people conceptualise motion and direction across languages. Participants actively contributed to the creation of Paths of Motion by adding words and phrases describing movement in their native and learned languages, which were woven into the artwork to reflect the diversity of linguistic structures used to express motion. They also shared personal reflections and thoughts, written on yellow sticky notes that form the basket of an air balloon, grounding the piece in lived experience and collective exploration.

A Shared Commitment to Inclusion

More than just an academic exercise, Crossing Boundaries underscored King’s ongoing commitment to inclusivity and cultural awareness. By foregrounding the voices and linguistic backgrounds of students, the event created space for meaningful exchange and reflection. Participants were invited to contribute their native languages and personal experiences to the discussion, ensuring a truly representative and inclusive environment.

The event also highlighted the value of student-led contributions to research and creative practice. Through their engagement, students played a vital role in promoting and preserving linguistic diversity, not only within the university, but in broader society.

Some pictures of the event

Symposium on Information Controls

When: May 16th 2025, 8:30 am – 5 pm

Where: MB4.2 Macadam building, Strand campus, King’s College London

The Symposium on Information Controls brings together academic and civil society perspectives on information controls from around the world. This event is hosted by the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College, London with support from the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP).

Registration

There is no registration fee for this event, but advance registration is required.

Preliminary Programme

8:30 am – 9 am Registration

9 am – 9:15 am Welcome and opening remarks

9:15 am -10:45 am Panel 1

10:45 am -11:15 am Coffee break

11:15 am -12:45 pm Panel 2

12:45 pm – 1:45 pm Lunch

1:45 pm – 3:15 pm Panel 3

3:15 pm – 3:45 pm Coffee break

3:45 pm – 4:45 pm Roundtable discussion

4:45 pm – 5 pm Closing remarks

For any inquiries, please contact the organisers:

Dr Ashwin Mathew: ashwin.mathew@kcl.ac.uk
Gowhar Farooq: m.g.farooq@kcl.ac.uk

PhD student Andrea Farina awarded the ‘Initiative of the Year’ prize by the Faculty of Arts & Humanities

We are pleased to announce that our PhD student Andrea Farina has been awarded the ‘Initiative of the Year’ prize by the Faculty of Arts & Humanities for his workshop Data Driven Classics: Exploring the Power of Shared Datasets (https://www.kcl.ac.uk/events/data-driven-classics-exploring-the-power-of-shared-datasets), which took place at King’s College London on 5 July 2024.

CFP: Symposium on Information Controls

Date: May 16, 2025
Location: King’s College, London
Submission Deadline: March 31, 2025

The Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College, London and the London Arts and Humanities Partnership (LAHP) invite submissions for a one-day symposium exploring the intersections of digital technologies and power, by examining contemporary issues involving information controls. This symposium aims to build connections by fostering critical conversations between scholars and practitioners working on information controls.

We welcome abstracts of 300 words (max) addressing the following themes:

Understudied Geographies of Information Controls
Methodological and Theoretical Approaches to Studying Information Controls

Discussions may include, but are not limited to:

The social, political, and economic conditions that enable information controls
The roles of different actors in perpetuating, supporting, or resisting information controls
Contemporary theoretical and methodological approaches to studying information control mechanisms
Experiences of practitioners and scholars conducting fieldwork in contexts of censorship, misinformation, and digital surveillance

This symposium will be of interest to upcoming and established scholars working on censorship, mis/disinformation, digital infrastructures, and other related areas.

Submission Guidelines

Abstracts should be around 300 words (excluding references)
Submit your abstracts via https://forms.office.com/e/dHQ3dzUaRX by March 31, 2025
Those selected will be notified by the second week of April 2025

Travel Support

Limited domestic travel support will be available for a few speakers traveling from outside London.

For any inquiries, please contact:
Dr Ashwin Mathew: ashwin.mathew@kcl.ac.uk
Gowhar Farooq: m.g.farooq@kcl.ac.uk

Seminar | Adventures in Fandom and Conspiracy Theory with Corpus Linguistics and the New Statistics

Event organised by the Computational Humanities research group.

To register to the seminar, please fill in this form by 11 March 2025.

18 March 2025 – 3:30pm GMT

Remote – Via Microsoft Teams.

In person (KCL staff and students only) – King’s College London, Bush House (NE), 2.02.

Daniel Allington (King’s College London), Adventures in Fandom and Conspiracy Theory with Corpus Linguistics and the New Statistics

Abstract

Corpus Linguistics is the statistical study of large text collections or ‘corpora’. It has considerable overlap with Computational Linguistics, although, in practice, the two disciplines have very different priorities, with one centrally focused on phenomena in what philosophers call ‘natural language’ and the other centrally focused on the algorithmic processing and production of such language. Both have application in the study of human culture, much of which is encoded in text. In this presentation, I will introduce and discuss my own research on texts produced within two very different online communities: YouTube users commenting on conspiracy theory videos and Archive of Our Own (AO3) members writing fanfiction: works of prose fiction created on the basis of intellectual property associated with mass media franchises such as Harry Potter and My Hero Academia, but without authorisation from the intellectual property owners. In doing so, I will also explain the principles of the New Statistics, and on what I have learnt from the endeavour to reimagine corpus linguistic modes of analysis in their light — an endeavour which has necessarily involved the development of new computational tools.

Bio

Daniel Allington is Reader in Cultural Analytics in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. His published research spans multiple fields, ranging from Extremism Studies to the History of the Book.

How genre work can shift evaluations

Could social media challenge dominating approaches to organisational evaluation? In a recent paper we explore how student vloggers remediate traditional university rankings. In particular, we look at how this is done through ‘reaction’ and ‘tier list’ videos. In reaction videos, vloggers film their own reaction as they, one by one, read the results of ‘official’ university rankings. In the tier list videos, vloggers simply make their own rankings. For examples of each see here and here.

Through our research we found that vloggers engage in a sophisticated dance of confirming and undermining the genre expectations associated with traditional university rankings. They know and confirm that university rankings are, in the words of one of the vloggers, ‘bullshit.’ This, however, does not mean that they are not important. Rankings are both silly and serious at the same time.

This serious/silly tension is comedy gold for our content creators. It allows them to speak about a set of practices that are both nonsense (like pretending that rankings provide something akin to an objective measure of worth), and serious (like caring about how a future employer might perceive you as a prospect, based on the ranking of the university you attended).

Because vloggers can lean into the commenting on and creation of rankings, while fully acknowledging that there is no cardinal essence to these lists, it provides them the room they need to develop new evaluation practices that are potentially very useful to students. It provides students with useful interpretive frameworks for making sense of university choice, and richer accounts of what they can expect when starting university.

These expectations not only concern what to expect from the university experience itself, but also the perceptions of the social and institutional hierarchies that come with admission to university X versus university Y. Some of this discourse takes the form of anecdotes, gossip, prejudice, and jokes, providing a realistic picture of how evaluative schemes emerge and are circulated.

Take for example the video below, in which YouTuber Clouds posts a tier list of London-based universities based on her “personal experiences”, which turns into musings about who she likes to spend time with. This leads to categories such as “Stranger danger” for undesirables (see below) and “Invite to pres” (a term referring to a “pre-party” before the actual party) for universities that are just shy of “10/10 Recommend”.

If this has piqued your interest, have a look at Clouds remediating the way universities are ranked. If you want to learn more about the reference to Cardi B, and how it relates to genre remediation, do have a look at our paper.

“‘Rankings are all bullsh*t anyway, why not do my own?’: Vloggers and genre remediation” was co-authored by Astrid Van den Bossche, Jelena Brankovic, and Morten Hansen, and published in New Media & Society in February 2025.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448251316795

Seminar | Structure Meets Strategy in the Misinformation Age: a Simulation-Based Study

Event organised by the Computational Humanities research group.

To register to the seminar, please fill in this form by 28 February 2025.

4 March 2025 – 4pm GMT

Remote – Via Microsoft Teams.

In person – King’s College London, Bush House (SE), 1.10.

Brian Ball (Northeastern University London), Structure Meets Strategy in the Misinformation Age: a Simulation-Based Study

Abstract

We are now living in what some have called ‘the misinformation age’ (O’Connor and Weatherall, 2019), in which AI algorithms and social networks determine the quality of the information we can access – with a range of important consequences (e.g. for democracy). Previous work has explored the effects of different information processing strategies on the abilities of communities of rational agents to discover the truth in a timely manner (Ball et al., 2024). The present paper uses the PolyGraphs simulation framework to (computationally) investigate how network structure interacts with, and impacts upon, the effectiveness of these strategies.

We begin (in section 1) with a thorough investigation of artificial networks generated using the preferential attachment model (Barabasi and Albert, 1999) on which existing network nodes (agents) with more connections are more likely to be linked, via an information-sharing edge, to new nodes joining the network. We find (amongst other things) that the ill-effects of mis- and disinformation on the efficiency of truth-seeking inquiry are even stronger in these relatively sparse (i.e. low density) networks than in the complete networks that were explored previously; and we detect hints that concerns about accuracy extend to larger networks than previously thought (Zollman, 2007). We then (in section 2) pursue a more systematic investigation of a range of network structures, including random networks (Erdos and Renyi, 1959), as well as those that exhibit the so-called ‘small-world’ property (Watts and Strogatz, 1998), using advanced statistical techniques to tease out the relative influences of a range of structural features, including density, clustering, and path length. Finally, (in section 3) we look at a pair of larger networks representing real-world communities/populations.

Bio

Brian Ball is Head of Faculty in Philosophy at Northeastern University London. A Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, he was previously a Lecturer in Philosophy at St. Anne’s and then Balliol College, Oxford. His expertise is in the theory of knowledge, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. His recent work engages with computer science and artificial intelligence.

Data Driven Classics: Interdisciplinary Connections through Shared Data

Workshop organised by Andrea Farina (Department of Digital Humanities) and Francesca Lam-March (Department of Classics).

The Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London is excited to announce a unique opportunity for scholars interested in the intersection of Classics and digital methodologies. We invite you to participate in our second workshop of the Data Driven Classics series, titled Data Driven Classics: Interdisciplinary Connections through Shared Data on 27th June 2025.

Webpage: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/events/data-driven-classics-interdisciplinary-connections-through-shared-data-workshop

Date: 27th June 2025

Time: 9:30 AM – 5:00 PM

Venue: King’s College London, Embankment Room MB-1.1.4 (Macadam Building, Strand Campus)

About the Workshop (more info on our webpage):

The workshop focuses on the role of curated datasets in advancing open research in Classics through digital humanities. It aims to enhance participants’ understanding of data-sharing, interoperability, and collaboration. The event includes expert presentations on published datasets, discussions on data use, and hands-on sessions where participants work with datasets, receive feedback, and explore best practices for sharing data. Topics covered include repository types, licensing, DOI assignment, and README files. The workshop concludes with a roundtable discussion on fostering further collaboration and data-sharing in the academic community.

Invited speakers:

Dr Marton Ribary (Royal Holloway University of London), Open humanities data: Creation, collection, research and access

Dr Mar A Rodda (Merton College Oxford), Classics through data: why is it difficult and why is it still worth it?

Dr Mathilde Bru (King’s College London), Datasets in Classics: sharing your research as a Classicist

Dr Gabriel Bodard (Institute of Classical Studies), Inscriptions, Prosopography, Linked Open Data: standards, connectivity and sustainability in recent digital classics projects

Who can attend:

This workshop is open to postgraduate students, researchers, and staff members interested in Classics, regardless of their level of expertise in digital methodologies. We especially encourage participation from those with an interest in linguistics, archaeology, history, and related fields. Participants are sought within and outside King’s College London. Preference will be given to applicants whose cover letters demonstrate that their research projects or professional pursuits benefit from the event. We also aim to maintain a balanced representation across disciplinary backgrounds.

No prior knowledge of computational or digital methods, or experience working with data or datasets, is required, as the workshop is designed to help attendees build these skills and apply them effectively in their research. Those with prior experience in either area are more than welcome to send us a cover letter for participation, as activities will be tailored to accommodate participants’ diverse backgrounds and levels of expertise.

Registration and logistics:

Seats for this workshop are limited. To apply for participation, please email Andrea Farina (andrea.farina@kcl.ac.uk) and Francesca Lam-March (francesca.1.lam-march@kcl.ac.uk), attaching a cover letter no longer than one page in .pdf format and writing “Data Driven Classics Registration” as the subject of your email. In your cover letter, please (1) state your name, affiliation, position (student, PhD student, Lecturer etc.), email address, and your field in Classics (e.g., linguistics, history, etc.), and (2) explain why you would like to attend the workshop and how it can benefit your research.

There is no registration fee for this event. However, participants are responsible for covering their travel expenses through their own institutions. The workshop will accommodate a maximum of 15 participants to ensure adequate assistance during the hands-on session.

Important dates:

Deadline to submit expression of interest with cover letter: 20 April 2025.

Notification of acceptance: 30 April 2025.

Event: 27 June 2025.

Contact Information:

For any inquiries or further information, please contact Andrea Farina (andrea.farina@kcl.ac.uk).

Hybrid Round-Table | Digital Methods in Brazil – Fostering Dialogue and Connection

Event organised by Janna Joceli Omena and Thais Lobo

31 January 2025 – 14:00 to 16:15 GMT

In-person, at Franklin-Wilkins Building, London + Online, via Microsoft Teams

To register for the event, please visit King’s official webpage

Join us for this hybrid roundtable that will discuss the current status of digital methods research in Brazil and what one can understand as “methods” when advancing research with the web as a methodological landscape. We seek to celebrate emerging research practices and kick off a Global South network, situating them within a transitional methodological moment in which digital methods and methodologies have been built with, in and about AI, web platforms and data visualisation.