Directory of Research and Expertise

---

Research Summary and Profile

Research interests:

Contemporary History, Digital resources, Digitisation, Gender studies, History, Politics

Regions:

England, Europe, United Kingdom

Summary of research interests and expertise:

Kaspar Beelen is a digital historian who explores the application of machine learning to humanities research. He obtained an interdisciplinary PhD in History and Linguistics (2014) at the University of Antwerp, in which he studied identity in political discourse through the angle of pronouns. He continued as postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and University of Amsterdam, analysing parliamentary discourse from various angles, such as the representation of women in Westminster and the use of affect in parliamentary language. In 2016, he became assistant professor in Digital Humanities (Media Studies, Amsterdam) and later moved to the Alan Turing Institute, where he worked as research associate for the Living with Machines project. At the Turing, Kaspar focused on understanding and analysing bias in digitised heritage, predominantly newspapers collections. At the same time, he engaged with various other topics, studying maps at scale, the history of machine animacy, and the detection of place names in text.

Currently, Kaspar works as Technical Lead Digital Humanities, at the Digital Humanities Research Hub. His research focusses on multimodal AI for GLAM and the use of language models for historical research.

Publication Details

Related publications/articles:

Date	Details
06-May-2025	LwMDB: Open Metadata for Digitised Historical Newspapers from British Library Collections Journal articles Westerling, Kalle, Kaspar Beelen, Tim Hobson, Katherine McDonough, Nilo Pedrazzini, Daniel CS Wilson, and Ruth Ahnert. "LwMDB: Open Metadata for Digitised Historical Newspapers from British Library Collections." Journal of Open Humanities Data 11, no. 1 (2025).
28-Mar-2025	Reading maps at a distance: Texts on maps as new historical data. Journal articles McDonough, Katherine, Kaspar Beelen, Daniel CS Wilson, and Rosie Wood. "Reading maps at a distance: Texts on maps as new historical data." Imago Mundi 76, no. 2 (2024): 296-307.
26-Sep-2024	MapReader: Open software for the visual analysis of maps Journal articles Wood, Rosie, Kasra Hosseini, Kalle Westerling, Andrew Smith, Kaspar Beelen, Daniel CS Wilson, and Katherine McDonough. "MapReader: Open software for the visual analysis of maps." Journal of Open Source Software 9, no. 101 (2024): 6434.
01-Jan-2024	Beyond the Tracks: re-connecting people, places and stations in the history of late-Victorian railways Chapters Rhodes, Joshua Jon Lawrence, Kaspar Beelen, Katherine McDonough, Daniel C.S. Wilson, Beyond the Tracks: re-connecting people, places and stations in the history of late-Victorian railways, Living with Machines: Computational Histories of the Age of Industry, University of London Press.
06-Dec-2023	The past is a foreign place: Improving toponym linking for historical newspapers. Conference papers Ardanuy, M. C., Nanni, F., Beelen, K., & Hare, L. (2023). The past is a foreign place: Improving toponym linking for historical newspapers. Proceedings http://ceur-ws. org ISSN, 1613, 0073.
03-Nov-2023	impresso Text Reuse at Scale. An interface for the exploration of text reuse data in semantically enriched historical newspapers. Journal articles Düring, M., Romanello, M., Ehrmann, M., Beelen, K., Guido, D., Deseure, B., ... & Apostolopoulos, P. (2023). impresso Text Reuse at Scale. An interface for the exploration of text reuse data in semantically enriched historical newspapers. Frontiers in big Data, 6, 1249469.
03-Jul-2023	The living machine: A computational approach to the nineteenth-century language of technology Journal articles Wilson, D. C., Ardanuy, M. C., Beelen, K., McGillivray, B., & Ahnert, R. (2023). The living machine: A computational approach to the nineteenth-century language of technology. Technology and Culture, 64(3), 875-902.
01-Apr-2023	Bias and representativeness in digitized newspaper collections: Introducing the environmental scan Journal articles Beelen, K., Lawrence, J., Wilson, D. C., & Beavan, D. (2023). Bias and representativeness in digitized newspaper collections: Introducing the environmental scan. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 38(1), 1-22.
01-Jan-2023	The Minimum Research Outcome: A Mechanism for Generating and Managing Projects in Labs Chapters Tolfo, G., Griffin, E., Ridge, M., Beelen, K., & Ahnert, R. (2023). The Minimum Research Outcome: A Mechanism for Generating and Managing Projects in Labs. In Digital Humanities and Laboratories (pp. 193-207). Routledge.
01-Jan-2023	Fairness and Transparency throughout a Digital Humanities Workflow: Challenges and Recommendations Papers Beelen, K., Chambers, S., Düring, M., Hollink, L., Jänicke, S., Jean-Caurant, A., ... & Pfanzelter, E. (2023). Fairness and Transparency throughout a Digital Humanities Workflow: Challenges and Recommendations. In Computational Approaches to Digitised Historical Newspapers–Report from Dagstuhl Seminar 22 (Vol. 292, pp. 144-74).

Additional Publications

Consultancy reports:

Date	Details
2025	Small Language Models for libraries and computational humanities Practical opportunities and use cases.  Beelen, Kaspar, Small Language Models for libraries and computational humanities Practical opportunities and use cases, Jisc, 2025

Research Projects & Supervisions

Research projects:

Details
Congruence Engine: Digital Tools for New Collections-Based Industrial Histories Congruence Engine (grant ref. AH/W003244/1) was a three-year research project starting in November 2021 that used the latest digital techniques to connect industrial history collections held in different locations. Led by the Science Museum Group, it was one of five ‘Discovery Projects’ funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council under the ‘Towards a National Collection’ programme.
Impresso: Media Monitoring of the Past — Beyond Borders Leveraging an unprecedented corpus of newspaper and radio archives, Impresso - Media Monitoring of the Past is an interdisciplinary research project that uses machine learning to pursue a paradigm shift in the processing, semantic enrichment, representation, exploration, and study of historical media across modalities, time, languages, and national borders.
Living with Machines Living with Machines ( AH/S01179X/1) is both a research project, and a bold proposal for a new research paradigm. In this ground-breaking partnership between The Alan Turing Institute, the British Library, and the Universities of Cambridge, East Anglia, Exeter, and London (QMUL, King’s College), historians, data scientists, geographers, computational linguists, and curators have been brought together to examine the human impact of industrial revolution.

Available for doctoral supervision: Yes

Consultancy & Media

Available for consultancy:

Yes

Back to top