Jessica Witte

I hold a PhD in nineteenth-century British literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which I completed in 2022. Since then, I’ve been engaged in a variety of interdisciplinary research projects at the intersection of digital cultural heritage, language, and society. Most recently, I have explored how fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) can improve existing methods for text analysis of heritage data from libraries and archives; support authors of heritage guidance and policy throughout the writing process; and address complex OCR (that’s ‘optical character recognition’) errors in digitised archives. I’ve worked with partners in the galleries, libraries, archives and museum sector (AKA the ‘GLAM sector’) and am committed to ensuring that my work has an impact outside of the academy.

In addition to my research, I have an interdisciplinary teaching background and have taught in subjects such as writing and composition, literature, film studies, computer science, and digital humanities. I contribute to the digital skills training programme at the Centre for Data, Culture, and Society (CDCS), where I support the digital and computational needs of the Edinburgh Futures Institute and the broader humanities and social sciences research communities at the University of Edinburgh.

Outside of work, I enjoy hiking, skiing, practicing Pilates, and learning new languages. Should you wish to connect, you can find me on LinkedIn or BlueSky, but I’ll probably get back to you more quickly via email.