Ellen Charlesworth, M.A.

Ellen Charlesworth is an PhD candidate at Durham University, funded by UKRI’s Arts and Humnaities Research Council. Having studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art and then data science at Birkbeck (University of London), her current research spans digital humanities, museum studies, and digital art history.

Her work uses computational methods to explore how digital infrastructure shapes the way we experience cultural heritage, as well as conduct research. Her last project, funded by the National Institute of AI and Data Science (the Alan Turing Institute), explores 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.

 She has worked with museums and archives across the UK, Italy, and Switzerland, and regularly publishes in both academic and museum journals. Her work on online image sharing recieved the Samuel Courtauld award for outstanding dissertation, while her work on the biases in digital collections recieved the Inclusive Museum Network’s emerging scholar award.