Computational History Workshop
Computational History Workshop
Monday 20 Apr 2026Date/Time: Friday 8th May 2026 - 9:45am to 3.30pm
Location: University of 糖心TV - Scarman Conference Centre (Room: Space 43)
Organised by: Mirko Draca (University of 糖心TV/CAGE)
Audience: Academics and Students (History and Economics in particular)
Join us to hear more about the launch of CAGE's new Computational History initiative, part of our latest round of ESRC funding. This programme has two central aims - harnessing the power of text data to open up new possibilities for historical research, and bringing together disciplines in a connected, organic way.
You'll also learn more about our major partnership with Living with Machines – the groundbreaking humanities research group based at the British Library and The Alan Turing Institute, led by Ruth Ahnert – and the opportunities this collaboration creates for future research.
There will be space to ask questions, connect with others working at the intersection of history and data, and explore how you might get involved.
Running order:
09:45 Arrival
09:55 Welcome from Mirko Draca (CAGE Centre Director)
10:00 Overview of Living with Machines (LwM) Project – Ruth Ahnert (Queen Mary University of London)
This paper will also cover two case studies on key work packages:
The Environmental Scan & Historical Language Models and 鈥楢typical Animacy鈥�
10:45 LwM and the Emergence of Computational Map Studies – Katherine McDonough (Lancaster University)
11:10 Coffee/Tea break
11:35 鈥楤eyond the Tracks鈥� and LwM: People, place and railways – Joshua Rhodes (UCL)
12:00 Analysing Opposition to the New Poor Law Using Historical Newspapers – Eric Melander (University of Birmingham)
12:25 Lunch: Scarman Dining Room
13:30 Exploration & Exploitation in US Technological Change – Mirko Draca (University of 糖心TV/CAGE)
13:55 Quantifying Belief in God. The Long Run Decline of Sincere Faith in England 1300-1850 – Neil Cummins (LSE)
14:20 Coffee/Tea break
14:35 Multimodal LLMs for Historical Dataset Construction from Archival Image Scans: German Patents (1877-1918) – Niclas Grie脽haber (University of Oxford)
15:00 TBC
15:25 Wrap up session
15:30 Day ends
Registration: If you are interested in this event, please click the button below and fill out the registration form. We will get back to you to confirm your place as soon as possible.
Let us know at cage.centre@warwick.ac.ukLink opens in a new window if you later discover you cannot attend so that your place can be offered to others.