Joseph Nockels
School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities
Research Associate
- Profile
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Joe is a Research Associate at the Digital Humanities Institute (DHI), responsible for developing and supporting the DHI’s strategic 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.
Joe is a researcher of AI-enabled Automated Text Recognition (ATR), as well as critical digitisation and digital archives more broadly. His research explores how such methods are changing access to our collective past, libraries, and library users’ relationship with collections.
Joe also works to blend ATR approaches with text and data mining, most recently on the Frederick Douglass Papers, while a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress on the project Deepening Autobiographical Research: A Textual Analysis of Frederick Douglass (1845 – 1887) at the Library of Congress
- Qualifications
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He completed a PhD from the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, partnered with the National Library of Scotland (NLS), entitled: Making the Past Readable: A Study of the Impact of Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) on Libraries and Their Users. He is a trained archivist, with an MA in Archival Science from Leiden University and stints working at Greenpeace International, the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, and the National Trust.
Joe’s work also engages with AI sustainability in the Digital Humanities; digital approaches to religious history, digital preservation and digital editions.
- Research interests
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Automated Text Recognition and Optical Character Recognition
AI sustainability
Open source and open access
Digital approaches to theological and intellectual historical collections
Digital preservation
Digital scholarly editing
- Selection of publications
Nockels, J., Gooding, P., Ames, S., Terras, M. (2022) Understanding the application of handwritten text recognition technology in heritage contexts: a systematic review of Transkribus in published research. Arch Sci 22, 367–392.
Nockels, J., Gooding, P., Terras, M. (2024) Are Digital Humanities platforms facilitating sufficient diversity in research? A study of the Transkribus Scholarship Programme, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 00, 1-20.
Nockels, J., Gooding, P., Terras, M. (2024) The implications of handwritten text recognition for accessing the past at scale. Journal of Documentation 80, 7, 148-167. 10.1108/JD-09-2023-0183
Marjory Fleming Diaries, Data Foundry, National Library of Scotland (NLS) (2021). Funded by the AHRC.