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.