Professor Leif Isaksen

I am Director of Digital Humanities at the University of Exeter, based in the Digital Humanities Lab, and a member of the Department of Classics, Ancient History, Religion and Theology. I am also Theme Lead for Humanities, Heritage and the Creative Industries at the Institute of Data Science and AI (IDSAI).

My main interests are in spatial and temporal representation in the humanities - both in the ancient world and the modern one - and the use of Intelligent Systems to relate and interrogate online resources about the past. This is most notably as director of several projects associated with the Pelagios Network, including the development of the Recogito annotation platform. I have a background in archaeology, and in recent years I directed the Cluny Hill Dig.

I have been involved with a number of Humanities and Digital Humanities activities and organisations worldwide, including CAA, EADH and ISHMap, and was Executive Board Chair of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations (ADHO) from 2019 to 2021. I am a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and former Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute.

Biography:

I am originally from Moray, Scotland. My first degree was in Philosophy at King's College, Cambridge, following which I spent several years as a language teacher and software developer in Berlin, Germany. In 2003 I undertook an MSc in Archaeological Computing at the University of Southampton, and then worked as an IT Officer at Oxford Archaeology South. In 2007 I returned to Southampton to do a Computer Science PhD on 'Archaeology and the Semantic Web'. Following a post-doc on Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) at Oxford University I returned to Southampton once again as a Lecturer in Archaeology, where I worked for four years. In 2015 I moved to Lancaster University's History Department as Senior Lecturer in Spatial History. In 2017 I joined the University of Exeter's Department of Classics & Ancient History and Digital Humanities Lab as Professor in Digital Humanities.