Ellen CHARLESWORTH

Ellen Charlesworth is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) ) at the University of Luxembourg.

Ellen’s work uses computational methods to explore how digital infrastructure shapes the way we experience cultural heritage, as well as conduct research. Her most recent project explored how museums have implemented online collections, asking what types of organisations are missing from the online cultural landscape. Her current work builds on this foundation to explore the way that various algorithms – for search, ranking, and recommendation tasks – exacerbate these absences, and shape the way we perceive cultural collections and the wider historic record.

Ellen’s PhD won funding from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and received a further grant from the National Institute of AI and Data Science – the Alan Turing Institute. Her work on online image sharing received the Courtauld award for outstanding dissertation, while her project on bias in digital collections received the Inclusive Museum Network’s emerging scholar award

Over the course of her research Ellen has worked closely with museums, universities, and archives across the UK, Italy, and Switzerland. She was most recently based in Rome as a pre-doctoral fellow at the Machine Visual Cultures research group at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History. She remains an affiliate researcher there, as well as at Cambridge Digital Humanities. 

Ellen received an undergraduate degree in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art and went on to do a master’s degree in data science at Birkbeck, University College London. She recently completed her PhD at Durham University.