Bio
Daniel Wilson is a historian of science and technology working on the politics and provenance of data and machines in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His work combines traditional close-reading and archival study with computational techniques. Current projects include using language models and other critical methods to explore historical text datasets, including the internationally important collections of the British Library.
Prior to being appointed a Turing Research Fellow, Daniel was Senior Research Associate on the Living with Machines project: a radical collaboration between historians, curators, data scientists and computational linguists. The project explored the industrial revolution in Britain using digital methods, including computer vision on historical map collections.
Before joining the Turing, Daniel worked on the 'Technology & Democracy' project at CRASSH in Cambridge – an inquiry into the politics of the digital – alongside David Runciman and John Naughton.
Daniel continues to teach occasionally in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, is an Honorary Research Associate in the Department of STS at UCL, and a Research Fellow in the Department of History at Queen Mary, University of London.
Research interests
Daniel's work is in the tradition of STS (Science & Technology Studies) and includes interests in the politics of technology, in data provenance, and in developing new approaches for working with large collections of 19th-century maps and texts. Daniel continues to nurture a long-term interest in Humphrey Jennings's Pandaemonium and collaborates daily with research software engineers, curators and librarians to develop new forms of data-driven historical research.
