What is the Digital Humanities @ Oxford Summer School?

Posted on 26 May 2026 by karamana

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.

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

1. According to one of our convenors!

Code the Collection

Posted on 30 April 2026 by karamana

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.

Catalogue of 15th century printed books now available to search

Posted on 12 April 2016 by Emma Stanford

Further to work carried out at Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services, the TEXT-inc database and an associated TEXT-inc Person Index are now available to search.

The TEXT-inc database is an electronic catalogue of 15th century printed books, otherwise known as incunabula, conceived by the 15C BOOKTRADE Project. The database builds on an electronic version of A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century (project Bod-Inc) and now provides a catalogue of incunabula from collections including the British Library, Venice Libraries, and Oxford Colleges. The TEXT-inc database includes corresponding identifiers in other databases such as ISTC and MEI. The TEXT-inc Person Index describes people related to the incunabula described in the TEXT-inc database.

The public search interface has been implemented using Blacklight, an open-source discovery platform framework. Blacklight is a Ruby on Rails Engine plugin and provides a faceted search interface to a Solr index. The Solr index is updated automatically further to a scheduled query of the Text-Inc relational database that the 15C BOOKTRADE project members use to record details of incunabula.

Blacklight includes useful extensions such as an advanced search form and a date range widget that can be used in the faceted search to limit results by year:

Text Inc date tool

A showcase of how Blacklight has been implemented in other libraries is available on the Blacklight web site.

Further information:

Text-inc database http://textinc.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
Text-inc Person Index http://textinc-person.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

– Tanya Gray Jones

DIY Digitization Mini-Conference

Posted on 18 January 2016 by Emma Stanford

MS. Laud Misc. 243 fol. 82v, https://flic.kr/p/wyYsyJ, image © Daniel Wakelin

On Friday the 8th of January, the Weston Library hosted a mini-conference on DIY digitization organized by Christine Madsen of the Oxford e-Research Centre, Daniel Wakelin of the English Faculty, and Judith Siefring of BDLSS. The aim of this event was to share and discuss the results of the DIY Digitization research project undertaken by Christine, Daniel and Judith in the past six months, and to learn about small-scale, semi-unstructured or otherwise unconventional digitization projects at other institutions across the UK and abroad. Nineteen librarians and academics gave presentations on the potential role of DIY digitization in teaching and research and its impact on library policy, and Judith presented the results of her survey of researchers.

A more formal report on the outcomes of the day will be forthcoming, but in the meantime we would like to thank everyone who contributed to the event, either by giving a presentation or by taking part in the discussion. We would also like to thank Christine, Daniel, Judith, and Alex Franklin of the Centre for the Study of the Book for organizing such an enlightening and enjoyable day, and the John Fell Fund for making it possible.

Digital Manuscripts Toolkit: The Journey So Far

Posted on 25 November 2015 by Emma Stanford

Monica Messaggi Kaya recently presented her ongoing work on BDLSS’s Digital Manuscripts Toolkit project at two different events: Future of Web Apps (FOWA)’s conference in London on October 5-7, and JSOxford’s Javascript Story Time event on November 18.

The Digital Manuscripts Toolkit, funded by the Mellon Foundation, aims to produce a set of IIIF-based tools for studying manuscripts online, including an in-browser manifest authoring tool, which will allow scholars to build their own sequences of images from across IIIF-participating institutions. The project is still very much a work in progress, and these events were an excellent early opportunity to present our work to a more technical audience.

Monica will be writing about these events in a future blog post. In the meantime, she has made her presentation, “Digital Manuscripts Toolkit: The journey so far…“, available online. It’s a great resource for anyone who would like to know more about the project or about the world of IIIF-based manuscript scholarship.

– Emma Stanford

DIY Digitization Update

Posted on 9 November 2015 by Emma Stanford

Many thanks to the wonderful people who have sent us hugely engaging and detailed answers to our DIY Digitization interview questions via email. This input will be invaluable for our project and it is fascinating to read about scholars’ research practices and personal experiences in this area.

If you’ve taken your own photographs of Special Collections in the course of your research, and you’d be willing to answer some questions on the subject of DIY Digitization by email, please get in touch with Judith Siefring, via email in the format firstname.lastname@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Your views would be greatly appreciated!

Interviewees sought for DIY Digitization project

Posted on 7 October 2015 by Emma Stanford

Readers and researchers in special collections reading rooms worldwide are increasingly being allowed to photograph books and manuscripts themselves, for their own research use. We at the Bodleian Library are seeing this demand increase amongst our readers, from those wishing to take high-quality images with a camera to those who want to take a quick snap with their smart phone.

However, the impact of such “DIY digitization” both on research and teaching and on service provision has not been given sustained attention. Daniel Wakelin, Jeremy Griffiths Professor of Medieval English Palaeography at Oxford University, Christine Madsen, formerly Head of Digital Programmes at the Bodleian and currently a visiting academic at the Oxford e-Research Centre, and Judith Siefring, a digital project manager at the Bodleian, recently received funding from The John Fell Fund to explore the impact of DIY digitization.

One experimental aspect of the project has been to set up a Bod leian Special Collections Flickr site, where we encourage readers who have taken photographs of our special collections to share their photographs with the members of the group. Guidance and restrictions are given on the site. We want to know if and how readers want to share their images, and what their practices reveal about user-led photography.

A second aspect of the project will be to interview users of special collections about their methods and attitudes to taking their own photographs of books and manuscripts. If you are willing to be interviewed for the project, we’d be very grateful! Please contact Judith Siefring via email, in the format firstname.lastname@bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

Many thanks!

Launch of Digital.Bodleian

Posted on 10 July 2015 by Emma Stanford

We’re very pleased to announce that our new unified digital collections platform, Digital.Bodleian, is now live. For the first time, it is possible to search and browse the Bodleian’s online special collections via a single interface. The site was launched on Wednesday at an event in the new Weston Library, with a lecture by Bruno Racine, president of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (whose Gallica is a well-established giant of digital library collections), and a speech by BDLSS’s own Lucie Burgess.

Digital.Bodleian has occupied the energies of a number of BDLSS people for some time now, and we are very excited to see it go live. The site’s landing page was designed by ONE, and the iNQUIRE search and browse interface was built by Armadillo (whose code will shortly be going open-source). We will have another post later on about the technical specs, but there are a couple of things we would like to highlight:

Digital.Bodleian is IIIF-compliant, so you can view the manifest for any item, use the item’s UUID to open it in a IIIF viewer such as Mirador or Digirati’s Universal Viewer, and keep pace with future IIIF developments. Links to the IIIF manifest and the Universal Viewer are included in each item’s metadata panel within Digital.Bodleian.
The content of the Bodleian Libraries’ diverse online collections, such as Luna, image.ox.ac.uk, and the Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project, is in the process of migration to Digital.Bodleian. Much of it is already there, and we hope to migrate the rest of it by the end of this year.
Digital.Bodleian is interactive: you can tag and annotate items and build your own collections to download and export. The download package includes both the image (as a lower-resolution JPEG) and the metadata, but you can also download a JPEG of a portion of an image by right-clicking.

For more information, please see the Bodleian’s press release about the launch, an article by BBC Oxford, and this Storify of DB tips. Also check out the next few weeks’ Twitter coverage by @bodleianlibs and @BDLSS.

– Emma Stanford

Seminar—Digital scholarship: Intersection, Scale, and Social Machines

Posted on 25 May 2015 by Pip Willcox

We are delighted to announce the first, open seminar in a series looking at projects and activities in digital scholarship across the University of Oxford.

David De Roure What: Digital scholarship: Intersection, Scale, and Social Machines

Who: David De Roure

When: 13.00—13.50, Thursday 28 May 2015

Where: Centre for Digital Scholarship, Weston Library (map)

Seminar: Today we are witnessing several shifts in scholarly practice, in and across multiple disciplines, as researchers embrace digital techniques to tackle established questions in new ways and new questions afforded by digital and digitized collections, approaches, and technologies. This seminar addresses current activity in digital scholarship, framing it in its multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary settings.

Speaker: David De Roure is director of Oxford e-Research Centre. He has strategic responsibility for Digital Humanities at Oxford and directed the national Digital Social Research programme for ESRC, for whom he is now a strategic adviser. His personal research is in Computational Musicology, Web Science, and Internet of Things. He is a frequent speaker and writer on digital scholarship and the future of scholarly communications.

This seminar is open to all. No booking is necessary. You can download a flyer for it.

Please meet inside the Parks Road entrance of the Weston Library (opposite the King’s Arms). If you are already in the Library, you can find the Centre for Digital Scholarship on the first floor of the Weston Library, through the Mackerras Reading Room and around the glass walkway.

Bodleian Digital Library

A Bodleian Libraries blog

Tag Archives: digital scholarship