Paul Spence

paul.spence [at] kcl.ac.uk

Paul Spence is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the Department of Digital Humanities and has an educational background in Spanish & Spanish American studies, having also worked in journalism and teaching.

He led the ‘Digital Text’ research area in the Department of Digital Humanities from 2003 to 2010, when he was responsible for the development of XML-based and semantically aware frameworks for information retrieval and digital publication on over 30 research projects. He has been Co-Investigator, Project Manager or Technical Research Director of a number of major research projects with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, AHRC, JISC and the Leverhulme Trust, and his current research interests include digitally mediated knowledge creation, digital publishing and global perspectives in the digital humanities.

He has twice been Acting Head of Department for DDH and is currently Department Education Lead and convenor for the MA in Digital Humanities. He has played senior roles in various international digital humanities organisations, including most recently Humanidades Digitales Hispánicas (HDH). He is Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded project ‘Language Acts and Worldmaking’, which looks at “how learning a language affords greater cultural understanding of the world through the multilingual and multicultural lens of Iberian languages, empires and contact zones”. The strand he leads will bring together Modern Languages and digital humanities researchers in examining what kinds of ‘translation’ are enacted as information enters and leaves the digital sphere, and the extent to which data, as a complex cultural product in its own right, represents a meaningful record accessible to Modern Languages research and learning.