Research Projects 2011 — Present

Projects.

Three connected research projects in digital oral history. Together they recover the early voices of digital humanities — a field reaching back to 1949 — and build the methodological tools to study its memory today. Each builds on what came before; together they form the methodological spine of the International Digital Oral History Lab.

International Digital Oral History Lab

Hidden Histories

Foundational Oral history of digital humanities Since 2011

Project 01 · The foundational corpus

Recovering the early voices of digital humanities — from the scholars and practitioners who shaped the field.

Since 2011, Hidden Histories has been conducting, collecting, and disseminating interviews with the scholars and practitioners who shaped digital humanities — a field whose origins reach back to 1949, when Roberto Busa imagined an index variorum of some 11 million words of medieval Latin. The project recovers what print sources leave out.

Interdisciplinary in method, drawing on oral history, digital humanities, and cultural studies, it gathers the memories, observations, and insights rarely admitted into the scholarly literature — and makes them available as a foundation for the lab's later projects.

From the corpus · selected interviews

  • Susan Hockey Humanities computing · Text analysis · Oxford / UCL 1960s →
  • Willard McCarty Humanities computing · Modelling · King's College London 1970s →
  • John Unsworth Electronic publishing · IATH · Virginia 1989S →
  • Geoffrey Rockwell Text analysis · Voyant Tools · Alberta 1980s →
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For the most part, such information cannot be gleaned from extant documentation — these are the hidden histories of digital humanities, accessible only through the testimony of those who lived them.

Method Semi-structured interviews
Sources Oral testimony + archives
Active Since 2011
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Multimodal Digital Oral History

Multimodal Sound as data Since 2023

Project 02 · The "sound-as-data" turn

Audio, video, and transcript as a single interpretive surface — not a hierarchy.

Building on Hidden Histories' foundation, MDOH treats oral history artifacts as multifaceted resources — transcripts, sound, waveforms, video, and metadata read together as analytical categories, not nested in priority of text.

The project moves digital oral history past passive digitisation toward what we call the "sound as data" turn: pacing, hesitation, laughter, and silence — the texture of speech itself — enter the analytic frame alongside the words. Computational tools (WhisperX, waveform analysis, and the in-development TransVisEd editor) operate in service of reflexive interpretation, not in place of it.

Specimen · transcript synced to waveform

00:14:32 "…there's a pause here, and that pause is —"
3.2 s silence
00:14:39 "— well, that pause is the data."
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Oral history is meaning-making, not signal extraction. The sound-as-data turn treats pacing, hesitation, and silence as evidence — never noise to filter, never flourish to ignore.

Modalities Audio · Video · Transcript
Tooling WhisperX · TransVisEd
Active Since 2023
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MeDoraH

NLP · Ontology FAIR data Since 2024

Project 03 · Mixed-methods Digital Oral History · UCL × TU Darmstadt

FAIR data and semantic infrastructure for multilingual oral history — extending the corpus beyond the Anglophone world.

A collaborative venture between University College London and TU Darmstadt, MeDoraH extends the Hidden Histories corpus with new German- and Italian-language interviews, broadening the lab's lens past Anglophone testimony.

Built on a comprehensive knowledge graph, an OWL/RDF ontology, and a cross-lingual NLP pipeline, the project produces structured representations of oral history interviews that adhere to FAIR principles — discoverable, comparable, and re-interpretable across English, German, and Italian sources.

SPECIMEN · INTERVIEWS, MODELLED AS A GRAPH

MeDoraH knowledge graph — interviews modelled as a semantic network
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Semantic infrastructure as a hermeneutic act: making structure, never flattening meaning.

Languages English · German · Italian
Stack NLP · Knowledge Graph · FAIR
Active Since 2024
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One trajectory, many voices.

International Digital Oral History Lab · UCL × TU Darmstadt
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