I am an early career researcher who specialises in computational approaches to analysis texts – or as I like to term it, ‘digital philology’.
I have a background in medieval literature, descriptive translation studies, corpus linguistics, digital humanities, and digital editing.
I am especially interested in Older Scots language and literature and have a burgeoning interest in book history, layout, and hypertextuality. I have worked extensively on the poet-translator Gavin Douglas, and have created a fully digitised annotated version of the Eneados and its source.
I work (and have worked) on the following research projects:
1. Oxford Text Archive (OTA) funded by the AHRC through the iDAH programme (2024-), based at the Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics Faculty, University of Oxford.
Principal investigator: Martin Wynne
Technical lead: John Pybus
Research assistant: Megan Bushnell
The Oxford Text Archive (OTA) is one of the first ever digital repositories for linguistic and literary data, and currently the longest living one. It contains over 70,000 resources and is host to the British National Corpus, which contains over 1 million words of native British English.
My current role is to help maintain and grow the OTA, and develop it into a national level platform for depositing literary and linguistic data. I also provide training on the creation and maintenance of literary and linguistic datasets. Finally, I help administrate CLARIN-UK and the Knowledge Centre for Digital Resources for the Languages in Ireland and Britain.
To visit the OTA go to https://llds.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/llds/xmlui/.
To find out about CLARIN-UK go to https://www.clarin.ac.uk/home.
To find out about DR-LIB go to https://www.clarin.ac.uk/dr-lib.
2. Mapping the Arts and Humanities commissioned by the AHRC (2022-24), based at the Digital Humanities Research Hub, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
Project sponsor: Jo Fox
Core team: Kim Burgi, Megan Bushnell, Marco Dosi, Virginia Ghelarducci, George Meredith, Lui Pisanelli, and Elena Zolotariof.
Project board: Kunika Kono, Christopher Ohge, Marty Steer, Elaine Walters, and Jane Winters.
There is significant arts and humanities research infrastructure in the UK, consisting of institutes, centres, hubs, research clusters and networks, and professional, learned and scholarly societies with a research focus. However, much of this infrastructure remains invisible, undiscoverable, and unconnected. This project seeks to identify and connect this complex research eco-system in the arts and humanities through the creation of an interactive, online, open access map. Along with a searchable database and application programming interface (API).
I was Project Officer and then Project Manager, and I led the data team, where I designed the data structure and collection process. I also consulted on the web design and data visualisations.
To see the project website go to https://www.humanities.org.uk/
3. Unlocking the English Portrait Miniature, funded by David Thomson, Ken Thomson Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario, British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant, Fitzwilliam Museum Marlay Group (2021-22), based at the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.
Principal investigator: Christine Slottved Kimbriel, Paola Ricciardi
Research scientist: Flavia Fiorillo
Head of digital and IT: Daniel Pett
Digital content producer: Megan Bushnell
The ‘Unlocking the English Portrait Miniature’ web resource is a key outcome of technical research work, commenced in 2018, on 16th and 17th century miniatures from collections in the UK and abroad. This online resource features the technical images and interpretation of analytical results, and will ultimately include close to one hundred miniatures. While the main focus has been on miniatures attributed to, or associated with, Isaac Oliver, the resource holds examples attributed to other artists as well, including Lucas Horenbout, Nicolas Hilliard, Peter Oliver, John Hoskins and Jacob van der Doort.
As digital content producer on this project, I structured the data, designed the website, liaised with web developers, and designed a layered function in the IIIF viewer Mirador.
To see the project website go to https://unlocking-miniatures.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/.
