Dr. Sebastian Dows-Miller
Research Fellow, UCL
Research Fellow, UCL
I am an Early Career Research Fellow at University College London, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. My project, which contains significant Digital Humanities elements and falls within quantitative palaeography, aims to shed light on the understudied question of why medieval scribes used abbreviation when they copied manuscripts. Specifically, I approach this question through digital and statistical analyses of manuscript text, extracted using AI-based handwritten text recognition and encoded within TEI-XML.
Prior to joining UCL, I completed my DPhil at the University of Oxford in January 2025. Part of my thesis laid the foundations for my current project, while elsewhere I conducted digital textual analysis on the work of a fourteenth-century French poet, Jean de Saint-Quentin. In doing so, I interrogated the validity of existing claims regarding which texts can be attributed to Jean, while also considering possible new additions to his body of work. A monograph building on this portion of the thesis is already under contract.
Between my DPhil and the start of my fellowship, I worked as a research assistant on a digital project led by Dr Matthew Holford at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford. I was responsible for the majority of the data modelling and coding for the project, which sought to extract user-friendly tabular data from the Bodleian’s TEI-XML manuscript catalogues using Python and XPath. The outputs of the project are already being used to support quantitative codicological research, and have resulted in significant recent discoveries about Oxford’s manuscript archives, which will be published in due course.
The Digital Humanities form the foundation of much of my research, but they also play a significant role in my teaching, both when I am teaching more digitally-oriented courses and more general ones. While a lecturer in French at Oxford during the final years of my DPhil, I taught digital textual analysis skills within a broader undergraduate course on literary theories and methods, as well as Masters-level sessions on TEI-XML encoding and the use of XPath.
Aware of the need to promote DH methods to researchers of all career stages, I have also taught on introductory TEI-XML courses for the past two years at the Digital Humanities @ Oxford summer school, and will be running a similar course next year at a workshop hosted by the Digital Medieval Studies Institute. Since 2022, I have also been an active member of the Digital Medievalist Postgraduate Committee which promotes the Digital Humanities to scholarly and non-specialist audiences alike, by producing online content including the Coding Codices podcast, and by organising roundtables and events at a variety of international conferences.
Email: s.dows-miller@ucl.ac.uk
UCL Profile: https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/107083-sebastian-dowsmiller
ORCID: 
0000-0002-8560-9063