What is the Digital Humanities @ Oxford Summer School? 

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Author: Dr Megan Gooch is Head of the Centre for Digital Scholarship at the Bodleian Libraries and Director of DHOxSS.

“The best week of the year for digital humanists.”1 

I have the privilege of running the Digital Humanities @ Oxford Summer School (DHOxSS), which is a gathering of digital humanists to learn new skills and make new networks that has happened every year in Oxford since 2010.  

My first interaction with DHOxSS was typical of many of our attendees – I’d got some research funding and plans to learn some new digital skills to help me achieve my research aims. I looked at DHOxSS and thought it looked a bit pricey and it didn’t offer a course on what I needed. Looking back, I wish I’d spent the money and learned Python (sorry to the R fans out there!). Working with the DHOxSS team of event managers, convenors and speakers, as well as meeting former participants – I know I missed out on something amazing not attending DHOxSS 2018! 

A grid of 9 images. The images are all from the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School (2025) drinks reception in Blackwell Hall in the Weston Library. They vary from groups of people talking and drinking to some shaking hands with Professor David de Roure.

Photo credit: Digital Humanities @ Oxford Summer School 2025. Drinks reception in Blackwell Hall, Weston Library.

A week dedicated to learning 

When you sign up to DHOxSS you choose a strand to follow for the whole week. This isn’t like a conference where you dip in and out of sessions. You spend the whole week dedicated to your particular topic, or half a week for online strands. Options vary from year to year but include things like learning Python from scratch, advanced Python or TEI (Text Encoding), or more thematic strands such as an Introduction to Digital Humanities or Humanities Data. For the last few years we’ve had an online strand looking at library issues in digital humanities with Research Libraries UK. We’ve also covered topics like crowdsourcing, Linked Data, digital cultural heritage, AI and creative industries and more in the past.  

Our strand convenors are expert academics or practitioners from Oxford and many of our partner institutions across the globe – this year’s convenors hail from the Bodleian Libraries, Cambridge University Library, the Alan Turing Institute, University of Luxembourg, Oxford e-Research Centre, RLUK, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, School of Advanced Studies, Oxford IT Services and Humanities Division. And then there are the guest speakers! Most strands have guest slots from leading experts, and we also have two amazing keynotes every year. I haven’t attended a keynote yet that I haven’t scrawled copious notes in my undigital notebook. 

A week with other digital humanists 

A week (or half a week online) of learning is intense. So it’s great that our participants get to work and learn in small groups. Onsite we get to know each other during the breaks and at our welcome reception or optional Oxford walking tour and gala dinner. Online we have tried to build mechanisms to bring that element of networking into your home or workplace. Watch out for speed networking in 2026 – we’ll report back as to how it went.  

DH for everyone 

To make DHOxSS viable we have to charge for it, but we don’t make a profit. We run on an annual budget and have to make the case every single year for the continued existence of DHOxSS. We also have to balance that budget. This is why we charge, but I know we offer exceptionally good value for money for a week (or half for online) of learning, and a lifetime of DH connections.  

Since the Covid pandemic forced us, like everyone, online in 2020, we’ve maintained at least one online strand for DHOxSS, and kept it at an accessible price point. In case you’re wondering, we run the online strands as wholly digital rather than hybrid, cos we tried that, read your feedback, and we know that non-hybrid gives the best learning experience.  

But we know that price can still be a barrier. This is why we run a bursary scheme every year. We use surplus in our budgets to fund more bursaries, and have been active in seeking sponsorship and funding to fund more bursaries.  

DH forever  

I always bump into someone who did DHOxSS whenever I’m at a DH conference and I love to hear their stories about what they’re doing now. Some are working in digital libraries, some are doing DH degrees, some are doing exciting new projects. Members of my team who started their DH journeys at DHOxSS are now convenors of it. That’s the kind of impact I can get behind. 

Join us at DHOxSS 

Find out more about joining us, and click to register from here. 

Sign up here to hear about next year’s bursary opportunities. 

If you’re interested in supporting our work financially, please get in touch.

1. According to one of our convenors! 

Code the Collection

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Author: Dr Megan Gooch is Head of the Centre for Digital Scholarship at the Bodleian Libraries 

Event poster for 'Code the Collection'. Image of board game titled 'The Panorama of Europe', with small tiles of different European cities. Date and details of event: 4-5 March 2026, Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston Library. Text: Experiment and work with datasets provided by University of Oxford's libraries and museums and the Berlin State Library. Logos for Digital Scholarship at Oxford, Centre for Digital Scholarship (Bodleian Libraries) and the Berlin State Library.

What do coins, ethnographic collectors, a medieval manuscript, religious texts and AI have in common? They all made an appearance at a Hackathon run by the Bodleian Libraries’ Centre for Digital Scholarship team in March 2026. 

A hackathon, in case you’re new to the concept, is a collaborative (and often competitive) event using data to build a technology prototype.  

Why did we do a hackathon? 

Quite honestly, we’ve had data envy for a while now. Some of our brilliant library and museum colleagues in places like the US Library of Congress Labs, National Library of Scotland’s Data Foundry and the Netherlands’ Rijksmuseum Data Services have been showcasing their collections data for years. We were also inspired by the KU Leuven Libraries approach to cultural data hackathons. This approach, called Collections as Data, has been on our To Do list, but an opportunity to meet colleagues from the State Library of Berlin’s Stabi Lab as part of the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership kickstarted our collaborative Collections as Data journey.  

At the Stabi Lab they already had some data collections online and were keen to find out more about how people might use these data. At the Bodleian we wanted to know how people wanted to use data before we invested in any infrastructure or data clean-up projects.  

The result was a year-long research project in which we used two hackathons – one in Berlin in October 2025 and one in Oxford in March 2026 – to see what people did with some Oxford and Berlin cultural heritage data sets. Read the results of our Berlin edition here. 

11 people in the Centre for Digital Scholarship working during the hackathon. Spaced around 3 tables.

Image: Attendees at the Code the Collection hackathon in the Centre for Digital Scholarship (Weston Library). Photo credit: Nick Cistone, Photographer, © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

How did people use our data? 

We welcomed teams with mixed technical abilities, including MSc in Digital Scholarship students, programmers, humanists and social scientists. We added some of our own technical and digital collections specialists to the mix in case anyone needed any help.  

We provided a range of datasets from the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (including the Berlin State library and museums in Berlin), and Oxford’s Gardens, Libraries and Museums. 

One team created a ‘vending machine’ in which you fed a coin, and it would play you a musical instrument from the same year as your coin was made. As a lifelong numismatist (coin specialist), I loved the creativity of this one. Another team used data from the Ethnological Museum in Berlin to map collectors and collecting hotspots, which revealed the obvious (German cities were popular), but also uncovered some surprising connections like collecting activity in Brazil, West Africa and Chile.  

The third team came with a research question about analysing religious and non-religious texts and used a range of textual data and software Stata to demonstrate the changing nature of languages and theological texts. The fourth group took one manuscript, the medieval Piers Plowman at the Bodleian, and created an interface which both enabled those studying Middle English texts to interrogate different dialect words and had handy features for Middle English learners to look up words. Our final group was one of our software engineers who unleashed his creativity by using AI to create an interactive discovery interface for Berlin collections. 

What did we learn? 

For me, the most amazing thing about what our hackers created was what they did with data we already had openly available on the internet. I mean, yes, we pointed people to the data and collated a list of datasets. But these amazing games, analytical tools, and entire discovery platforms didn’t require us to spend years creating new digital infrastructure or enhancing our metadata.  

Could we have better infrastructures for computational access? Well yes, there’s always room for improvement and technology is changing so quickly. Could we have better data? Also yes, but no data will ever be perfect, so it’s a real insight to know that researchers, students and programmers can deal with the messiness of real cultural heritage data.  

My final learning is that it takes a heck of a lot of work to organise a hackathon, and the team did a brilliant job of making it look this easy. We’re hoping to publish more blog posts on our hackathon teams, so sign up to our mailing list to stay in the loop.  

Welcome back to our digital blog 

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Author: Dr Megan Gooch, Head of the Centre for Digital Scholarship, Bodleian Libraries 

Photo: © Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford (Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Japan. d. 20/1-2): https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/31e509ac-1836-453f-8a32-159f81747426/

Oh hi!  

We know it’s been a while but we’re back on this blog to tell you about some of our work on digital scholarship and other digital things in the Bodleian Libraries.  

First things first, what’s digital scholarship? 

 ‘Research and teaching that is made possible by digital technologies, or that takes advantage of them to ask and answer questions in new ways’  (Melanie Schlosser, Digital Scholarship @ The Libraries, Ohio State University Libraries, March 11, 2013)

This definition makes more sense if you’re working in a humanities or social sciences discipline. In other sciences you may think ‘that’s just my research’. But we also think about digital scholarship in the context of the library as the ways we can make our collections and their data available for research. This could be anything from the study of ancient papyri to training large language models (LLMs) on textual data.  

Next up, who are we and what can you expect from this blog? 

In the Centre for Digital Scholarship team we run a programme of events and training every term, check out our events on the Digital Scholarship @Oxford website. Bodleian Bytes is our online research showcase, so get in touch if you have some great digital research you want to share with Oxford and international audiences. Bodleian Student Editions is a series of in-person workshops where you get to work with real collection items and transcribe them. But be prepared for some top nineteenth-century gossip if you come to those! Expect some blog posts on fascinating new research in digital scholarship (and maybe some historical gossip too). 

Our team also work with researchers to ensure research data is safe and finds the best home in Oxford, making your work findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. So if you have data drama, get in touch with the Sustainable Digital Scholarship service team. If you’re worried you don’t understand what research data sustainability is by the way, no shame, but check out our short explainer video. We’ll blog on key issues in research data management and how it affects you, but also use this space to showcase some fantastic projects we work with.  

Electronic Enlightenment is a resource of more than 80,000 digitised letters from the Enlightenment period (roughly the eighteenth century) which we are adding to all the time. The team will share posts about new content and the international social network of letters between the good, the bad and the ordinary in the Enlightenment. 

Finally, our team are active researchers and we’re working on projects to understand whether AI tools such as LLMs and computer vision can be used to identify archaeological objects or catalogue books. We’re looking at how digitisation processes and digital collections are created and used in the cultural sector and we’re using hackathons to understand how people might use our collections data in new ways for research or creative outputs, you can find the project page here. In short, we’re a curious bunch and always keen to meet you whether or not you define yourself as a digital scholar. 

Dr. Megan Gooch is the Head of the Centre for Digital Scholarship, Bodleian Libraries. Megan has 20 years’ experience working in museums, heritage and libraries in curatorial, learning, research and leadership roles. Megan has been PI and Co-I on AHRC-funded research projects, and has experience and publications in the fields of audience research, museum studies, numismatics and digital scholarship. She is also the Director of the Digital Humanities @ Oxford Summer School.  

Workshop invitation: Textual editing workshops for undergraduates and postgraduates

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We are looking for enthusiastic undergraduates and postgraduates from any discipline to take part in workshops in textual editing culminating in the publication of a citable transcription.

 

Sign up for a workshop: see below for details.

 

We are pleased to announce the fourth year of Bodleian Student Editions workshops, a collaboration between the Bodleian’s Department of Special Collections and Centre for Digital Scholarship, and Cultures of Knowledge, a project based at the Faculty of History.

There will be 6 standalone workshops taking place in the year 2019-20, two per term. Workshops are held in the Weston Library’s Centre for Digital Scholarship. Dates for each term will be announced in that term, and are as follows:

Michaelmas Term 2019

  • 10:00–16:30 Wednesday 3rd week, 30 October
  • 10:00–16:30 Thursday 7th week, 28 November

Hilary Term 2020 To be announced in Hilary

  • 10:00-16:30 Wednesday 3rd Week, 5th February
  • tbc

Trinity Term 2020 To be announced in Trinity

  • tbc
  • tbc

Textual editing is the process by which a manuscript reaches its audience in print or digital form. The texts we read in printed books are dependent on the choices of editors across the years, some obscured more than others. The past few years have seen an insurgence in interest in curated media, and the advent of new means of distribution has inspired increasingly charged debates about what is chosen to be edited, by whom and for whom.

These workshops give students the opportunity to examine these questions of research practice in a space designed around the sources at the heart of them. The Bodleian Libraries’ vast collections give students direct access to important ideas free from years of mediation, and to authorial processes in their entirety, while new digital tools allow greater space to showcase the lives of ordinary people who may not feature in traditional narrative history.

Our focus is on letters of the early modern period: a unique, obsolescent medium, by which the ideas which shaped our civilisation were communicated and developed. Participants will study previously unpublished manuscripts from Bodleian collections, working with Bodleian curators and staff of Cultures of Knowledge (http://www.culturesofknowledge.org), to produce a digital transcription, which will be published on the flagship resource site of Cultures of Knowledge, Early Modern Letters Online (http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk), as ‘Bodleian Student Editions’.

The sessions are standalone, but participants in previous workshops have gone on to further transcription work with Bodleian collections and with research projects around the country, as well as producing the first scholarship on some of the manuscripts by incorporating material in their own research (from undergraduate to doctorate level). The first-hand experience with primary sources, and citable transcription, extremely useful for those wishing to apply for postgraduate study in areas where this is valued: one participant successfully proceeded from a BA in Biological Sciences to an MA in Early Modern Literature on the basis of having attended.

The sessions provide a hands-on introduction to the following:

  1. Special Collections handling
  2. Palaeography and transcription
  3. Metadata curation, analysis, and input into Early Modern Letters Online
  4. Research and publication ethics
  5. Digital tools for scholarship and further training available

You can read about research conducted in previous workshops here.

Participation in the workshops is open to undergraduate and graduate students currently enrolled at the University of Oxford in any subject and year, full-time or part-time. Eligibility includes visiting students who are registered as recognized students, and paying fees, but does not include informal visitors, postdoctoral researchers, or staff.

If you would like to participate, please contact Francesca Barr, Special Collections Administrator, francesca.barr@bodleian.ox.ac.uk, and include:

  1. your ox.ac.uk email address
  2. your department
  3. your level and year of study
  4. particular access requirements
  5. particular dietary requirements

Please note that owing to the workshops regularly being oversubscribed, we can only confirm places on this term’s workshops. You may register your interest in subsequent workshops, and will be notified of the dates for each term before they are advertised more widely.

The Bodleian Libraries welcome thoughts and queries from students of all levels on ways in which the use of archival material can facilitate your research. For an idea of the range of collections in the Weston, visit our current exhibitions in Blackwell Hall. Thinking 3D: Leonardo to the Present, in the Treasury gallery, tells the story of the development of three-dimensional communication over the last 500 years, showcasing techniques that revolutionised the dissemination of ideas in anatomy, architecture and astronomy and geometry and ultimately influenced how we perceive the world today. Talking Maps in the ST Lee Gallery is a celebration of maps and what they tell us about the places they depict and the people that make and use them. Drawing primarily on the Bodleian’s own unparalleled collection of more than 1.5 million maps – including the Gough Map (the first to show Great Britain in recognizable form), the Selden map (a late Ming map of the South China Sea, and fictional maps by CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien – it also features specially commissioned artworks and loans from artists and other institutions. Both exhibitions are free to attend and can be accessed through Blackwell Hall.

 

Welcome Japan Search to the web of Linked Open Data

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Bodleian Libraries MS. Jap. c.4(R) depicts the character Urashima Taro, known to Japan Search as 水江浦島子

Japan Search is an aggregator, holding metadata on 17 million items from 38 databases related to Japanese cultural institutions. It is like a Japanese counterpart to Europeana. Hosted by the National Diet Library, it is currently in beta phase – not officially released yet – but already an impressive service. It’s of interest to a Wikimedian working in Oxford because it has been designed in an open way, with connection to other databases and applications built in from the outset.

Part of its database is a table of nearly 8000 named entities: these are artists, depicted entities and sometimes locations. Japan Search has its own system of identifiers based on Japanese names, but thankfully they have incorporated identifiers from other systems, including VIAF, BnF, British Museum, DBPedia, and Wikidata. Continue reading →

What Wikidata offers Oxford’s GLAM Digital Strategy

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As part of Oxford’s GLAM Digital Strategy, there has been some interesting research into audience archetypes. This work examines the many different aims people can have when engaging with our GLAM institutions: from “have fun” to “use collections in teaching”. The technology we use in GLAMs can help users in these goals, or can throw up frustrating barriers, and this strategic work explores how it could help.

Meanwhile, open platforms like Wikipedia continue to be the principal way in which people encounter cultural heritage. A growing “GLAM-Wiki” movement involves cultural institutions and volunteers in sharing collection data and building new tools, with some of those data sets coming from Oxford University. So is there an overlap between Oxford GLAMs’ aspirations and what Wikidata enables? In this post, I draw together some of my previous posts to show Wikidata’s role in advancing some aims mentioned in the document. Continue reading →

Build your own Digital Bodleian with IIIF and SPARQL

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This post describes a simple way to create a customised, interactive view of a set of documents. Despite my provocative title, it’s not a rival to Digital Bodleian, having far less content and without the personalisation and commenting features. BUT it is 1) customisable in terms of the items it displays and 2) not limited to Oxford collections. So in the long term this technique could be useful to researchers who want to focus on a set of items, such as the manuscripts, printed works or art works of a particular culture or era.

IIIF is the International Image Interoperability Framework (discussed previously). At the time of writing there are around 32,000 objects with IIIF manifests linked from Wikidata, from over 100 GLAM collections. Just under two thousand of these are from Digital Bodleian. The Bodleian items are usually multi-page documents such as manuscripts, incunabula, or other printed books, many of which are in this digital form thanks to the Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project.

With some code in the SPARQL query language, we can request the IIIF manifest for each document we are interested in, and send it to a reader application that will give us a nice interactive interface. Continue reading →

Making Wikidata visible

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→ Cet article en Français

I’ve been experimenting with a way to show how Wikidata represents knowledge; specifically how it makes pathways out of relationships between things. In a previous post I wrote about how Wikidata’s representation enables new pathways between entities. Since those pathways link into a giant web they offer new ways to discover existing collection objects. Now that I have been describing Oxford’s GLAM collections on Wikidata, we can show concrete examples of this expanding knowledge graph.

Normally with Wikidata we specify properties and get results that are identifiable things. For example if we ask for “female historians born in the 1730s with a biography in Electronic Enlightenment”, we get Catherine Macaulay. Here I’m using queries that specify a group of things and request the properties connecting them. So we get a tiny fragment of the Wikidata knowledge graph (which right now has just over 54 million people, places, publications, object and concepts). We can see how different kinds of data (biographical, bibliographic, and catalogue data) are combined in the same model. I’ve captured these graphs as screenshots, but I recommend clicking through to the live query where you get a draggable, stretchy graph. Continue reading →

Detailed depictions with IIIF, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons

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Extract from “High Street Oxford.” Ashmolean Museum WA2016.48

The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) is a standard, developed by a consortium including the Bodleian Libraries, that allows images and associated metadata to be shared across the web. It’s used by many sites including Digital Bodleian and Wikimedia’s image server, Wikimedia Commons.

As of November this year, Wikidata can point to the IIIF manifests associated with a digitised object (example near the foot of this page). However, the opportunity of Wikidata and IIIF is not just about discoverability of the IIIF data itself. Included in IIIF is the ability to address a specific rectangular region of an image with a URL. Wikidata can use this to express statements about part of an image

Anyone familiar with Turner’s “High Street, Oxford” will recognise several landmarks included in the scene. In this sense, there is a lot of structure in the image that is obvious to humans but not naturally captured in the painting’s digital representation (image + catalogue record). My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to express in open data not just that the painting depicts the Church of St. Mary the Virgin but that a specific part of the image depicts the church. Continue reading →