Professor David De Roure appointed Academic Director of Digital Scholarship @ Oxford

Professor David De Roure has been appointed as the Academic Director of Digital Scholarship @ Oxford (DiSc). 

DiSc is a five-year £2.4 million inter-disciplinary project which launched in November 2021. It aims to transform the application of digital technology in the Humanities and firmly establish Oxford University at the cutting edge of collaborative researcher-led digital scholarship.  

DiSc is based jointly in the Humanities Division and the Bodleian Libraries and funded from the University’s Strategic Research Fund. The initiative complements the creation of a new Master of Science degree in Digital Scholarship, which started last year. 

Professor De Roure said: "I'm excited to be taking on this role as DiSc enters its second phase. Oxford has had an important and influential role in digital humanities and digital scholarship, and I am proud to be able to build on this to support new research, especially at a time with such a focus on digital transformation across the institution." 

Professor Dan Grimley, Head of Humanities at Oxford University, said: “DiSc has already changed the way so many researchers in Oxford think about their work and collaborate with others. David De Roure is a world expert in digital scholarship who is carrying out fascinating research into the way technology can be used to create and perform music. I am delighted that he will lead DiSc into the next phase of this exciting and important project.”

Professor De Roure served as Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre from 2012 to 2017 and has been closely involved with the Digital Humanities @ Oxford Summer School since the inaugural event in 2011. He recently shared observations from his involvement in the University’s digital transformation in a blog on the University website.  

His research is in digital musicology, where he focuses on the application of AI in music composition and performance. Professor De Roure is a Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute, the national institute for data science and AI, where he works broadly with arts, humanities and cultural heritage.  

More information about DiSc can be found here.  

Photo by John Cairns.