Paul Spence

Biography

Paul is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Digital Humanities, with an academic background in Spanish & Spanish American studies.

Before entering academia, Paul worked in journalism and English language teaching, spending a number of years in Spain.  He joined King's in 2001 and led the ‘Digital Text’ research team here from 2003 to 2010, when he was responsible for the development of sophisticated and semantically enriched frameworks for information retrieval and digital publication on over 30 research projects. He has led and managed digital humanities research on a number of major interdisciplinary projects of a total value of £5 million, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, AHRC, JISC, Leverhulme Trust and various European funding agencies.

He has twice been acting Head of Department for DDH, has played several senior roles in international digital humanities organisations, and he is particularly active in Spanish language digital humanities, which he has taken a leading role in promoting internationally.

Research Interests and PhD Supervision

His research interests are currently in three main areas:

• digital humanities
• digital publishing
• digital modern languages

He has also carried out research in:

• digital textual scholarship
• digital humanities pedagogy

Paul’s current research seeks to explore how digital knowledge practices are changing the way that we record, disseminate and share information when we study human culture, and how these practices are inflected by linguistic and cultural factors. He is currently Co-Investigator on the AHRC-funded ‘Language Acts and Worldmaking’ project https://languageacts.org/. The strand he leads on that project 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.

Paul welcomes applications for PhD topics related to any of his research interests. For more details, please see his full research profile.

Teaching

Paul has extensive teaching experience in different areas of digital humanities teaching at postgraduate level. He is currently programme director for the MA in Digital Humanities and teaches on digital publishing, digitally mediated knowledge production, and critical awareness in relation to the application of digital culture to the study of the human record. He has implemented a major review of the MA in Digital Humanities since taking over as programme director in 2014, and is currently actively promoting innovations in digital humanities pedagogy.

Expertise and Public Engagement

Paul has served on the steering committees of various Digital Humanities organisations at an international level, including the European Association for Digital Humanities (EADH), Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) and the Executive board of Humanidades Digitales Hispánicas (HDH).

He is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Peer Review College and regularly reviews research applications for funding bodies in the UK and overseas. He has been on numerous international conference programme committees and was programme chair for the Digital Humanities 2012 conference in Hamburg, Germany. He is on the Editorial/Advisory Boards of various journals, including the Journal of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Caracteres. Estudios culturales y críticos de la esfera digital, Revista Internacional de Humanidades and Janus digital.