About

Recent Posts

Joe Nockels is a Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Glasgow, co-organising their new Digital Humanities MSc.

He previously worked as a Research Associate at the Digital Humanities Institute, University of Sheffield, and was responsible for developing their research theme - Digital Representation of Cultural Artefacts: which set out to advance the state-of-the-art in the digital capture, interpretation and representation of physical culture.

His research brings together AI experimentation in libraries and archives with user studies, historical research, and information behaviour modelling. Across this research, he uses a socio-technical perspective to advocate for values-driven approaches to collections as data.

Joe has held research positions at the Library of Congress, National Library of Scotland, National Trust, Greenpeace International (International Institute of Social History), and through the AI cooperative Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents (READ), who maintain and develop Transkribus. He earned his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2024.

For more on some of Joe's research, see:

I Can Complain. Schopenhauer, Pessimism and the Crisis of Higher Education

Taking a Pessimistic Outlook UK Higher Education is under strain. Pointing to rising tuition fees, Andy Burnham in his ‘People’s Question Time’ referred to the sector being ‘in a state’, without offering an explanation for why universities are struggling to make up their lost income. Even positive news, such as the University of Exeter reneging on its projected redundancies, can be met with the cynical view that their aggressive voluntary severance scheme met whatever saving

Sep 137 min read

An Academic Grief Observed

In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis attempts to reconcile with the loss of his beloved wife. It is a brief, honest, sometimes cutting but not entirely unashamed account. The latter feature is what makes the work so interesting and meaningful. Lewis describes how in one moment he needs to be surrounded and coddled; he wants to be asked how he is doing. In another moment, he wants nothing less. He is aware of the difficulty this creates for those around him, with his friends and fa

Aug 215 min read

On History, Historical Materialism and Artificial Intelligence

What is the role of a historian? Historians research, analyse and interpret the past, extracting meaning and establishing patterns from evidence (Anderson, 2004: 81-82). This evidence is often hard to find, it's located in the ground or within the archival depths. Once found, they work with primary sources; eavesdropping on the past to construct arguments about what happened and weighing up evidence based on scraps of information (Galgano et al., 2008: 1-5, Devon et al., 2012

Jul 217 min read

Joe Nockels discusses how Explainable AI principles and automatic transcription can better coalesce.

Joe Nockels, alongside Natalia Estrada (Digital Scholarship Librarian, University of Buffalo), present on Natural Language Processing methods for extracting 'red flags' in AI terms of service. Part of Programming Historian's ENABLAR programme.

Selected Publications

Recognising Text, Recognising Processes, which explored explainable AI transcription for spiritualist histories, is now live! Funded by the National Library of Scotland.