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melissaterras.bsky.social
Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. Computers versus the past. Digital Humanities and somesuch, including CoSTAR network activities, Creative Informatics, and Transkribus. MBE FREng.
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A chat with Prince William this morning to collect my MBE for services to Digital Humanities. He got what it was once I explained! A lovely day out. Thanks to @expert-sleepers.co.uk for all his support over the past 20 years. All surprisingly moving!

Hidden Heritages - a great resource providing access to digitised Gaelic and Irish folktales. The transcription was done automatically using @transkribus.bsky.social or crowdsourcing. A great example of the use of AI and NLP for the benefits of research and society.

View from a hotel room, #Windsor. #academicglamour #frfr

Current view. 200m from where I used to live in Vauxhall, 22 years ago. For today I am off to Windsor, and tomorrow I shall tell royalty the sky is falling. For real. Or something… 🎩

Newly launched- the Decoding Hidden Heritages project brings together over 5,500 Gaelic folktales from Ireland & Scotland, transcribed & made searchable using advanced AI. Congrats to Will Lamb, Bea Alex and wider team!

So OTOH: yay! a new EU grant I'm Co-I on! for the first time since Brexit, hurrah! nice to be back in the fold! 🇪🇺 OTO: that means I have to make sense of anything in the EU grant portal which sees me turn into a overwhelmed 5 year old in 3 easy clicks... First World Problems. I know. But still...

erm, yay...?

Am pleased to have contributed to this #costarnetwork report on how Generative AI is affecting the screen industries. How can we support the delivery of ethical, & inclusive AI integration across the screen sector? What is at risk if we don't get it right? Congrats to lead authors at the BFI.

5 yr Postdoc at Edinburgh - how and why digital participation is transforming experience of warfare. Data Viz, NLP, text & data mining, principally related to Russian war against Ukraine.

VIS4DH is back at @ieeevis.bsky.social, November 2025 in Vienna! Find the Call for Papers here, focusing on the Visualization of Conflict and Peace: vis4dh.dbvis.de/cfp/

What fun from @zooniverse.bsky.social and @archive.org - Picturing Children's Stories, asking volunteers to describe children’s book illustrations to develop AI that can better understand the visual history of storytelling. Altho I will warn that pre 1920s kids lit can have "interesting" morals...!

Out this morning & Open Access! 📢 My new article in Public Archaeology on the entanglement of archaeology, the far right and ancient genetic studies, using the British National Party as a case study: ‘In Our Blood’: Archaeology and ‘Indigeneity’ in the British National Party’s Magazine Identity'

Prague is pure hoaching

View from a hotel room… #prague 😍 here for fun not work but #academicglamour nevertheless

Glazing my pots tonight… let’s see how they turn out!

Electronic Legal Deposit materials are back online in 5 legal deposit reading rooms after the British Library cyberattack! Hurrah. But not in London yet. ICYDK, this encompasses vast swathes of modern digital texts including journal papers & books, & other media. Great to see it back!

Such fun to put this together, both to celebrate 5 years of operating commercially as a coop, & in tribute to Günter Mühlberger, who has just completed his term as chair of the board. Thanks to the community for their hard work, & to Günter for leading the way to cooperative & responsible AI.

A bit of Edinburgh #histmed that's new to me

"... tricky place names such as Milngavie and Achnasheen are inputted phonetically as "Mill-guy" and "Akna-sheen" to help the software avoid embarrassing mistakes". *small voice* if your purported scotbot pronounces "ch" as "k" that _is_ an embarrassing mistake. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

View from a hotel, #Durham #academicglamour. It is v posh actually! Being put up after a workshop on HPC infrastructure design for the Arts & Humanities, for www.ccpahc.ac.uk

Absolutely delighted that "Picture-Book Professors: Academia and Children's Literature" is one of the 12 most downloaded Cambridge University Press Element books, as they publish their 2000th one! It was a joy to research and put together. www.cambridge.org/core/publica...

Are you a member of EADH/one of our AOs? Do you want to shape how we support our community, how we lobby for DH research funding, how we distribute grants, how we publish? Then pls nominate yourself to serve on Executive Committee by 28 May! We encourage both new and experienced members to nominate!

Getting to know #Edinburgh shortcuts 😍

31 years of seeing Kristin Hersh live, and I finally got to see her rock out with the Throwing Muses. Joyous! She’s always so happy making big, syncopated noise!

Join our team @dhssfau.bsky.social @fau.de 2 full professorships in #DigitalHumanities ‼️ Professor in #DH with focus on #HCI ‼️ Professor in #DH with focus on #Place&Space ⏰ Deadline: 2 June 2025 www.fau.eu/people/worki... @fauphil.bsky.social

The convergence of heritage digitisation plus a fully digital production pipeline in the creative industries mean we’ll see more of this, which requires careful governance & data protection to avoid unethical use, or the creation of misinformation. Are we in the heritage sector ready…?

TW - assault. Just done @edinburgh-uni.bsky.social's mandatory new training on sexual harassment. The most important thing to remember - when being sexually assaulted in the workplace - is to REMAIN POLITE. That will lead to Success!!! jfc 🫠

Bloody hell. So much access to shared heritage - which digitisation allows, and supports - just cut off at the knees, day after day after day... (do read the thread: and, organise and download whatever datasets you can, right now).

AI, Authenticity, & the Future of 3D Cultural Heritage: Challenges and opportunities for GLAM in a world of AI-generated content - essential reading from @nebulousflynn.bsky.social

Exploring today… down to Granton, and the sea front 🌞🏖️ #edinburgh