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Professor Melissa Terras (MA MSc DPhil CLTHE FCLIP FBCS CITP FHEA)

Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage

Biography

Background

Melissa Terras is the Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh‘s College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, which she joined in October 2017, leading digital aspects of research within CAHSS at Edinburgh, as well as building digital capacity in the new Edinburgh Futures Institute. Her research focuses on the use of computational techniques to enable research in the arts, humanities, and wider cultural heritage and information environment that would otherwise be impossible.

With a background in Classical Art History and English Literature (MA, University of Glasgow), and Computing Science (MSc IT with distinction in Software and Systems, University of Glasgow), her doctorate (Engineering, University of Oxford) examined how to use advanced information engineering technologies to interpret and read Roman texts. She is an Honorary Professor of Digital Humanities in UCL Department of Information Studies, where she was employed from 2003-2017, Honorary Professor in UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, which she directed 2012-2017, and previously Vice Dean of Research in UCL’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities (2014-2017).

Books include “Image to Interpretation: An Intelligent System to Aid Historians in Reading the Vindolanda Texts” (2006, Oxford University Press) and “Digital Images for the Information Professional” (2008, Ashgate), and she has co-edited various volumes such as “Digital Humanities in Practice” (Facet 2012) and “Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader” (Ashgate 2013) which was recently translated into a Russian Edition (Siberian Federal University Press 2017). Her latest monograph on the representation of academics in children’s literature is in production with Cambridge University Press.

Terras was program chair of the major international conference Digital Humanities 2014, in Lausanne, Switzerland, vice-chair of DH2013 in Lincoln, Nebraska, and outgoing chair of DH2015 in Sydney, Australia. She served as Secretary of the Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing (now the European Association of Digital Humanities) (2008-2011) and as a Steering committee member of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (2009-2012).

You can generally find her on twitter, at @melissaterras.

 

Research summary

Terras is working on a range of funded projects and initiatives applying computational approaches to cultural heritage areas, including  Transcriptorium , Crosscult, Oceanic Exchanges, and Digital Library Futures, and numerous unfunded research approaches including the representation of academia in children's literature, and the history of female punchcard operatives in early Digital Humanities projects.  Previous research projects include and Deep Imaging Mummy Cases, Non-Destructive Analysis of Multi-Layered Papyrus, QRator, Transcribe Bentham, The Great Parchment Book , The Slade Archive Project, Textal, Log Analysis of Internet Resources in the Arts and Humanities, Virtual Environments for Research in Archaeology, eScience and Ancient Documents, and Researching eScience Analysis of Census Holdings.

Knowledge exchange

Terras is general editor of Digital Humanities Quarterly, and on the editorial board of the Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities.  She currently serves on the Board of Curators of the University of Oxford Libraries and the Board of Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, as well as a number of Advisory boards including The British Library Labs, the Scientific Consultative Group of The National Gallery, and The Imperial War Museum’s Operation War Diary. Terras is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals and a Chartered IT Professional and Fellow of the British Computer Society. Terras was the Co-Investigator of the The EPSRC funded Centre for Doctoral Training in Science and Engineering in Arts, Heritage and Archaeology (SEAHA) during its set up period.

View all 74 publications on Research Explorer

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