Monthly Archives: July 2026

GBP Digital Humanities Assistant Technician

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Hi, I am Molly. I am the Digital Humanities Lab’s GBP Assistant Technician. I started working for the DH Lab in March 2025 after graduating from Exeter University with an MA in Literary Studies in 2024 and a BA in English in 2023. As my time with the DH Lab comes to an end, I have been reflecting on all the incredible experiences and skills I have gained over the last one and a half years.

Gemma, Gary, and Molly at the 2025 Technician Conference in the Forum

2D Digitisation

Learning how to operate the photography equipment and Capture One software in Lab one has been my favourite skill to develop, as this has allowed me to become involved in a variety of digitisation projects. This has given me the opportunity to handle so many interesting artefacts and archival material that I would never otherwise have encountered. I also enjoy digitising collections or items, because it has a lasting impact. Having relied on digitised databases throughout my degrees, it has been incredibly rewarding to contribute to the creation of resources that will support future researchers.

The Special Collections Team kindly gave me the opportunity to work with a wide variety of material from across their collections, ranging from glass negatives and photographs to paper manuscripts. Each item and collection presented its own unique and rewarding challenges, requiring different approaches to handling, imaging, and preservation. However, among the collections I worked with, I especially enjoyed the Jack Clemo Collection and the Theo Brown Papers.

Jack Clemo was a Cornish poet and writer, who, despite becoming deaf and blind, wrote extensively about the landscape, industry, and communities of Cornwall. Working with his collection offered a fascinating insight into his creative process and how he navigated losing both his sight and hearing. I also experimented with handwriting text recognition technology to improve the accessibility of the collection by making handwritten materials easier to search and transcribe.

Theo Brown was an English Folklorist who was best known for documenting the folklore, customs, legends, and beliefs of Devon and the wider South West of England. Working with her research and personal papers showcased the work that went into documenting and preserving local heritage, while also highlighting the importance of archival collections in safeguarding cultural memory. I loved reading all the newspaper cuttings she had saved from the 1950s-1970s. I found myself regularly falling down research rabbit holes as I uncovered folklore and local traditions that I had previously been completely unaware of.

3D Printing and Modelling
I suspected I would enjoy working on digitisation projects prior to starting with the DH Lab. However, 3D printing and modelling were entirely new to me. I had no previous experience with either technology or any expectations of what they would entail. I quickly discovered a passion for both, particularly after learning about the role of 3D printing in increasing access to cultural heritage artefacts.

One of my favourite 3D printing projects was working with Professor John P. Cooper’s Chhot Boat for the 2025 HASS Research Celebration event. Using the digital information provided by a previous photogrammetry model, I was tasked by Dr Adrián Oyaneder Rodriguez to produce a 3D printed replica of the Chhot boat. To do this, I used Blender to assess the quality of the 3D digital mesh and to ensure the file’s size and format were compatible with the DH Lab’s 3D print software. I then used Bambu Studio to repair the mesh and experiment with support formats. I enjoyed bringing the Chhot boat to life through 3D printing and it was a pleasure to learn about the history and tradition behind such an interesting watercraft

Working with Interns:

Each year, the DH Lab employs a group of fantastic student interns from across HASS subjects. Over their internships each cohort learns all the digital methods and technologies that the Lab has to offer. They also get to work on a brilliant range of exciting research projects. Working with the interns each year and getting involved with the hiring process has been a fantastic experience. It has taught me so much about what makes a standout application and interview from an employer’s perspective, which has been invaluable in my own subsequent job searches. Getting involved in training and supporting interns in their work has taught me a great deal about mentoring, communicating technical concepts clearly and accessibly, and the value of patience and encouragement. One of the core highlights from my role has also been witnessing interns grow in confidence and find aspects of digital humanities that genuinely excite them, particularly when those interests develop from technologies or approaches they had never encountered before.   

Molly with Thea, Rachael, Holly, and Evelyn (some of the 2025/2026 DH interns cohort) at the Employment Awards Ceremony
Evelyn, Holly, and Molly after HASS
graduations

Guest Lecturing
My role with the DH Lab has led to some amazing teaching and guest lecturing opportunities. I created two lectures about 3D Cultural Heritage for the new Digital Cultures Minor. These lectures focused on 3D Imaging Technologies and 3D Printing in Cultural Heritage projects and environments. I also created a lecture for an optional first-year English module called Digital Cultures: Narrative, Creativity, Industry. My lecture was included in a week dedicated to Fans, Prosumerism, and Participatory Cultures. I focused on how online platforms have shaped fan cultural production as the internet has evolved.

Developing and delivering these lectures has been one of the most rewarding aspects of my role. It has been a great opportunity to share my own research interests with students while building my confidence in teaching, public speaking, and audio visual production.

Admin Experience and the Research Bid Pipeline

One aspect of the Assistant Technician role that has been particularly valuable has been the opportunity to develop my administrative and organisational skills. Prior to joining the DH Lab, my work experience as a student had primarily been in retail. While this developed essential skill sets, during my post-graduate job search, I quickly realised that employers prioritised candidates with administrative or office experience, making this an area I was especially keen to develop.

I have been responsible for a range of administrative tasks, including managing room bookings, coordinating equipment requests, maintaining records and metadata, and supporting the research bid pipeline through data entry and organisation. These tasks have given me first-hand experience of the day-to-day administration required to support busy research facilities and have helped me appreciate the fascinating lifecycle of a HASS research project.

Social Media

During my time with the DH Team, I have really enjoyed being responsible for the Lab’s social media channels. This has primarily involved planning and creating content to showcase the Lab’s research projects, digital methods, and intern training. It has been a rewarding challenge that has developed my creativity and strengthened my ability to communicate complex techniques and research in engaging and accessible ways. I feel passionate about celebrating and increasing the visibility of the DH Lab.

I was particularly thrilled to be nominated for, and receive, the Visibility Award at the 2026 Technician Conference. Winning this award was very meaningful, as it recognised my efforts to raise the profile of the Lab and share its work with wider audiences.

Overall, my role with the DH Lab has been a truly informative experience. It provided me with a fantastic introduction to full-time professional employment and to working in a research and cultural heritage environment. I have genuinely looked forward to coming to work each day, and I could not have asked for kinder, more supportive colleagues.

The GBP role has given me the time, encouragement, and opportunities to discover and pursue my interests while developing both professionally and personally. I am incredibly grateful for everything I have learned, the people I have worked with, and the confidence I have gained. It has been an invaluable experience that has shaped my career aspirations, and I am excited to carry these skills and experiences forward into the next stage of my career.

Whitefriars Theatre

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This year the Digital Humanities Lab had the pleasure of collaborating with Professor Pascale Aebischer on an exciting project exploring the staging possibilities of the early modern Whitefriars playhouse. Bringing together literary scholarship and 3D digital modelling, our DH student intern, Holly Doel, aimed to create a 3D model of the Whitefriars stage to better understand how plays might have been performed in this theatrical space.

3D print of a visualisation of Whitefriars Playhouse

Prof. Pascale Aebischer had this to say about the collaboration:  

‘The gorgeous little model of the Whitefriars stage is the result of multiple conversations between staff and students at the University of Exeter. We’ve been teaching Ben Jonson’s Epicene, which was written specifically for the very elite early modern Whitefriars playhouse, for years – and for years, we’ve struggled to understand exactly how some of the more crowded scenes could possibly have been performed on a stage of such unusual shape and dimensions. While the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, the Cockpit-at-Court reconstruction in Knowsley (Shakespeare North) and the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia, all help us get a sense of how generic and specific individual indoor candlelit playhouse spaces ‘worked’, there was no existing design or even a simple drawing of the Whitefriars stage that could inform our interpretation of how that stage shaped what could be performed on it.

Then of our former students-turned-lecturer, Briony Frost, performed a deep dive into trying to understand the dimensions and properties of this playhouse a few years ago for a lecture which she later published as an article. Her research, while answering important questions about sound insulation and sound penetration in the Whitefriars playhouse, along with the broader sonic environment of the Whitefriars precinct (very noisy), only raised more questions for us about sightlines, stage-sitters and the use of the ‘above’ area. Since then, every year when studying the text, lecturers and students have scratched their heads about how to imagine this space and its affordances. Dodgy drawings on whiteboards and maps of the stage area on PowerPoint slides only made it ever more evident that we weren’t quite able to imagine the relations between performers on the upper and lower stages, stage-sitters, and the audiences in the galleries and stalls.

Finally, a research project by one of our students, Holly Doel, presented an opportunity to create a 3D model of the stage. We dug out all the information and hypotheses we had regarding the Whitefriars stage and Holly used her design skills to produce two alternative models: one with an upper stage thrust over the lower stage and the three tiring house doors, and another with the upper stage recessed within the tiring house, so that the stage doors were not obscured by the main part of the balcony. Comparing the two models has revealed just how challenging a theatrical space the former arrangement is, suggesting that (purely from a practical standpoint), the latter arrangement is the more plausible. As it happens, this arrangement also corresponds more closely to the layout of many surviving early modern hall structures, in Guildhalls, manor houses, Inns of Court and Oxford and Cambridge colleges. The part of the balcony that protrudes over the stage is unusual for early modern halls, but it was included in the design because one of the sources we used mentioned pillars to support the balcony. The little stage-sitter figures Holly produced help us understand the crowding of the stage for group scenes, while the ‘female’ figurines enable us to grasp better the proxemics plays such as Epicene and The Tamer Tamed (another probable Whitefriars play) that involved unusual numbers of female characters whose skirts required more stage space than that occupied by male characters.

All in all, the models have transformed and refined how we can imagine those plays in performance and have taught us to ask new questions of the plays and the performance space. It’s wonderful to see how questions that arose from the classroom are contributing to asking new research questions and find new methodologies for answering those questions, in collaboration with generations of students and with the help of colleagues in Digital Humanities!’

Screenshot of 3D model of Whitefriars Playhouse

Working from existing scholarship and staff discussions, Holly transformed ideas about the Whitefriars stage into a detailed digital model that balanced historical interpretation with practical demands of 3D design and printing.

Holly had this to say about the process:

‘Creating the model involved transforming rough sketches, based on existing scholarship, into a 3D design using the CAD software Tinkercad. To construct the theatre, I had to break the structure down into as many individual geometric components as possible. Certain features, such as the railings, had to be reinforced or simplified slightly to ensure that more delicate sections would not break during printing, when removing supports, or through general handling. The final model was produced at a scale of approximately 1 cm to 1 metre.

One of the most rewarding aspects of the project has been the opportunity to connect my interests as an English student with the work I’ve undertaken during my internship. Producing the model has made the potential layout of the Whitefriars stage far easier to visualise and understand spatially. The project also highlights the value of digital technology as both a research method and an educational tool, demonstrating how 3D modelling can help bring historical performance spaces to life in a tangible way.’

Projects such as this highlight the value of collaboration between academic staff, students, and the Digital Humanities Lab. By facilitating opportunities for students to contribute meaningfully to research and teaching projects, the Lab helps create spaces where innovative ideas can be explored in practical ways. Additionally, DH internships provide invaluable experience that enables students to develop technical, creative, and research skills that extend far beyond their studies. To access Holly’s Digital models of the Whitefriars theatre, follow these links:
Whitefriars Theatre – 3D model by Exeter Digital Humanities (@exeterdigitalhumanities)
Whitefriars Full Hall – 3D model by Exeter Digital Humanities (@exeterdigitalhumanities)

3D printed model of Whitefriars Playhouse