Dr Andrea Kocsis
Job title:
Chancellor's Fellow in Humanities Informatics
Office:
Design Informatics, Bayes Centre
Research Output:
Edinburgh Research Explorer linkBiography
Andrea comes from an interdisciplinary and international background. Before finding her path in digital humanities, she graduated in Communications, Archaeology, History, and Geography. She collected these degrees at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Charles University in Prague, and EHESS Paris.
She received her MPhil and PhD in Heritage Studies from the University of Cambridge (ESRC DTP). Her MPhil research investigated the use and abuse of medieval archaeology in Hungarian nation-building. Her doctoral research focused on the impact the national WWI commemorations had on the urban landscape of capital cities, London, Paris, and Budapest. She found her passion for coding while acting as a CodeFirst: Girls ambassador at the University of Cambridge, helping women and non-binary students receive free coding classes.
As a Cambridge Grand Challenges research intern at BT, she participated in a machine learning project on 5G misinformation. At the National Archives UK, she was a Research Fellow in Advance Digital Methods, working with the crowdsourced dataset of the Operation War Diary. As an Archive of Tomorrow Research Methods Fellow at Cambridge Digital Humanities, she worked on classifying misinformation in the Talking about Health collection of the UK Web Archive. In her role as the National Librarian’s Research Fellow in Digital Scholarship 2024-25 at the National Library of Scotland, she continues contributing to making the UK Web Archive’s collections more accessible to wider audiences.
Besides being an avid writer, Andrea has a profound interest in digital storytelling, especially in web development, facilitating the interaction between GLAM institutions and their users. She is a web developer for several research projects aiming at gamified and interactive dissemination. Her works include the digital outputs of the Unforgotten Lives exhibition at the London Metropolitan Archives.
Andrea was an Assistant Professor in History and Data Science at Northeastern University London and a Lecturer in Digital Humanities at Anglia Ruskin University before joining the University of Edinburgh.
Research interests
- Heritage Studies
- Digital Humanities
Andrea teaches at the MSc in Cultural Heritage Futures at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Her lectures cover the futures of libraries and archives as well as debates on contested heritage. She also regularly offers various humanities informatics workshops.
Previously, Andrea has taught:
Archaeological Theory, Spatial Heritage (University of Cambridge);
Historiography, Heritage, and Memory, episodes of British History (Northeastern University London);
Research Communications and Digital Storytelling, Research Methods, Popcultural and Media Theory (Anglia Ruskin University).
Research
Research
While remaining a medieval archaeologist at heart, Andrea's research is based on two pillars: Heritage Studies and Digital Humanities. She is fundamentally interested in how the past is used and abused in the present and how it can be understood from a data-driven perspective. Her research topics include contested heritage, historical misinformation, medievalism, and heritage affect. As a digital humanist, she explores the intersection of technology and humanities. She is interested in digital archives, GLAM institutions and technology, historical data, digital storytelling, and the application of Complex Systems approaches in historical research.
PhD Supervision Topics
- Heritage Studies
- Digital Heritage and History
- Humanities Informatics
- GLAM institutions and technology