I’m the Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh‘s Institute of Design Informatics, in Edinburgh College of Art, which I joined in October 2017. My research focuses on the digitisation of cultural heritage, including advanced digitisation techniques, usage of large-scale digitisation, and the mining and analysis of digitised content. In Edinburgh I have led digital aspects of research within the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Edinburgh, building research capacity in the new Edinburgh Futures Institute, and being the Founding Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Data, Culture and Society. I’ve put more about me over at the Bio page. I also hang out at @melissaterras.

I am an honorary Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of Information Studies, University College London, where I was employed from 2003 – 2017, and was previously Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (2012-2017) teaching digitisation of cultural heritage.  

This is my personal blog, and everything I say here is in a personal capacity: the thoughts and opinions expressed here are my own and are not aligned to my institutional home, nor my past, present, or future employment. Nothing posted here expresses or implies anything on my employer’s behalf. Its all me, on this space.

Production Notes

This blog was designed with the help of Rudolf Ammann, UCLDH’s designer at large, who I cant recommend highly enough if you are looking for a digital designer to work with. Hosted on wordpress, the theme we started from is Penscratch, the (open source) font for headings is Source Sans Pro, and the font for body text is Minion. The tiles in the background are based on a free tile from Pattern8, and Rudolf designed the fetching M (which plays into my being James Bond’s boss fantasies). The image of the document in the header is a section of a handwritten manuscript written by Jeremy Bentham, held in UCL Library Special Collections (JB/035/320/001), which has been transcribed by volunteers as part of UCL’s Transcribe Bentham project. The text contains Bentham’s writing on the Constitutional Code – Quasi-jury [1823-26]. Transcribe Bentham is a partner in the EU funded tranScriptorium project, in which we have been using the quality controlled transcripts from Transcribe Bentham to help develop modern, holistic Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) technology. An output of tranScriptorium is Transkribus: software that enables users to transcribe documents with HTR support. So what we see in the image above is the computer recognising Jeremy Bentham’s handwriting. Cool, huh? And sums up the space I hang out in: between cultural heritage and computing science. This image is used with permission, btw.

Site Policies

Unless stated otherwise, all work on this site is provided under a CC BY 2.0 UK license. Feel free to take content and do with it what you will, as long as you credit the original source.