Digital Humanities - postgraduate community and research culture

Learn with the World Leading Digital Humanities Institute in a supportive, interdisciplinary environment.

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Studying with the Digital Humanities Institute

Our Masters degree courses and PhD programme make use of the expertise of the world-leading Digital Humanities Institute (DHI) and expertise from across the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. The DHI has over 25 years of expertise and an international reputation in the domain of cultural data (digital humanities). The DHI’s practice-based expertise will contribute an important component to the skills, knowledge, and employability related aspects of the programmes. Students will have access to the DHI’s extensive portfolio of projects, data, clients, and industry partners and benefit from the interdisciplinary learning environment represented by the DHI’s work within the Faculty and internationally, as well as cognate cross-faculty initiatives related to digital methods such as the Sheffield Institute for Language Analytics (SILAS). The Faculty of Arts and Humanities has strengths in languages and cultures, philosophy and ethics, linguistic, musical, historical, and archaeological disciplines and methods.


Our Partners

We collaborate with a wide range of academic and research colleagues, as well as professionals in the heritage, culture and information industries, across the UK and internationally on funded projects with a computational component or digital output.  Since the DHI was established, we have delivered over 120 externally funded research projects, collaborated with more than 125 external partners, and received grants from 39 funders.

Approximately 50% of all our projects are led by academic or cultural institutions outside the University of Sheffield which means we have a wide network of industry experts and organisations which our students are able to tap into and benefit from through things such as our annual Business Leader talks.

Our partners


Our projects

Our expertise include database development, computational ontologies, natural language processing, computational linguistics, data visualisation and 3D, user-centred design and mobile apps.

Research projects completed by staff within the Digital Humanities Institute include:

  • Digitised crime records.
  • Interactive maps of Italian cinema memories.
  • Scholarly editions of Tudor letters.
  • Data visualisations of mediaeval aliens.
  • Linguistic algorithms for extracting meaning from human discourse.
  • a citizen science platform for annotating 3D models of bird beaks.

Our projects


Hear from our students

student stood in front of book shelf.

Make the most of every opportunity that comes your way. Be proactive and start considering how you can use this course to pursue your passion

Muqades Raja Digital humanities graduate

Muqades speaks about her experience studying in the digital humanities institute and the wealth of extra-curricular activities she has been involved in.

Photograph of Harry Langford

The course has really helped solidify what I want to be in life - an archivist

Harry Langford MA Digital Culture and Communications

Harry talks through his experience of the Digital Culture and Communications MA, and how he developed a passion for archiving which is now what he wants to do as his future career.

Read about more student experiences