I am a historian and Digital Humanities scholar who conducts interdisciplinary research at the intersections of technology, history, memory, human labour and heritage. Across different historical periods, technologies and forms of evidence, my research has addressed the following interlocking questions:

1. DATAFICATION

How do systems of knowledge-making shape what becomes visible, knowable and rememberable about the past?

My work argues that Digital Humanities is part of a much older documentary, memory and knowledge culture, with which it shares both continuities and ruptures. Thus, the data that Digital Humanities creates about a historical source through digitisation or computational modelling does not arise uniquely at the moment of the digital intervention. Datafication sits atop a much longer history of collecting, classification, documentation, description and knowledge organisation.

On top of this, computational formalisation requires decisions: what aspects of a source can be modeled or not? According to which and whose categories? And to what extent do or should traces of earlier knowledge systems shape a digital object? In other words, present-day digital representations can be though of as palimpsests. They are not only digital interventions; they carry traces of the earlier knowledge systems, institutional practices and historical circumstances through which a given source has passed. Thus, I do not treat technologies and knowledge infrastructures (like e.g. databases, digital archives, systems of classification and representation and increasingly AI) as neutral instruments through which an independently existing past becomes accessible. I treat them as active mediators of historical knowledge.

I am interested, therefore, not simply in how computational methods can offer researchers powerful new possibilities for analysis, connection and interpretation. I am most interested in what happens epistemologically when historically situated forms of evidence become computational objects.

Selected work

Nyhan, Julianne; Hauswedell, Tessa; Beals, M. H.; Terras, Melissa; Bell, Emily. (2020). “Of global reach yet of situated contexts: an examination of the implicit and explicit selection criteria that shape digital archives of historical newspapers.” Archival Science 20: 139–165.

This article demonstrates that large-scale digital archives cannot be understood as transparent representations of an underlying historical record. Through an examination of digitised historical newspapers, it traces how selection decisions, institutional circumstances and digitisation processes shape the digital corpora subsequently encountered and analysed as historical data.

Sloan, Kim; Nyhan, Julianne. (2020). “Enlightenment Architectures and the reconstruction of Sir Hans Sloane’s Cabinets of Miscellanies.” Journal of the History of Collections.

This work uses the reconstruction of Sloane’s collections to examine the relationship between historical systems of classification, the organisation of collections and their digital reconstruction. It explores how the computational representation of a collection necessarily encounters, and must respond to, earlier architectures of knowledge.

Smyth, Hannah; Nyhan, Julianne; Flinn, Andrew. (2020). “Opening the ‘black box’ of digital cultural heritage processes: feminist digital humanities and critical heritage studies.” In Routledge International Handbook of Research Methods in Digital Humanities, 295–308.

This chapter examines the processes through which cultural heritage becomes digital, calling for critical examination of the assumptions, decisions, labour and power relations that can be subsumed by the illusion of a self-evident digital object.

Watch

Julianne Nyhan, “Examining the Digital Humanities as a Site and ‘Peoplescape’ of Collecting and Collections,” UCL Inaugural Professorial Lecture, 31 March 2023.

The lecture brings these concerns together at a larger scale, asking what becomes visible when Digital Humanities itself is approached through the histories and practices of collecting and collections

Watch Nyhan’s UCL inaugural lecture

2. FORMALISING ABSENCE?

How do we computationally represent historically and culturally situated forms of knowledge whose complexity, subjectivity, absence and bias resist formalisation?

My research asks how dominant historical narratives, memory processes, archival absences and historical exclusions are revealed, challenged or activated when humanities sources are datafied.

A central concern of this work is absence. Rather than treating gaps, silences and errors in historical sources as deficiencies that computation must solve and then move on from, I have studied what they reveal about histories of subjectivity, power and exclusion. For example, the objects, knowledge and labour that was extracted from enslaved people in the course of amassing collecitons such as that of Sir Hans Sloane (considered by many to be the foundational collection of UK heritage) are largely omitted from the early modern, and until recently, modern records of that collection. Yet the agency and identities of European indiviuals who contributed to the collection in other ways are preserved in the historical record. This points to how ideologies of empire, colonialism, race and attribution have shaped museum, library, archival and other collections and their documentation over time, including the digital representations subsequently created from them. 

In response, I am interested in how digital methods can make such absences perceptible (even when the identities of enslaved and other individuals cannot be rediscovered) rather than concealing or computationally resolving them? I also ask how digital humanities should respond to the legacies of absence, exclusion and bias that it inherits, so that it does not unwittingly reamplify them in new computational contexts. In this sense, my interest is in how such absences continue to “haunt” later mediations such as digital infrastructures, long after their historical ocurrance.  But my argument is not that absence should automatically be recovered. I am also interested in circumstances when absence should be protected and not restored, when material should not be touched computational intervention at all. As fields like critical archival studies has shown, acts like refusal and non-disclosure can constitute deeply meaningful acts of resistance and agency, both for individuals and for communities.

Oral history is where I have explored this question most recently. Oral history testimony contains not only words but silence, hesitation, interaction, gesture, sound, emotion and ambiguity. What consequences follow when this material is made computationally accessible, or inaccessible, through technologies like Automatic Speech Recognition?

Selected work

Ortolja-Baird, A. and Nyhan, J. (2021) Encoding the haunting of an object catalogue: on the potential of digital technologies to perpetuate or subvert the silence and bias of the early-modern archive. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 37 (3) pp. 844–867. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab065.

This is particularly important for my absence research: it asks whether computational representation must reproduce the silences and biases inherited from historical documentation or whether digital methods can represence these absences.

Flinn, Andrew; Nyhan, Julianne; Smyth, Hannah; (2026) Oral History as Data: Multimodal Approaches to Analysis and Interpretation. In: Freund, Alexander and Jessee, Erin and Thomson, Alistair, (eds.) The Bloomsbury Handbook of Oral History. (pp. 153-170). https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10215997/Bloomsbury Publishing: London, UK.

This brings the problem into oral history: what happens the the contextual, subjective and multimodal characteristics of oral history testimony when it is treated as data? And what is the role of Automated Speech Recognition technologies in silencing or allowing new engagements with such features?  

Nyhan, J. (2026, August 17). Computing Futures: Positioning Absence in Inclusive Digital Humanities. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21981454

This document presents an outline course proposal for a core MPhil module in Digital Humanities, also offered as an optional module for students in Critical AI, Critical Digital Heritage, Critical Archives, Digital Labour, and cognate fields. This course explores the limits of current computing and Generative AI with regard to absence. It asks how noticing points of failure and misalignment can be generative and draw new and alternative computational futures into focus. Engaging critical frameworks, literature on technical and labour practices, historical perspectives, and participatory methodologies, the course prepares a new generation of scholars across these fields to critique computing in humanities and heritage contexts and to envision ethical, inclusive, and human-centred computational futures.

3. LABOUR

How have sociotechnical infrastructures and often hidden forms of human labour shaped both the history of knowledge cultures and the knowledge they create?

This strand of my research studies the people, practices and infrastructures that have been essential, sometimes in less visible ways, to the development of computational methods, data and knowledge making practices across Humanities, Heritage and Memory Computing.

My histories of computing and Digital Humanities have examined how disciplines construct accounts of their own development: which technologies, institutions, individuals and communities are remembered and commemorated, and which and who are not. This work also examines how disciplinary histories and data imaginaries perpetuate, challenge or complicate processes of attribution. In doing so, it has advanced critical histories of data, gender, computing, knowledge making practices and scholarly memory.

My first book in this area, Computation and the Humanities: Towards an Oral History of Digital Humanities, presents the first oral history account of the emergence and development of Digital Humanities in the UK, Europe and North America. Across thirteen oral history interviews and four analytical chapters, we unpicked the shifting, complex and heterogeneous dynamics that underpinned the emergence and development of the field and the experiences of some of those who helped to develop it.

My more recent monograph, Hidden and Devalued Labour in the Digital Humanities (Routledge, 2023), combined oral history and archival research to reveal the hidden and devalued feminised labour that underpinned some of the data foundations of Digital Humanities. It also investigated how mobilisations of gender, scholarly identity, labour and data imaginaries contributed to its occlusion. The book shows how absolutely essential feminised labour was obscured and devalued by project and disciplinary accounts that privileged machines, methods, innovation and prominent individuals.

By reconstructing the nature of the work undertaken by female keypunch operators using electromechanical punched card machines, and the processes through which their labour was devalued and ultimately silenced, the book offers new insights into how knowledge was defined at the dawn of Digital Humanities and the categories of people who were permitted to make that knowledge. In doing so, I draw attention to the sometimes unexamined or obscured historical dynamics and processes encoded in the digital tools, data and algorithms that Digital Humanities makes and uses. The book thus opens up otherwise hidden histories of the intersectional power dynamics that converged on the data foundations and knowledge production of Digital Humanities, some of which continue to shape the field today.

These questions become newly significant, and provide part of the essential “deep history” of computational labour in the age of AI, where apparently autonomous and automated computational systems similarly depend upon extensive and frequently obscured human, material and infrastructural conditions.

Selected work

Nyhan, Julianne. Hidden and Devalued Labour in the Digital Humanities: On the Index Thomisticus Project 1954–67. Routledge, 2023. https://www.routledge.com/Hidden-and-Devalued-Feminized-Labour-in-the-Digital-Humanities-On-the-Index-Thomisticus-Project-1954-67/Nyhan/p/book/9780367685980
This reconstructs the contribution of the predominantly female workers whose labour was essential to the Index Thomisticus, while examining the processes through which their intellectual, technical and emotional labour became obscured in dominant histories of humanities computing.

Nyhan, Julianne; Flinn, Andrew. Computation and the Humanities: Towards an Oral History of Digital Humanities. Springer, 2016. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-20170-2
Oral history becomes a method for exploring established disciplinary memory, recovering experiences, practices and actors that documentary and canonical histories of computing and Digital Humanities have inadequately captured.

Nyhan, J., Rockwell, G. 2023.  Introduction: on making in the Digital Humanities. In Nyhan, J., Rockwell, R., Sinclair, S., Ortjola-Baird, A. (Eds.). On Making in the Digital Humanities: Essays on the Scholarship of Digital Humanities Development in Honour of John Bradley. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800084209

On Making in the Digital Humanities fills a gap in our understanding of digital humanities projects and craft by exploring the processes of making as much as the products that arise from it. The volume (and introduction) draws focus to the interwoven layers of human and technological textures that constitute digital humanities scholarship. To do this, it assembles a group of well-known, experienced and emerging scholars in the digital humanities to reflect on various forms of making (we privilege here the creative and applied side of the digital humanities). The volume honours the work of John Bradley, as it is totemic of a practice of making that is deeply informed by critical perspectives. A special chapter also honours the profound contributions that this volume’s co-editor, Stéfan Sinclair, made to the creative, applied and intellectual praxis of making and the digital humanities. Stéfan Sinclair passed away on 6 August 2020.

4. REIMAGINING

How can Digital Humanities confront the absences and exclusions it inherits while helping to imagine more critical and generative computational futures?

My research is not only concerned with diagnosing the historical biases, exclusions and absences embedded in archives, collections, datasets and computational systems. It also asks what Digital Humanities can do with that knowledge, so that critical awareness can become methodological and generative.

This work has involved participatory strands, particularly through the “Sloane Lab: Looking back to build future shared collections” project (2021-2024). Hans Sloane’s vast and diverse collection, foundational to the British Museum and Natural History Museum, was assembled from the 1680s onwords. Its formation was deeply entangled with colonialism, empire and transatlantic enslavement. The Sloane Lab sought not only to build a knowledge graph that brings together the surviving digital records of this dispersed collection. It also explored how digital cultural heritage infrastructures might become spaces of reinterpretation, attribution,  participation and co-creation. We sought to embed diverse perspectives from a range of expert and interested communities, including descendants of communities from whom Sloane and his networks extracted objects and knowledge, into the technical design and wider activities of the project.

This included a travelling exhibition in Wales and Northern Ireland and a Community Fellows scheme, which sought to prioritise Global Majority participants in the reinterpretation of Sloane’s collections and legacy. One of the larger methodological questions underlying this work was how critical histories of collections might inform not only what we say about the past, but the computational infrastructures, participatory practices and forms of knowledge that we build with them in the present and future.

Selected work

Nyhan, J., Vlachidis, A., Flinn, A., Pearlman, N., Carine, M., Hill, J., Humbel, M. et al. “Final Report – Sloane Lab: Looking Back to  Build Future Shared Collections.” Towards a National Collection, January 31, 2025. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14771754.

This final report presents the key findings of the Sloane Lab project which worked with interested communities and heritage organisations to link the present with the past to allow the currently broken links between Sloane’s collections and catalogues to be re-established across the Natural History Museum, British Library and British Museum (plus others that have relevant material). The main outcome of our project is the freely available, Sloane Lab Knowledge Base, which provides researchers, curators and the interested public with new opportunities to search, explore, and critically and creatively use and reuse digital cultural heritage.

2024. Terraciano, A., Flinn, A. and Nyhan, J. Participation and Inclusion with Digital National Collections: Co-designing the Sloane Lab. Mimesis Journal 13:2 (DRHA). https://doi.org/10.13135/2389-6086/10178

Watch

Julianne Nyhan, Andreas Vlachidis, Alda Terracciano and Andrew Flinn (2025). Innovations for a Unified Digital Collection – The Sloane Lab Journey. Version 1.0.1. Edited by Vicky Garnett. DARIAH Campus [Webinar recording].

https://hdl.handle.net/21.11159/019595c5-1afb-70a2-95f3-0bbe0098bbbf

5. MEMORY

What happens when computational systems move from representing and analysing historical knowledge towards actively participating in its interpretation, reconstruction and remembrance?

My current work acknowledges how generative AI introduces powerful new possibilities for the practice of oral history, yet argues that generative AI’s underlying logics, including extraction, abstraction, prediction and efficiency, can run counter to oral history’s foundational commitment to shared authority, situated knowledge, contextualisation and interpretive nuance. In response, I am exploring critical and hermeneutic frameworks, data led interventions, and situated epistemologies that seek to ensure that AI responds to oral history’s social, cultural, epistemological and ethical imperatives, rather than forcing oral history to adapt to the demands of AI. In this sense, the questions that have driven my earlier research become newly urgent. My background across Digital Humanities, oral history, histories of computing, archives and collections allows me to identify questions at the intersection of oral history and machine learning that may not be visible from the perspective of one discipline alone.

This work is leading me towards the concept of algorithmic memory. My emerging argument is that we cannot adequately understand algorithmically mediated memory by imagining AI as an external technological force acting upon an otherwise stable object called human memory. Instead, I ask: how does human memory reshape algorithmic systems, even as algorithmic systems increasingly participate in shaping what and how humans remember?

Alongside this conceptual work, my collaborative research on Multimodal Digital Oral History is developing a methodology and AI driven workflow for engaging with the oral, aural and sonic dimensions of oral history collections. By integrating modalities such as transcript, sound, waveform, spectrogram and metadata, this approach foregrounds expressive features, such as laughter, that are typically excluded from transcripts. This work brings methodological and theoretical innovation to digital oral history and scholarly memory studies.

Selected works

2024. Flinn, A., Boyd, D., Morgan, C. and Nyhan, J. Democratising Access? The interface of new technologies and archived life stories. Oral History Journal: The Life Story in Oral History Practice (52:3) pp. 102-9. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10194919

This is an edited transcript of a panel discussion reflecting on some of the themes and issues to be considered when archiving life histories and making them accessible to researchers in the digital age. Topics discussed include: use and reuse of life histories, ethics and informed consent, the benefits and challenges of new and emerging digital tools and technologies for archiving and analysing life-history interviews, sensitivity reviews, multimodal digital oral history, automated transcription, and artificial intelligence and oral history

2023. Smyth, H., Nyhan, J., Flinn A. Exploring the possibilities of Thomson’s Fourth Paradigm Transformation – the case for a Multimodal approach to Digital Oral History. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. https://academic.oup.com/dsh/article/38/2/720/6967121?searchresult=1&login=false

This article seeks to reorientate ‘digital oral history’ towards a new research paradigm, Multimodal Digital Oral History (MDOH). Calling for a recalibration of the current dominance of the textual transcript, and for active engagement with the oral, aural, and sonic affordances of both retro-digitized and born digital OH (DOH) collections, we call for a re-orientation of the digital from passive to generative and self-reflexive in the human–machine study of spoken word recordings.

Watch

2025. Nyhan, J. Oral History as Data? Critically approaching the digital turn in method, meaning and recollection. 2025 Susan Hockey Lecture 22 May https://www.ucl.ac.uk/digital-humanities/ucldh-events/susan-hockey-lecture/2025

From an earlier oral history landscape that was constituted of the oral history interview, its analogue or digital recording, its transcript and, potentially, its publication, we are now asking whether oral history can be understood as “data”? What happens when we try to organize or represent the rich and complex experiences shared in an oral history interview using a structured format, like a knowledge graph? And do such changes matter? Or, to put it another way, if we understand oral history as ‘data’, can digital methods be used to analyze it without epistemological loss or consequence?