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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.