Melissa Terras, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage
Melissa Terras is Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage in Design Informatics, Edinburgh College of Art. She is Director of Creative Informatics (2018-2024) and University of Edinburgh lead on CoSTAR activities (the UK Government’s Convergent Screen Technologies and performance in Realtime programme, 2023-2029).
Her research interest is the digitisation of cultural heritage, including advanced digitisation techniques, usage of large-scale digitisation, and the mining and analysis of digitised content. Recently she has has been engaging more widely with technology innovation for the cultural and creative industries.
Terras has a MA in History of Art and English Literature and an MSc in IT (Distinction in Software and Systems) both from the University of Glasgow, and a doctorate in Engineering from the University of Oxford. She previously directed UCL Centre for Digital Humanities in UCL Department of Information Studies, where she was employed from 2003-2017, being Vice Dean of Research for UCL’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities (2014-17). She was Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute (2018-2023) and is an Expert Advisor to the UK Government’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport, and a Director of the READ-Coop (delivering Transkribus, Handwritten Text Recognition software and infrastructure). She is Founding Director of Edinburgh Centre for Data, Culture and Society, and was Director of Research of the Edinburgh Futures Institute (2018-2023).
Books include “Image to Interpretation: An Intelligent System to Aid Historians in Reading the Vindolanda Texts” (Oxford University Press 2006), “Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader” (Ashgate 2013), “Picture-Book Professors: Academia and Children’s Literature” (Cambridge University Press 2018), “Electronic Legal Deposit: Shaping the Library Collections of the Future” (Facet 2020), and “Millicent Garrett Fawcett: Selected Writings” (UCL Press 2022).