Core team

Digital Humanities is driven by a group of digital specialists from across the University.

Some of the key people involved in DH@Manchester are:

Guyda Armstrong, Faculty Academic Lead for Digital Humanities

Guyda is Senior Lecturer in Italian at The University of Manchester. With a specialisation in literary computing, she held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Early Modern Italian and New Media at Brown University (2001-03), working on the Decameron Web and later contributing to Brown’s Virtual Humanities Lab. She has worked on a number of collaborative projects with the John Rylands Library and Mimas, including the British Academy-funded Manchester Digital Dante Project and award-winning SCARLET project with Mimas, using AR in Special Collections teaching.

Sean Bechhofer

Sean Bechhofer is a Senior Lecturer in the Information Management Group within the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. His interests fall under the broad umbrella of developing middleware and infrastructure to support applications, in particular through the use of semantic technologies such as OWL, SKOS and RDF. He has been a participant in W3C Working Groups developing Semantic Web languages, and was responsible for the development of editors and APIs to support the development and use of OWL ontologies and SKOS vocabularies.

Jonny Huck, GIS lead for Digital Humanities

Jonny Huck is a Lecturer in Geographical Information Science at The University of Manchester. Prior to moving to academia, Jonny was the Technical Manager of a wind energy company, specialising in the use of GIS for the assessment of environmental impact. Jonny's research is centered around the representation of vague geographical entities in geographical information science, novel approaches to participatory mapping and new applications of digital cartography. Amongst other things, he developed and continues to maintain the Map-Me and Paper2GIS participatory GIS systems. Jonny is the chair of the 25th GIS Research UK Conference to be held on 18th-21st April 2017 at The University of Manchester.

Lorraine Beard, Head of Digital Technologies and Services, University of Manchester Library

Lorraine leads the team which manages and develops the Library’s digital infrastructure. She is a member of both the Library Leadership Team and the IT Leadership Team for the University of Manchester and in these roles has been involved in the development of the Library and IT Strategies for the University. Recently Lorraine has been closely involved in improving the digital experience at Manchester by implementing new discovery services and developing a University-wide research data management service. She has also led the development of the Library’s digitisation strategy and the University’s institutional repository, Manchester eScholar, which is now one of the largest in the UK. As the Library’s lead on innovation, she has led a number of new projects and services, including the Eureka innovation challenge competition and gamification. 

Robert Haines, Research Software Engineering Manager, Research IT; Honorary Lecturer, School of Computer Science

Robert works with academics and researchers to design, implement, modify and install maintainable, usable and well-tested software systems to enable them, and their collaborators, to do their research. This might mean creating new software, researching entirely new ways of doing things or identifying and possibly modifying existing applications. He has worked in a wide range of domains for research projects of various types and sizes from small "proof of concept" investigations up to long-term multi-partner RCUK, EU and US NSF projects. He has also collaborated with diverse organisations such as utility companies, national laboratories, start-ups and public bodies as well as other universities. I also contribute to a number of open-source software projects. He teaches on two course units in the School of Computer Science: ‘Software Engineering’ and ‘Agile and Test-Driven Development’.