Dr Eirini Goudarouli

Position: Head of Research
Specialism: Computational and Experimental Humanities, Digital Innovation in Cultural Heritage, Research leadership and mentorship
eirini.goudarouli@nationalarchives.gov.uk

Eirini has extensive experience working on interdisciplinary research projects across the Cultural Heritage and Higher Education sectors. A historian of science by training, Eirini started her career holding research and managerial roles at the University Archives and the University Lab for the electronic processing of historical collections at the University of Athens in Greece. This early engagement with heritage collections and their digital representation, exploration and analysis, led her to develop a passion for digital cultural heritage.

In 2015 she received her doctorate degree from the University of Athens. As part of her doctoral research, she spent a year at Clare Hall and the History and Philosophy of Science department at the University of Cambridge in the UK and a few months at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Before joining The National Archives, UK Eirini was a researcher at the University of Warwick and an Associate Research Fellow at Birkbeck, London. Over the past years, Eirini also held various digital research roles in UK information-holding institutions and academia, before she joined The National Archives, UK in 2017 where she is now the Head of Research.

Her current focus of work is to drive innovation that enables the unlocking of physical, digital and born-digital collections in new ways for broadening our current understanding through ground-breaking interdisciplinary research and cross-sector collaborations. Eirini is particularly interested in bringing together methods and theories from a range of disciplines that could essentially contribute to the rethinking of digital, archival and collection-based research.

Eirini is a Research Fellow at the Research Centre for the Humanities in Greece, a member of ‘Humanities and Data Science’ special interest group at the Alan Turing Institute, and a board member of the Advanced Information Collaboratory, an international network with partners from leading academic and cultural institutions spanning five continents.

Select publications

Digital Cultural Heritage book series, edited by J. Winters, A.M. Sichani and E. Goudarouli, University of London Press (forthcoming in April 2025).

Archival Materialities in a Digital Age, edited by E. Goudarouli and A. Prescott, Publication award: Proceedings of the British Academy, University of Oxford Press (February 2024).

E. Goudarouli (2023), ‘Digital Innovation and Archival Thinking’, edited by A. Wiggins and A. Prescott, in Archives, Power, Truth, and Fiction volume, Oxford University Press.

E. Goudarouli et al., (2023), ‘Workshop Report: Archives and the Environment’, Zenodo.

J. Liem, A. Slingsby, E. Goudarouli, M. Bell, C. Turkay, C. Perin, J. Wood, (2023) ‘Visualising the Uncertain in Heritage Collections: Understanding, Exploring and Representing Uncertainty in the First World War British Unit War Diaries’, Literary Geographies, Vol 9/no 1.

'Special Issue on Challenges and Prospects of Born-digital and Digitized Archives in the Digital Humanities', edited by L. Jaillant and E. Goudarouli, Archival Science, September 2022, Vol 22/ Issue 3.

'Special Issue on Computational Archival Science', edited by M. Hedges, R. Marciano and E. Goudarouli, ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage Journal, February 2022, Vol 15/Issue 1.

The Alan Turing Data Study Group Final Report: The National Archives, UK: Discovering Topics and Trends in the UK Government Web Archive (2021).

Barbara McGillivray, […], E. Goudarouli, et al., (2020) ‘Challenges and prospects of the intersection of humanities and data science: A white paper from The Alan Turing Institute’, co-authored by members of the Humanities and Data Science special interest group at the Alan Turing Institute.

E. Goudarouli, (2020), Workshop report: Computational Archival Science: Exploring Data, Investigating Methodologies and Bringing Interdisciplinary Groups Together, Zenodo.

E. Goudarouli, A. Sexton, J. Sheridan (2019) 'The Challenge of the Digital and the Future Archive: Through the Lens of The National Archives UK', J. Philos. Technol., 32: 173 - 183.