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Events

History Open Mic Night @ The Portico, Manchester, 11 December 2025, 6pm – 7pm

Come in from the cold this winter with another evening in the ‘Fast History’ open mic night series, co-curated with History Lab Plus. Listen to a series of quickfire talks with specially invited guests from across the history and heritage sector, then take to the stage yourself to share your own historical passions! Historian, enthusiast, librarian, archivist – it’s free, and all are welcome!

There is no Christmas theme, but the goth grinch at the Portico may throw in some seasonal treats if people book via this link: via Eventbrite.

Join the HistoryLab+ committee for our next CHRISTMAS CONNECTIONS EVENT on 17 December!

There will be…

Free hot drinks and comestibles at Sketch by Origin, York Art Gallery’s lovely café from midday
A free, hour-long introduction to the history of print in York and traditional printing demonstrations at Thin Ice Press by the brilliant Prof. Helen Smith (University of York) and Lizzie Holling (Thin Ice Press) from 14:00
Some aimless wandering, enjoying York’s award-winning Christmas Market, historic pubs, and the beautiful Bar Walls together…
Dinner with the exciting Spark_* York project at 18:00

This is an opportunity for ECRs in and around York and North-East England to meet informally to support each other, build professional connections, and discover more about the HistoryLab+ network. Members from further afield are also more than welcome. <Register here>

January 2026: The Trade Publishing Historian: Writing Non-Fiction – TBA

External Events

DIGITIZATION & CITIZEN SCIENCE
Inviting collaborative research to transcribe handwriting
Online Meeting: Weds 22 October at 5pm
with Harry Smith and Emily Vine
of the Material Culture of Wills, 1540-1790 project at the University of Exeter
Warwick History ‘POST-DOC’ CLUB METHODOLOGIES SERIES
Advances in machine learning present new opportunities for historical research, allowing new forms of analysis, and enabling digitization and transcription to happen at a far greater pace than was previously possible. This is particularly true for the early modern period since earlier automatic transcription methods using optical character recognition (OCR) performed poorly when applied to manuscript sources.

The rapid improvement of handwritten text recognition (HTR) methods has, however, opened up the possibility of digitizing manuscript sources at a scale not previously possible. Any output from such models needs to be checked, and the use of volunteer labour to do so is increasingly common. In this session we discuss the use of HTR models to transcribe 25,000 wills from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as part of the Material Culture of Wills project.

This project used the HTR platform Transkribus to transcribe the contents of these wills, but has also worked with a small group expert volunteers (to produce training data) and a wider pool of volunteers through the Zooniverse platform (to check model outputs). This combination of human and algorithmic labour has proved successful in developing accurate transcriptions of our wills sample and we will discuss our approach to this task, and the lessons learnt.
Register free

WORKSHOP: Skills Training in Archival Research (STAR) Workshop
Join The London Archives on Wednesday 29^thOctober (1-4pm) for a hands-on workshop designed to help students and researchers make the most of archival collections. £10 fee.

NETWORKING: British Academy Early Career Network
An inclusive, researcher-led network for UK-based early career researchers working in the humanities and social sciences.
BOOK/ ARTICLE PRIZES FOR ECRs: Royal Historical Society
The RHS have annual prizes for first books and articles by Early-Career Historians. The window for applications for both the RHS First Book Prize and Early Career Article Prize opens on 15 September (and closes 15 December 2025).

RHS Events listings

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