Date: 2 November 2026 (Monday)
Time: 4:00 - 5:30 pm
Venue: LI-6376, 6/F, Li Dak Sum Yip Yio Chin Building, City University of Hong Kong
Language: English
Speaker: Professor Paul Spence
Registration:Please complete the online registration form HERE on or before 29 October 2026.
Successful registrants will receive a confirmation email not later than 30 October 2026.

Abstract

While digital humanities are increasingly recognized internationally as a transdisciplinary field capable of encompassing multiple disciplines and professional perspectives, this very transdisciplinarity can make it difficult to situate digital humanities research and teaching within existing institutional structures. In this presentation, I will explore how the concept of laboratory has been used in the digital humanities - whether as institutional structure, knowledge platform, or space for public action and engagement - and what implications this has for the humanities and the study of human culture more widely. In doing so, I will examine the impact of open science, global and multilingual diversity, and, finally, the increasingly permeable boundary between academic research and the cultural heritage sector.

Biography

Paul Spence is a Reader in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. His background is in modern languages, digital methods, digital pedagogy and structured knowledge representation. His research currently focuses on digital publishing, global perspectives on digital scholarship and multilingual digital humanities. Through his work on the Language Acts and Worldmaking project, he has focused in particular on digital transformations in how we engage with languages, while also analysing the power of language to disrupt digital monolingualism in knowledge infrastructures, methods and data. He is co-editor of the first edited volume on Multilingual Digital Humanities.