{"id":2063,"date":"2026-10-20T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/?page_id=2063"},"modified":"2026-09-25T10:24:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T09:24:00","slug":"ecr26-vicky-bouche","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/dariah-ie-ecr-bursary-blogs\/ecr26-vicky-bouche\/","title":{"rendered":"ECR26 – Vicky Bouch\u00e9"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Vicky Bouch\u00e9<\/strong>, PhD Researcher, Trinity College Dublin<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019re excited to present the fourth and final post<\/strong> as part of our special four-part blog series featuring insights from DARIAH-IE\u2019s 2026 Early Career Researcher Bursary awardees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DARIAH-IE was delighted to be able to support four Early Career Researchers to attend the DARIAH Annual Event<\/a>, which took place in Rome, Italy in May 2026. A<\/em>s well as attending the event and benefiting from the networking and learning it offered, the awardees were given the opportunity to provide a short blog about their own work to share with fellow Irish Digital Arts and Humanities researchers on the DARIAH-IE website. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All the posters and presentations mentioned by Vicky can be found in DARIAH’s Digital Arts and Humanities With and For Society: Building Infrastructures of Engagement<\/a><\/strong> community collection on Zenodo.<\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"Headshot<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Vicky Bouch\u00e9 at the DARIAH Annual Event in Rome [Photo Credit: 911 Foto (https:\/\/www.911foto.it\/<\/a>), CC-BY]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why Are There So Many Spider Webs? An Education Researcher Encounters the Digital Humanities<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vicky Bouch\u00e9<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I arrived at the DARIAH Annual Event in Rome as a complete newcomer to digital humanities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My own PhD research sits in education and technology, looking particularly at generative AI, feedback and classroom practice. I was therefore delighted to receive a DARIAH-IE bursary to attend the conference, but also slightly unsure of where I fitted. I knew what the words digital and humanities meant separately. Putting them together was another matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then I noticed the spider webs.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

During the poster session, they seemed to be everywhere. Dots connected by lines; clusters branching into other clusters; people linked to places, texts, objects, concepts or institutions. As an education researcher, I am more accustomed to tables, thematic diagrams and conceptual frameworks. Here, apparently, everyone had a web. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first, those networks seemed to confirm that I had entered somebody else\u2019s research world. But as the conference progressed, I began to think that perhaps the webs were actually helping me understand it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The theme of the 2026 event was Digital Arts and Humanities With and For Society: Building Infrastructures of Engagement<\/em>. Across the sessions, \u201cinfrastructure\u201d did not seem to refer simply to computers, databases or sophisticated research tools. It was also about the relationships that allow knowledge to be created and shared: between researchers and communities, collections and publics, disciplines and institutions, and increasingly between humans and digital technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was perhaps what surprised me most. I had subconsciously imagined digital humanities as humanities scholars using digital tools. What I encountered in Rome felt much less like a particular set of tools and much more like a way of asking questions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who gets access to knowledge? How do we represent complex human and cultural material as data without losing what makes it complex? Who participates in creating that data? What happens when technologies mediate our interpretation of texts, histories or cultural objects? And who are our digital infrastructures ultimately being built for? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Suddenly, these questions did not feel so distant from education.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In educational technology, we are grappling with many of the same tensions. Generative AI has made this particularly visible. It is easy to become fascinated by what a technology can do; the more difficult questions concern what it should do, for whom, under what conditions, and with whose voice still present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The atmosphere in Rome reinforced that sense of connection. What struck me was the openness of a community in which conversations moved easily across disciplines, countries, methods and projects. Even workshops concerned with building large-scale infrastructures returned repeatedly to users, participation and communities. One workshop on cultural-heritage infrastructure, for example, deliberately brought different approaches together rather than searching for one universal methodology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps, then, my first mistake was trying to find a neat definition of digital humanities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am still not sure I could produce one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I left Rome with an image instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The spider webs that initially made me feel like an outsider eventually began to make sense: digital humanities is perhaps found somewhere in the connections, between the human and the digital, data and stories, technology and culture, disciplines and communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, unexpectedly, I could see my own research somewhere in that web too.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n

Biographical note<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vicky Bouch\u00e9<\/strong>, PhD Researcher, Trinity College Dublin<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vicky is a PhD candidate in the School of Education at Trinity College Dublin, where her research centres on how generative AI-supported feedback can support student writing in multilingual and multicultural classrooms. With a background as a secondary school French and Spanish teacher, she holds a Professional Master of Education and a Master\u2019s in French Language and Literature, and has a strong interest in Second Language Acquisition, educational technology, and inclusive curriculum design. She is particularly interested in how technology can empower more equitable and responsive learning environments, guided by the belief that \u201ctechnology is most powerful when it brings people closer to learning\u2014and to each other.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vicky Bouch\u00e9, PhD Researcher, Trinity College Dublin We\u2019re excited to present the fourth and final post as part of our special four-part blog series featuring insights from DARIAH-IE\u2019s 2026 Early Career Researcher Bursary awardees. DARIAH-IE was delighted to be able to support four Early Career Researchers to attend the DARIAH Annual Event, which took place in … [Read more…]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"parent":1230,"menu_order":1,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-full-width.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["entry","page","publish","author-joan-y-murphytcd-ie","post-2063"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P9zaVM-xh","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2063"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2063\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2177,"href":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2063\/revisions\/2177"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dariah.ie\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}