Digital Humanities Master of Arts - MArt (Hons)

On this degree you’ll learn how to apply cutting-edge technology to traditional humanities and cultural heritage research, providing you with expertise that can be applied in further academic research and a wide range of careers.

You will build a portfolio of the skills that the humanities graduates of tomorrow will use – from AI models that read centuries-old handwriting to digital maps that reveal the landscapes of the past.

Why Lancaster?

* Learn from experts with an international reputation in Digital Humanities research and teaching

* Study in a faculty that specialises in the development and use of data science and artificial intelligence techniques in humanities research

* Collaborate with your peers in our Digital Scholarship Lab, a state-of-the-art research space

A global leader in the field

You’ll learn from globally recognised experts in the field and engage with cutting-edge research in digital humanities. We particularly emphasise the analysis of historical texts in a digital environment and the use of geospatial technologies to map the geographies of the past.

You may learn about: the use and creation of digital assets and databases; interdisciplinary theories and methods as to how these can be applied; and applications of artificial intelligence (AI) such as natural language processing, machine learning, and computer vision.

Digital skills and contexts

Computational skills can be used to study societies and cultures of the past, present and future. You will gain digital skills tailored to working with digitised humanities sources such as historical newspapers, books, maps, oral histories and more. As you acquire the technical competencies required to work with these sources, you will place these methods in the context of key debates around the history, ethics and cultures of today’s digitised world.

You will learn state-of-the-art methods including:

* Textual Analysis: Approaches from corpus linguistics, natural language processing and AI that give you the skills to analyse large collections of digitised texts.

* Spatial Humanities: Shows how geographical information system (GIS) and other technologies enhance your understanding of the geographies of the past.

* Digital History: Explores the ways in which digital methods are changing how we understand the past.

* AI for the Humanities: Cutting edge methods such as Handwritten Text Recognition, large language model (LLM) applications for historical text and computer vision for maps and manuscripts.

You can apply these skills to a range of disciplines from across the humanities including History, Literary Studies, Media Studies, Linguistics and more.

Take a look at some of our recent and current projects:

* Encyclopedia of Shakespeare's Language Project: Drawing on Lancaster’s expertise in using Corpus Linguistics to study the past, this project reveals what Shakespeare’s language meant to the Elizabethans through the analysis of millions of words written by his contemporaries.

* Mapping the Lakes and Lancaster: Streets of Mourning: Focusing on Lake District writing and Lancaster’s experience of the First World War, these projects give two contrasting examples of how geospatial technologies can be used to visualise and better understand the geographies of the past.

* Unlocking the Colonial Archive: Works with cultural institutions to make collections on colonial Latin America more accessible and explores how digital scholarship can enhance our knowledge of this period. The project draws on a range of AI-based approaches including Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR), natural language processing (NLP), and automated analysis of images.

* Lancaster Digital Collections and Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive: Two examples of projects that demonstrate the potential of using digital tools to make cultural heritage collections more accessible and understandable.