Stuart Dunn

This is an approximate text of the talk I gave at King’s Digital Futures Institute’s event on the Digital Futures of History on 15th October 2025.

In 1937, H G Wells imagined an interconnected worldwide information system of the future, which he termed the “Permanent World Encyclopaedia”. This carefully curated and presented summary of the world’s knowledge would supplement, and eventually replace, both what he saw as the outmoded eighteenth and nineteenth century concept of the encyclopaedia, and the knowledge traded in by traditional universities. These, he said:

“[did] not perform the task nor exercise the authority that might reasonably be attributed to the thought and knowledge organisation of the world”.  Never again, in Wells’s view, would there be misinformation, false narratives or unevidenced claims because an army of professional librarians, curators and archivists would have custody of the sum total of human knowledge, in a “a well-ordered scheme of reference and reproduction”. (World Brain, 1937)

Fast forward to 2001, and the closest manifestation of the Permanent World Encyclopaedia is, of course, Wikipedia. We may tip a wry smile in H G Well’s direction over his faith in how the permanent world encyclopaedia might be overseen and run, but he was not as far off as might be seen on the face of it. Rather than a professional staff of curators and librarians, Wikipedia, and its offshoots such as Wikidata, has evolved a set of processes and models through which volunteer effort is channelled systematically and, to an extent, reliably. In 2002, after just one year’s operation, Wikipedia had over 48,000 articles. Today’s estimate puts that number somewhere north of 65m articles in 340 languages. A world encyclopaedia indeed.

2002 was also the year that what has to be my favourite ever Onion headline appeared, professing shock that a factual error had been found on the Internet. Looking back at nearly a quarter of a century’s distance, the idea that this was a subject of satire even then is telling.  From the early days, the need for the kind of stable, reliable information the Permanent World Encyclopaedia promised was needed by anyone wanting to take advantage of the world’s knowledge opened up by digitisation, including historians and folklorists. But it wasn’t quite there yet. A response to this, as noted in the main description of this event, was a rush of projects in the 1990s and early 2000s to digitise the sources and resources which the humanities rely on. In those heady days before the 2008 financial crash, this meant significant financial investment, with funders like the AHRC paying large sums, into the many millions according to this list, for the AHRC’s Resource Enhancement Scheme (which I am old to remember) alone.  

Inevitably however, centrally planned and funded efforts to digitise existing resources  replicated existing structures and existing content. Even at the time however, it became clear that the effort and the ambition to digitise masses of historical content would eventually push both its form and the way it was used in new directions. In 2000, the renowned digital humanities scholar Susan Hockey noted:

The humanities scholar of the future will have access to digital objects of many different kinds on the network. It is not yet clear exactly what these objects will look like, but the need for a common interface and set of software tools is obvious. It is also clear that the future environment will be mixed … much remains to be done to work towards a common methodology which allows for the many different and complex types of material that are the subject of research in the humanities and can also leave open the possibility of new and as yet undiscovered avenues of exploration

Posterity has shown than one such kind of humanities information object, which could not have been fully anticipated at the time, was digital vernacular expression on, for example, social media, and how this took hold as the WWW evolved from a publishing environment to a conversational one – the advent of was called Web 2.0 – in the mid noughties. Facebook was founded in 2004, Google Maps in 2005, Twitter, as was, in 2006. The very word “crowdsourcing” was coined by the tech journalist Jeff Howe in the same year.  However, as Trevor J Blank points out in the introduction to his landmark edited volume of 2009 Folklore and the Internet, while the fields of anthropology, sociology and communication studies began to engage with the ever-expanding and evolving WWW in this period (and this interdisciplinary collaborative is very much manifested in the present-day Department of Digital Humanities at King’s), folklore studies largely stayed behind. It has certainly done some catching up in recent years -m and Blank’s volume must be acknowledged as a key moment on this – but it is worth thinking a bit about why this might have been.

Conventional definitions of key ideas such as superstition stresses the informality and fuzzy nature of both the information they rely on and, more importantly, the evidence we have for them – not generally acknowledged or officially recognised. Quoting Peter Opie, Iona Opie and Moria Tatem state in the 1989 Dictionary of Superstitions, that ““[f]olklore in general ‘consists of all the knowledge traditionally passed on from one person to another which is not knowledge generally accepted or “officially” recognized’ (p. viii). Blank, however, stresses both the creative and the shared significance of folklore beyond the archive. He states that “[f]olklore should be considered to be the outward expression of creativity – in myriad forms and interactions – by individuals and their communities” (p. 6). In the context of this definition, Blank goes on to argue that printing and the distribution of printed material promoted and enabled the study of folklore in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – despite William Wells Newall’s claim that genuine folklore is the “lore which escapes print” – and that the Internet was proving to be the “new print”  which was bringing folklore into a new “electronic vernacular”.  Blank and others since 2009 acknowledge the continuous presence of physical metaphors in the online space (which is, itself, a metaphor) – web page, surfing, portable document etc – and states that the Internet has an inherent base in the real world – that “there is a human behind everything that takes place online”.

That, I think, is the key statement that we need to consider when thinking about the digital futures of folklore. The digital culture theorist Guro Flinterud recently argued that the algorithms which sort content on platforms such as X (Twitter as was) shape the behaviour of those contributing content to them by exerting a priori influence on which pieces of information get widely circulated and which don’t.  Flinterund views the algorithm as

a form of traditional folklore connector, recording and archiving the stories we present, but only choosing a select few to present to the larger public [p. 451].

To the digitized archive therefore, we must add the algorithm, a decidedly non-human actor in the construction of knowledge. It is the very nature of algorithms that they build connections according to the logic with which they are programmed, not to any vernacular or human-driven scheme.. Add to this the interacting powers of spin, misinformation and commercial appropriation, where the “ground truth” of the (digitized) archive is overtly relegated.

Does truth even matter as a result? In a 2023 interview where he faced criticism of the historical accuracy of his movie Napoleon, Ridley Scott is quoted as saying “When I have issues with historians, I ask: excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the f*** up then.”  And in 2022, Graham Hancock’s Netflix series, which claimed that there are previously unknown pre-Ice Age connections between the emergence of complex societies in different parts of the world. Whether this can be evidenced or not hardly matters,  the reach of the show – some 25 million viewing hours in one week, according to one report – drove great impact and algorithmic success as a “folkloric connector”, in Flinterud’s terms.

The phenomenological mediation of the screen can make it very hard to tell these different kinds of connector apart. In a recent post, the historian of belief Francis Young makes an intriguing argument which expands on this. Young argues that the reception of AI, across the public and the scholarly spheres, has shifted society towards a new epistemology of knowledge, where content produced by LLMs is perceived as literal ground truth. For example,  that a LLM can internalise the extant works of Livy, and then produce the 107 books of his that are lost – that it can literarily produce the lost works of Livy.

This is the context of my question – can AI be literally superstitious? This is meant to be more of a provocation than a literal question. What I want to provoke us to consider is a comparison between AI generated content -the logic of the algorithm, driven by theoretically limitless computational power over billions of training datasets across the Web – with the complete absence of logic inherent in superstition. Is there a meaningful difference between the two? This is what I think the Digital Folklorist of the future will have to figure out.

“stumped. in stump v1. adj. (Originally U.S.). To cause to be at a loss; to confront with an insuperable difficulty; to nonplus

This is one of those moments when you just have to bash our a few words for no other reason than to vent. The Independent has reported that archaeologists are “stumped” by a wheel-like building complex at the Kastelli airport development in Crete. An enigmatic, evidently communal complex has been uncovered, whose exact purpose is not clear. It’s a very interesting find of Middle Minoan date, from a time when palatial civilisation was becoming a thing in the Minoan world. This has all sorts of connotations for the emergence of complex societies, where the rule of a central authority – later exemplified by the famous Minoan palaces – was become established. But the exact function of this building can’t be reconstructed from the finds currently available – and this, apparently, means that archaeologists are “stumped”.

I realise at this point that I am the proverbial Old Man Yelling At A Cloud of Simpson’s meme fame, but I’m afraid this time the cloud is just going to have to suck it up. Archaeology is an incomplete, partial picture. Every discovery reforms and recalibrated our view of the past, which can never be whole. So the fact that the exact purpose of this structure is not clear, coming as it does from a pre-writing society with no surviving textual records, and whose administrative infrastructure we cannot reconstruct in any detail, does not mean that archaeologists are “stumped”. They are operating within the limitations of the evidence they have.

Now, I am not familiar with the work of the journalist, Nicholas Paphitis. However if you read the article in full, you will see he has actually done a good job of reporting the Cretan archaeological authorities’ perspective, and the context of the find. What irks – being polite – is the headline, which draws an immediate and – ahaha – monolithic outline of that nuance, totally obliteraing it in the process. I am the son of two journalists, and know that a great way of really annoying one is to assume that they write, and are responsible for, their own headlines. The don’t and they aren’t. The headline writer has really done the issue a big disservice here.

There is a bigger point: a headline likes this feeds, in a tiny way, into a narrative that the past is somehow objective, and thus can be complete. If you are “stumped” then there has to be some rounded truth to which you do not have access. This lack of nuance, and the implied exclusion of uncertainty, enables the appropriation of past material culture for very, very unsavoury ends. Even with a throwaway headline on an otherwise well-written and apparently innocuous news piece, the mainstream media should not be contributing to this way of thinking.

Thank you for listening. The cloud has now drifted away.

This is not meant to be an overtly political intervention; this blog largely tries to steer clear of these altogether. However, the recent “Tories would swap ‘rip-off’ degrees for apprenticeships” issue in the British General Election has, in various forms, been such a staple of the entire quarter-century that I have spent in academia that I thought it was worth offering some thoughts on its latest iteration. It came up again last week in the context of the Election, with a government promise to fund up to 100,000 apprenticeships per year as alternative to poor-quality degrees, and to give our regulator, the Office for Students (OfS) greater powers to close down badly performing degrees. For the first time, graduate earnings are to be taken into account in such assessments. Both have very important policy implications for the HE sector.

To reiterate, conversations about the “quality” and “value” (monetary or otherwise) of degree programmes are not a new thing. “Mickey Mouse” degrees have been a target for certain sections of the media for as long as I can remember; for some reason, “Golf Course Management” sticks in my mind as a particularly totemic example of these, which was knocking around in my youth (I have no idea if any such programme has ever been offered by the way, or which institution or institutions were supposed to have done so). Since the turn of the century however, the number of students in UK HE has increased from around 1.9. to 2.8m, according to HESA figures. It is certainly the case that the range of subjects available to study has, for better or worse, expanded along with this increase; driven no doubt in part by a desire on the part of institutions to remain relevant to the societies they serve. Whether any of these are “Mickey Mouse” or not is surely a matter of subjective opinion, but the introducing term “rip-off” implies a more specific characteristic, as a poor financial return on financial investment.

Two questions are implied by the idea of “rip-off” degrees being offered by universities: firstly, how could any institution expect to get away with offering such a programme, even it if wanted to? From where I am sitting, the current UK landscape is not short of universities willing to take the pruning shears to their offerings in the face of financial pressures. There is more to it than financial viability however. Students are not fools. There are some parallels between choosing a degree programme and buying a house (which, incidentally, I am doing at the moment). House buyers “do their own research” these days, with a plethora of data available about house prices (both historic and current), amenities, transport links, environmental factors and so on. The choice of degree programmes faced by aspiring students is the same. Most institutions provide extensive data about their programmes and outcomes already (although it’s true that too many don’t), and as well as this we have countless university rankings and league tables, less formal forums such as the Student Room, as well the mass of nebulous networks on social media where students and aspiring students comminicate, all of which platform and broadcast student experiences. There is surely enough information out there for young people to make informed choices, and we should trust them to do so. And anyway, shouldn’t the free market rule?

This is of course not to deny that poor quality degrees exist, although whether they can survive the rigours of today’s academic environment in the long term is an altogether different question. However, just as there are good and bad degrees, there are also good and bad apprenticeships. One does not need to dig very far at all online to find horror stories, both from apprentices and their hosts. There also of course excellent apprenticeships which create experiences of long term value for those that do them.  But to set them up as as a whole a panaceic answer to poor quality in their HE counterparts is comparing apples with oranges. The comparison is culture war at its most shallow.

As noted above, it is suggested that our regulator, the Office for Students, should be able to step in to close “failing” degrees which. As some have pointed out, the OfS more or less has powers to do anyway. But even so, political parties (of any hue) drawing the OfS into such narratives is helpful not for it, for the sector, or for the relationship between the two. Last year, the House of Lords report, Must do better: the Office for Students and the looming crisis facing higher education, concluded that:

The actions of the OfS and the prioritisation of its duties appear to be reactive and driven by political pressures and input. While there are a small number of cases where the OfS has pushed back against the Government’s view, in too many cases the OfS has translated ministerial and media attitudes directly into regulatory demands on providers.

Given the importance of trust between the sector and its regulator, involving them in this way can only exacerbate the fears of political pressure which the Lords articulated.

Finally and most importantly: conflating the student experience and all that goes with it with the earnings graduates make on a degree by degree basis is both an oversimplification and a gross distortion of reality. Figures out this week show that students from the LSE are London’s highest earning graduates five years after finishing their degrees, with graduates of the Royal Veterinary College also being among the highest earners. In contrast the lowest earners are those of the Conservatoire for Dance and Drama, with the University of the Arts London and the Royal College of Music also languishing in the table. These figures are hardly astonishing surprises, and they say nothing whatsoever about the quality of the teaching on offer in any of the institutions in questions. The amount graduates can expect to earn on graduation is one of a vast range of factors, some to do with their personal situations others, as illustrated here, to do with the fact that (say) vets tend to earn more than musicians. That is not the fault of either students or universities. To suggest such a link, or that applicants are somehow being hoodwinked by poor teaching, is entirely tendentious.

The UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport has launched a consultation on ratifying the 2003 UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage. Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) is, as the consultation acknowledges, a “mouthful”. It refers to a broad range of things done, usually in public spaces, which form part of our communities. Spectacles, events or processes that we instantly recognise, whose motifs, significance and practices we already know about collectively, and which thus form part of our community’s identity, are all examples of ICH – with “we” and “our” being used very advisedly. Think Morris dancing perhaps, or the Lord Mayor’s Parade in London, or a Salvation Army band. UNESCO’s Convention on ICH aims to afford safeguards to its manifestations, on the same level as it affords preservation and protection to World Heritage’s more familiar tangible expressions, such as Stonehenge, the Giant’s Causeway or Durham Cathedral. Drawing on UNESCO’s own definitions, the consultation defines Intangible Cultural Heritage as

[T]he practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills – as well as the instruments, objects, artefacts and cultural spaces associated therewith – that communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage.

Later on, it speaks more succinctly of “Cultural heritage that is living and practised as opposed to material, fixed heritage.”

The “guiding principles” upon which the proposed ratification will take place are broad, and seem entirely reasonable, with a strong emphasis on inclusivity. They speak of ICH being community based and bottom up, of intercultural dialogue around cases of ICH that are both shared and not shared by different communities, while admitting that for ICH to exist at all it must carry a degree of “community recognition” (whatever that means). As Francis Young has pointed out, this could lead to problematic situations in cases where one item of ICH clearly forms part of one community’s identity, but which may at the same time represent ideologies which conflict with another’s – such as Northern Ireland’s fife and drum bands. The consultation – wisely in my view – steers clear of such conflicts by adopting what it calls a “lift not list” approach, which does not seek to elevate any items of ICH over others, or confer on any items any special status. It states that:

[ICH] is different to World Heritage, partly in that it is far broader and more extensive, but importantly in that it has no exceptional universal value and is not necessarily original or unique. Judging which elements are more valuable or important than others is neither desirable or beneficial, nor is there any commonly agreed way of doing so.

Failing to be ultra-responsive and ultra-inclusive would, at this early stage, surely doom the proposed ratification to failure, especially in such fractious and culturally-warlike times for the UK as these. The first stage will therefore be to create an all-encompassing “inventory” of ICH, which will not, at least at first, seek to accession any items to UNESCO’s own “definitive list”, which is far more definitive and exclusive.  However, when the consultation gets to defining what it thinks should be included, the principles become so all-encompassing as to risk indeterminacy. It is simply stated that ICH should be “currently practiced” and is not a material object (an ethnically specific piece of food preparation equipment does not itself form part of ICH for example, but a culinary practice which uses it might), that it can come from any time, and can originate from anywhere.  The proposed categories within these are drawn from the Convention itself:

• oral traditions and expressions, including language as a vehicle of the intangible cultural heritage;
• performing arts;
• social practices, rituals and festive events;
• knowledge and practices concerning nature and the universe;
• traditional craftsmanship.

Two additional categories are proposed, traditional games and culinary traditions.

It is interesting, and perhaps a subject for another blogpost, to note that that digital networked practices, events, and knowledge are not mentioned at all. These potentially cut across all seven categories, and highlight the necessary role of networking, connection, and collaboration within communities in the production of ICH – the process by which information, understanding, knowledge is shared, and is this collectively formed. Mark Hedges and I observed similar processes in relation to the ways that academic crowdsourcing produce knowledge in in our 2017 book, Academic Crowdsourcing: Crowds, Communities and Co-Production. We noted:

“The emergence … of more collaborative and co-productive forms of crowdsourcing in recent years has led to an increased focus both on community motivations, around the creation of benefits for the common good – to human knowledge or a cultural commons – and on a more profound engagement with the subject and closer involvement of contributors in designing and doing research”.

p 101

Our main thesis in was that the “networked age” from the mid-2000s onwards, when the Web became truly interactive, brought about a new type of “cultural commons”, whereby academics and cultural professionals were able to do new forms of research, and create and curate new forms of knowledge, by collaborating with enthusiastically amateur (in the best possible sense of the term) members of the public. For “cultural commons” here, one can read ICH, and the ways in which it is produced through collaborative and co-productive means between practitioners and communities; and the way in which it functions as a social good. No doubt the bearing which the theory and practice of networked knowledge has on the relationship between practitioner and public will form a major part of the Convention’s implementation in the UK in the future.

In order to be all-encompassing and inclusive therefore, the consultation casts its net wide, and skims over any reference to the way that ICH is actually formed. The sharpest contrast in terms of what ICS is not is its comparison with tangible World Heritage, the “tangible” properties already listed by UNESCO. It is worth unpacking this distinction a little more.

The UNESCO World Heritage List (which defines properties that the consultation explicitly states are not ICH) divides its entries into the high-level categories of “Cultural”, “Natural” and “Mixed” – essentially, those which are created by human hands, those which are not, and combinations of the two. The vast majority of listings are human-made: of 33 listed properties in the UK, 28 are Cultural, four are Natural and only one is mixed. The first thing to note is that under both UNESCO’s definitions and the UK consultation, all ICH would correspond to the “Cultural” category. It is always human-made. It can be further noted that pretty much all of the 28 Cultural listings might be considered to be the result, whether directly or indirectly, of “elite” historical processes. Durham and Canterbury Cathedrals and Blenheim Palace are obvious examples of the former, as is the City of Bath. The Jodrell Bank Observatory is a manifestation of “elite” practice in a scientific rather than a religious or social sense.  Similarly, the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct and Canal is an example of “elite” achievement in the domain of civil engineering – “a pioneering masterpiece of engineering and monumental metal architecture” according to the UNESCO listing. We may not have such a clear vision of the religious, social and architectural significance(s) of Stonehenge and Avebury as they appeared to those who built them, but we can be sure that they resulted from social complexity and hierarchy – some form of elite culture, even if it is one that we cannot access it directly.

By contrast, the ICH is none of these things. The UK consultation explicitly states that to be inventoried, items and practices of ICH must be “bottom up” and endorsed by their community. ICH derives its legitimacy from a shared embodiment at the local level, and not through validation by scientific, social, religious, engineering or architectural fame. Under the convention ICH will be “safeguarded”, not “preserved”, as physical World Heritage is. But this only serves to highlight that our approach to preserving “World Heritage” is to place it, metaphorically, behind glass, frozen in time and isolated from the world around it. This is in itself is a rather egocentric and monocultural view of World Heritage – privileging the way it appears to us, now, and excluding ways it might evolve in response to its environment over time (a property that is explicitly attached to ICH in the consultation). By banishing them, we in effect absolve ourselves of any responsibility for safeguarding the way in which a heritage monument changes dynamically over time.  Recognising heritage’s contemporary importance and impact makes the stark distinction between ICH and World Heritage seem incongruous. As Hugh Thompson points out in The Green Road Into the Trees (2013), any Iron Age druids who might have used Stonehenge for their rituals are just as distinct from the monument’s original builders, and at the same time just as much part of its history, as the hippie celebrants who congregate there at the Summer Solstice in modern times. Under both UNESCO’s definitions and the proposed UK ratification, the hippie events and rituals would surely qualify as an item and practice of ICH. The may not have the same “exceptional universal value” as the Stonehenge itself; but to regard them (and the social-networked process which sustain them) as separate from the movement from the point of view of preserving and safeguarding it in the present day itself seems to make little sense.

I believe that the UK consultation has struck the right tone in terms of setting principles and an agenda; and does a good job in framing the first steps towards ratification. Hopefully ratification will prove to be an impetus to ambitiously rethink the boundaries that an historic (and Westernized) view of heritage imposes on the distinction between the tangible and intangible, past and present, and safeguarding and preserving.

I am adding to a canon here. The Swaledale Corpse path, which runs along the Swaledale Valley in the Yorkshire Dales from the area of Keld to Grinton, is already well blogged about – see here, here and here for just three examples. Probably because of this, it’s one I have wanted to do for a long time, and this week I got my chance. The story is the same as elsewhere: before the church at Muker was built, the deceased had to be carried up Swaledale for burial at St Andrew’s Church, Grinton. As denoted by the blogs, this path seems to have attracted particular interest and tales – including the the haunting of Ivelet Bridge by a headless black dog which was, it seems, a portent of death.

I set off from Frith Lodge, a fabulous B&B a little north of Keld (just off the Pennine Way – very warmly recommended, Neil and Karen are perfect hosts). One needs to cut down and cross the river to get to the start of the walk, but this leads through the pleasant Rivendell-like landscapes of East Gill Force – all granite waterfalls and the swirling, beer-brown water of the Swale – to the notional start of the walk in Keld.

Swaledale from Kisdon Fell

Here, the corpse path briefly overlaps with the Pennine Way, which my late father walked in 1978. In the diary he kept, he said of this section:

After the steep climb to Shunner [Fell, to the south] I wanted a rest and a smoke, so [his walking companions] went on again soon disappearing into the most ferocious gale we’d so far experienced. The cloud was racing by at 70 to 80 mph and you had to lean hard over to keep you balance. Cairns, which had seemed ridiculously close when we’d crossed Shunner in fine weather were now a vital supplement to the track of earlier boot-prints. The wind roared by like an express train in a tunnel – an invisible though powerful presence. I started singing a marching song.

The next day however, the weather had looked up:

I climbed up to Keld with cuckoos in the valley hundreds of feet below. Heavy rain in the night made the going tough (well, sploshy). Past the Tan Hill Inn — lunched in Sleightholm Moor grouse shooters’ shelter (same one as two years ago), then just waded across the morass, perfectly happy in a cathedral of solitude with grouse raising gooseflesh by rocketing away from my feet.

One’s first encounter on the bath heading east is Kisdon Fell. Taking documentation on yorkshiredales.org.uk, which describes the corpse road between Keld and Muker as a guide, I crossed Kisdon on the path around its western and southern flanks – which, possibly deliberately, avoids the settlement. Truly fantastic views in all directions afforded from the crest. Part of this section runs as a green lane, with crumbling drystone walls on either side. In a rare moment of appreciating the finer things in life, Alfred Wainwright, in his guide to the Pennine Way, describes these thus:

A feature of the Yorkshire Dales country is the network of ‘green’ roads (i.e. grass covered) crossing the hills and linking the valleys: relics of the days when trade was carried on by the use of horse transport. Where these routes ran along the valleys they have long been superseded by tarmac roads, but motors have not been able to follow the horses over the hills and the high moorland ways have fallen into disuse; they are however still plain to see and a joy to walk upon, being well-graded and sufficiently distinct on the ground to remove doubts of route-finding. Often they are walled on one or both sides; sometimes they run free and unfettered across the breasts of the hills and over the skyline. For pedestrian exercise these old packhorse roads are excellent: quiet and traffic free they lead effortlessly into and over the hills amid wild and lonely scenery, green ribbons threading their way through bog and heather and rushes.

They call a man to go with them!

Green lane/corpse path over Kisdon Fell

Such is the green way over Kisdon. One can easily imagine it as an old packhorse way, co-opted for the passage of funeral parties. This would certainly have been one of the more difficult sections of the route as a whole, especially if they were trying to avoid habitation, but at a cost of gradient. The ascent up, and descent down, Kisdon certainly served as an unwelcome reminder that I am now nearer 50 than 40.

At Muker, I suspect that the original corpse path probably forded the Swale. There is still a ford there and, indeed, a large flat rock which could well have served as a coffin rest. I, however, succumbed to modern health and safety concerns, and doubled back and used the rather splendid stone footbridge. Turing east, one heads along the north side of the river, and onto the floodplain. The flat, easy walking here is a relief.

Ford at Muker

Possible coffin rest on the south side of the ford

One then comes to the sixteenth century Ivelet Bridge, one of the most iconic (and photographed) bridges in the Yorkshire Dales. I was slightly disappointed not to find a headless black hound, but I was able to find the coffin stone which I have read about here. These flat, oblong platforms, at periodic intervals, served the specific purpose of providing coffin parties with the means of setting their burden down for a rest. It is quite clearly visible at the northern end of the bridge, now level with the ground. My guess is that it lost its height, and was incorprated into the surface when the road was mettled.

The iconic sixteenth century Ivelet Bridge

Stone coffin rest at Ivelet Bridge

After a lunch stop at Gunnerside, one heads along a wooded footpath along the side of the river (confessing here that I cut off a right angle, probably allowing the ease of modern footpaths to trump being purist about following the exact corpse path route. About half a mile east of Gunnerside, I came across confirmation that I was, literally, on the right track: quite clearly another stone coffin rest. An oblong, distinctly coffin-shaped platform, about six feet long and two feet broad. The archaeologist in me clocked that it was certainly worked stone, and had been put there deliberately (there are no other stones nearby) and it is aligned exactly with the path. Well well…

Stone coffin rest near Gunnerside

I felt it is a shame that these features which are of historical interest to the landscape and its past, aren’t marked. A small metal sign would do. If in the highly unlikely event that anyone from the Yorkshire Dales National Park authority reads this, please get in touch, I will be happy to work with you on this.

Another bit of flat floodplain walking brings you to the Isles Bridge, another iconic photo-op for the Dales. Some more easy walking – except for a section where the path goes along a rather hair raising raised narrow stone walkway, with no rails or anything. There is a section along the main road as it hugs the river before it curves north, and one rejoins the footpath along the leafy riverbank. And so, finally, to the Dales village of Reeth.

St Andrew’s Church, “The Cathedral of the Dales” at Grinton

The end of the path, the 12th century church of St Andrews at Grinton, is colloquially known as “the Cathedral of the Dales”. It is certainly a fitting end to the walk. In an interesting connection, the Dales Discovery site mentions that a certain Adam Barker, buried in the church, along with his daughters Sarah and Ann, was fined £5 for conducting a burial with a linen rather than a woollen shroud, contrary to local laws aimed protecting the woollen industry, and that this is recorded on a stone slab. I found Adam, Sarah and Ann’s interment stones, but not the slab.

Adam Barker, and his daughter Sarah’s interment slab at Grinton. Anna’s is just out of shot.

And one thing I noticed is that the churchyard is big – much, much bigger than would be needed for a tiny hamlet like Grinton, which makes sense.

All in all, even though I did not have a coffin to carry, the feel of the terrain, the grandeur of the Dale, and finding a few of the features I’ve read about and also discovering one or two more hiding in plain sight, certainly gave me a very small hint, perhaps a taste of the determination and sense of mission those which the coffin parties must have felt.

Today marks the end of the four … interesting … years of my time as Head of the Department (HoD) of Digital Humanities at King’s College London. In a a College-wide briefing to HoDs last year, the Principal, Professor Shitij Kapur, described HoDs as “the line in the institution where the PowerPoints, the policy papers, the spreadsheets become the actions which make people’s lives better or worse”. I felt at the time that this description hit the nail on the head, and it has thus stuck with me. So: this is not another “reflecting on what is Digital Humanities” post (as I recently did for Viewfinder magazine), or an overview of my subject’s direction of travel (as I recently tried to offer in my Inaugural Lecture); rather I am going celebrate today by capturing a few insights into what I (think I) have learned by being part of the line.

Firstly, in general I have come to dislike the term “leadership role” in an academic setting. “Taking on a leadership role” sounds rather box-ticky, something you do for the CV, or for the probation or promotion panel. “Service” is slightly better, with connotations of facilitating actions for the greater good of a bigger whole in a way that “leadership role” doesn’t. “Citizenship” I think is a bit too generic. “Leadership role” still sets itself apart from the main business of working life. At risk of sounding cliched and/or trite, the aim of a “leadership role”, however flawed the term might be, should be to make life better for all and, by expecting high standards of it, oneself and others, to elevate the institution as a whole.

So far, so worthy. Having got that out however, I am not so overrefined as to claim this is why I put myself forward for the job in summer of 2019 (although it is something I have come to realise, and judge myself on, in the meantime). Rather, in 2019, DDH was still in the throes of rapid and turbulent expansion in both student and staff numbers, some of it planned, some of it unplanned.  I guess I felt that all the components of a vibrant, exciting Digital Humanities research agenda were there, one which was distinct from the kinds of DH done elsewhere, yet which had evolved and grown from twenty or more years of DH teaching and research at King’s. We could, I told myself, create the twenty first century successor to a long tradition of digital scholarship in, for and about the humanities. However, the whirlwind of constant expansion was stopping us from putting it all together. With several great opportunities and specific problems to address, it therefore seemed an exciting time to take on the role. In February 2020, shortly before becoming busy with other things, I published a post on here marking my first six months as HoD. In this, I argued that

DDH’s story is one of evolution, development, and even – perhaps contrary to some appearances – continuity. This is an impression driven by the kind of question that we have always asked at King’s … The prepositions “with” and “about” [the Digital, our strapline] provide space for a multivocal approach, which includes both the work DDH(/CCH) has excelled at in the past, and that which it does now.

Life, however, gets in the way of the very best plans. I became, of course, a “Covid era HoD”, and like many, my time became defined by the pandemic. During those first months of 2020, I remember learning, quickly, how to take one day, and one piece of information, at a time, and how try not to participate in cascades of dodgy information, whether from inside or outside.  I vividly remember that I learned about our first Covid case in the Department’s student body on Thursday 12^th March 2020 at exactly 5.45 PM, 15 minutes before I was due to take the lectern to give a Gresham College lecture, which itself turned out to be the last in its series before lockdown came.  Heady days indeed. Most, but not all, of our classroom teaching had finished by late March 2020, but we still had to adapt, or “pivot” as the term came to be very quickly. We found ourselves working in ways I certainly didn’t expect, having to form a small, agile, very centralised management team that could respond quickly to events that changed almost by the hour through the spring and summer.  As a Department with many international postgraduate students, we were particularly exposed to the risks of lockdowns and travel bans. However, the launch of our new MSc in Digital Economy in September 2020 was a major success; and our “pivot” to online, while of course turbulent, worked. Thanks to the innovation and creative flair of my colleagues across the Department, we came through.

Since 2019, we have made a large number of new permanent academic appointments (bearing in mind there are various ways of counting this apparently simple statistic which are too convoluted to go into here, so I am not even going to try). Our professoriate has tripled from two to six, achieving 50/50 gender parity in the process. In the Department, a responsive and discursive research agenda is emerging. We have had considerable grant success, with a cumulative income well into the seven figures, since 2021. Most importantly though, we have seen the emergence of a set of interoperating research clusters in the Department: in Computational Humanities, Creative AI, Environmental Humanities, Global Digital Cultures, and the Centre for Digital Culture, which has now become an integral part of our Faculty’s new Digital Futures Institute. There is much, much work still to do: a year plus after returning to fully in-person teaching, steps are needed to build our research culture, especially with so many new colleagues. This will take time. The question which is always implicit in these conversations is how much time?

But “satisfaction”, whatever that is, remains elusive. This is not in any way a criticism of anyone, rather it is a manifestation of a bigger truth: like the black and white geese in the M. C. Escher image, a Department is two things at the same time. It is part of a larger institutional and intellectual ecosystem which fosters it, provides it with infrastructure, gives it an official and reputational home, shields it from occasional meteor strikes which would otherwise cause it (and its HoD) devastation, and expects things in return. It is simultaneously a community of scholars, a key part of whose job it is to be independent-minded, with a natural desire to question, to self-govern, and an inclination – indeed a responsibility – to develop a collective research agenda into which all can buy. And they also expect things in return.  The purpose of the HoD is to enable their Department to exist in these two parallel states at the same time and – as much as possible – to maintain an equilibrium between them.  The whole edifice exists in a state of constant negotiation and renegotiation. It is a journey with (hopefully) direction, but no final destination.

Being in a Department which has expanded so much and so quickly in the last decade has also brought some larger truths about Higher Education up close and personal. It is probably not too controversial to say that the national funding model, and the principles behind it, are no longer fit for purpose. Across the UK workloads are out of control, people are stretched, compromise become inevitable in areas where we would rather not compromise, and there is often a sense of “running to stay still”. This makes maintaining the equilibrium between the Escher geese harder and harder, and occupying the “line” in the institution as described by Prof Kapur, gives one a very clear perspective on this. My own two cents is that the traditional residential three year BA/one year Masters is certainly a gold standard for the humanities which must be jealously guarded. However, the idea that this one the one model is the best or only one for everyone belongs to an era – which, sadly I am old enough to remember – when an academic could know every student in a year cohort, or even a whole Department, by sight. This is why I am very glad that we have begun to experiment with professional education, career accelerators and short courses; smaller and more adaptable pedagogies of imparting our knowledge to those who need it in more flexible timeframes. Working in such an interdisciplinary field, and across so many disciplines, we have had to develop strong collaborative, pedagogical and method frameworks in our own research. Having worked on some of these experiments directly myself, I have come to believe that these frameworks are strong enough to be bought into the commercial and industry worlds without any compromising of academic standards or rigour. So maybe this points towards the future.

One of the achievements I am most proud of is instituting our King’s Public Lecture in Digital Humanities, a major new biennial platform for the field’s leading international scholars (which I am much looking forward to continuing to organize in 2025). It was inaugurated this May by the stellar Shannon Mattern, who tackled the issue of modelling doubt in the digital age. The ability to get to grips with doubt is unquestionably the most important skill I have learned. I thank all of those who have taught me this.