BTHL Research
Alongside our truly cross-disciplinary and original research, BTHL creates collaborative opportunities and knowledge sharing for academics, students and industry practitioners that help bridge the gap between the humanities and science.
Underpinned by state-of-the-art facilities and led by world-class academics, our research delivers transformative insights into who we are and how we behave to help address some of society's most pressing challenges.
Exploring how AI shapes human relationships
Dr Matteo Fuoli and Dr Marcus Perlman, from the Department of Linguistics and Communication, have been working with Michael Allaway in the BTHL on a bespoke large language model (LLM) to explore how AI technologies shape human relationships, communication, and the evolving boundaries between machine and person.
All University of Birmingham staff can gain access to the BTHL for research work as either a registered user or as part of the Academy programme.
Join the BTHL Academy
In collaboration with a range of partners, the BTHL Academy offers a year-round programme of training and development. Open to all staff, the Academy focuses on:
- User-led training: Helping lab users become confident and competent in specific technologies and methodologies.
- Skills development: Small-group coaching in areas like coding, research software development, and beginner-friendly AI.
- Interdisciplinary collaboration: Themed workshops and sandpits co-hosted with other university labs to foster cross-disciplinary exchange.
- Apply to join the Academy.
Become a registered user
If you are a University of Birmingham employee and would like to use the BTHL for your research work, you can find more information about becoming a registered user on our SharePoint pages.
If you are based outside the University of Birmingham and would like to work with us, please email us: bthlab@contacts.bham.ac.uk.
Research projects
Compositor
Compositor
Dr Hazel Wilkinson is working with the BTHL’s AI modality to develop her Compositor project – a database of over 1 million eighteenth-century printers’ ornaments that popularly appeared in books from the period, Dr Wilkinson is building an AI interface that can not only scan the internet and upload millions more of these decorative and forgotten woodcuts or metal cuts to the database, but also to weed out incorrect entries without having to resort to hours and hours of manual inputting and vetting.
Sign language avatar
Sign language avatar
Dr Rose Stamp is working with the BTHL’s motion capture modality in her research examining variation across different sign languages and what impacts their survival. In order to understand how someone looks affects people’s perception of a sign language’s social value, Dr Stamp is creating an avatar that is stripped of any visible gender, nationality and social status, which is animated by the signer using motion capture technology.
Human-AI Interaction
Human-AI Interaction
Dr Matteo Fuoli and Dr Marcus Perlman are working with BTHL’s AI modality to create a bespoke large language model (LLM) for their Human-AI Interaction project. The cloud-powered but localised and secure LLM will allow them to run hundreds of experiments with volunteers via their website, exploring how people communicate with AI systems – whether it’s a virtual assistant, customer service chatbot or social media avatar – to understand how they’re influencing our relationships with machines and each other.
I am particularly keen to learn from and contribute to interdisciplinary discussions around technical workflows, data practices, and the ethical use of digital tools in humanities and social science research.