Melissa Terras

• Artificial Intelligence

Melissa Terras MBE FREng is Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage within Design Informatics, Edinburgh College of Art, at the University of Edinburgh, UK. She is a leading researcher in Digital Humanities, previously directing UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, and founding the Edinburgh Centre for Data, Culture and Society in 2018. Her research focus is the digitisation of cultural heritage, including advanced digitisation techniques, usage of large-scale digital collections, and the mining, analysis, and reuse of digitised content. Melissa holds a doctorate in Engineering from the University of Oxford on intelligent systems to read Ancient texts, and is a founding Director of READ-COOP, delivering Transkribus, the AI-powered platform for text recognition of historical documents. Between 2022-24, Melissa was Director of Creative Informatics, the Edinburgh AHRC Creative Cluster supporting digital innovation in the cultural and creating industries, including the spin-out of 47 companies. She is the Edinburgh Lead for the UKRI CoSTAR (Convergent Screen Technologies and performance in Realtime) Network, 2024-2029. Melissa is Expert Advisor to the UK Government’s Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, and has advised on digital strategy to various cultural heritage institutions, including the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Science Museum Group, and the National Library of Scotland. The author of over a hundred academic articles, and 12 books including the best-selling Defining Digital Humanities: A Reader, she was awarded an MBE in the King’s 2025 New Year’s Honours List for services to Digital Humanities.