Bio
Ellen Charlesworth is an AHRC funded PhD candidate at Durham University. Having studied art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art and then data science at Birkbeck, she gained experience designing and evaluating online exhibitions collaborating with the Birkbeck Knowledge Lab, Museum of the Home, and the Venerable English College, Rome.
Her current research asks how we can improve museums online content; using data from museums’ websites and social media it aims to develop more nuanced measures of audience engagement. Her work identifies sector-wide trends in museums’ online content and explores the way this is shaped by both funding guidelines and platforms’ algorithmic interventions.
Ellen’s work on the use of privately owned platforms in the museum sector was presented at the Belvedere Conference, Vienna (2022), and received coverage in the national newspaper "Der Standard". Her most recent paper, published in "Museums, Management and Curatorship", charts 315 UK museums’ website and social media use over the pandemic, and was also presented at the Museum Analytics conference, London (2023).
Research interests
At the Turing, Ellen will be exploring at the online content of 40,000 European museums. Using web scraping and NLP techniques to create a large data set, it aims to identify how museums’ digital strategies changed over the course of the pandemic. Ellen will be developing a web application to allow researchers to query the data and create interactive visualisations for museum professionals.