Dr Melissa Terras
Melissa Terras is a Lecturer in Electronic Communication and Publishing at University College London, teaching Internet Technologies, Web Publishing, and Digital Resources in the Humanities in the School of Library, Archive, and Information Studies (SLAIS). Her research interests include Humanities Computing, Digitisation and Digital Imaging, Artificial Intelligence, Palaeography, Knowledge Elicitation, Internet Technologies, and Virtual Reality.
Prior to joining UCL in August 2003, she was the Assistant Manager of the Engineering Policy department at the Royal Academy of Engineering. Melissa was awarded a DPhil from The University of Oxford in 2002, her doctoral work being a joint project between the Department of Engineering Science and the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents, which looked at how to build cognitive systems to aid historians in the reading of damaged and deteriorated texts.
Melissa is a co-investigator in the Log Analysis of Internet Resources in the Arts and Humanities (LAIRAH) project, based at SLAIS. Melissa is Acting Secretary for the Association of Literary and Linguistic Computing (2005/6), and an Officer of the Association for Computers and the Humanities (2005-8). She is on the editorial team of the new Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations' Electronic Journal, which is to be launched in 2006. She is involved in the Building a Virtual Research Environment for the Humanities project at the University of Oxford, and the Arts and Humanities Research ICT Awareness and Training (ARIA) project at De Montfort University. Melissa has published various articles on virtual reality and archaeology, and the use of image processing and artificial intelligence in the study of ancient documents. Her first book, "Image to Interpretation: An Intelligent System to Aid Historians in Reading the Vindolanda Texts" is currently in press.
