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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 advances 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 experimentation within libraries and archives with user studies, under a banner of socio-technical analysis, while 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 through 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 2024.

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

Yacks to Hacks, Should Historians Increasingly Code?

I felt old today, on account of visiting my old sixth form at Tapton High School. For the last few years, the school has coordinated with the University of Sheffield to host a set of Humanities and Social Science Seminars. These are intended to offer Tapton students a flavour of what undergraduate programming looks like, in an informal space, between their usual lessons. It also offers a key opportunity for the university to strengthen its connections with schools in the area

9 hours ago9 min read

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 role, 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, projects have greater value to DH, beyond self-learni

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

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

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

About

Recent Posts

Yacks to Hacks, Should Historians Increasingly Code?

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

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

Selected Publications