About

Scaling Down, The Place of Limited Studies in the Digital Humanities Landscape

Sinem Görücü / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ In getting closer to my new University of Glasgow, co-leading the new Digital Humanities MSc from August, I have been thinking more about the place of small-scale projects within the broader DH landscape. Is the main aspect of my role to support students in completing smaller projects, from which they can evidence transferable skills to employers? Or - do these tighter, time-bound, pro

Mar 1013 min read

Remarks on the Datafication of History, University of Nottingham, February 4th, 2026

Last week, I had the opportunity to present to a group of historians, mostly PhDs, interested in leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for Arts and Humani ties research at-scale. This formed part of a workshop, organised by Liudmila Lyagushkina and Finn Cadell , encouraging LLM experimentation, with suitable guardrails and encouragment in place, as a means to critically adopt such technologies and ascertain whether AI automation is truly fit-for-purpose in historical rese

Feb 97 min read

Library Labs, Data Foundry and Handwritten Text Recognition

AI-enhanced Data Foundry header image, with welders - created in Runaway , with the prompt - “add 3 - 6 construction workers to the Forth Bridge structure, welding with sparks” “The following will be very cheeky. If you’re available … how do you fancy doing an impromptu lecture?” It’s nice to be trusted by your former academic supervisors, especially when they invite you to contribute to their newly minted course. In this case, the Library Studies MA delivered by the Univers

Nov 24, 202518 min read

Selected Publications

Joe Nockels discusses the near-future impact of AI transcription at-scale

Joe Nockels speaks about how AI platform providers can support precarious users

Joe Nockels is a Research Associate at the Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield, responsible for developing 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-supervising their new Digital Humanities MSc.

His research brings together AI implementation within libraries and archives with user studies, under a socio-technical banner, advocating for critical and values-driven approaches to collections as data.

Joe has previously held research positions at the Library of Congress, National Library of Scotland, and the AI cooperative Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents (READ), who maintain and develop Transkribus. He earned his PhD from the University of Edinburgh, in 2021.

For more on some of Joe's research, see:

About

Recent Posts

Scaling Down, The Place of Limited Studies in the Digital Humanities Landscape

Remarks on the Datafication of History, University of Nottingham, February 4th, 2026

Library Labs, Data Foundry and Handwritten Text Recognition

Selected Publications