Scarlets and Blues

Pip Wilcox

Pip is Head of Research at The National Archives. She has a background in digital editing and book history, focussing first on encoding medieval manuscripts and later on early modern printed books. More recently, she has worked on projects linking collections and semantic web technologies, and social machines. Before joining The National Archives, Pip spent 13 years at the University of Oxford. She led the University's Centre for Digital Scholarship since establishing it in 2015, and worked with colleagues in Humanities to develop a research-led Master's programme in Digital Humanities. She directed the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School and was a Senior Researcher at the Oxford e-Research Centre.

Will Butler

Will is Head of Military Records at The National Archives. Previously he worked as a Lecturer in modern British military history and as an Outreach Officer at the University of Kent. Alongside teaching postgraduate and undergraduate courses at the university, he ran a project which sought to engage school students with the study of the First World War between 2015 and 2019, working with them in the classroom, at the university, producing exhibitions, performances, and supporting the GCSE and A Level curriculum. His book, The Irish Amateur Military Tradition in the British Army, 1854-1992, which was based on his PhD thesis, was published in 2016, and his latest co-authored book, The Disparity of Sacrifice; Irish Recruitment to the British Armed Forces, 1914-1918 came out in July 2020. He has also published articles relating to the army demobilisation strikes at the end of the First World War, on the Ulster Home Guard during the Second World War, and about the role of the British Army in Upper Silesia in 1921-22.

Liz Fulton

Liz is Academic Communications and Impact Officer for The National Archives’ Research and Academic Engagement team, where she promotes research projects, programmes and events. After receiving her Bachelor of Arts in Art History from McGill University in 2011, she worked in communications roles in organisations in the arts and culture sector before joining The National Archives.

Bernard Ogden

Bernard is a Research Software Engineer at The National Archives, working on digital aspects of research projects and with interests in both digital and traditional approaches to history and archives. Before joining The National Archives he completed an MA in Historical Research at Birkbeck, University of London and prior to that he was a software engineer in the private sector, working on software development tools in a variety of roles and disciplines.

Louise Seaward

Louise is Academic Engagement Manager at The National Archives, where she organises academic events, oversees student programmes and facilitates collaborative research. She received her PhD in History from the University of Leeds in 2013 and most recently worked as a Research Associate at the Bentham Project, University College London.

Becca Hutcheon

Becca is Digital Scholarship Researcher at The National Archives where she focuses on conducting and enabling research into the uses of digital technologies in approaching The National Archives’ collections. As well as digital scholarship, her research expertise centres on literary geographies, spatial theory, narratology and the long 19th century – in particular late-Victorian and Edwardian fiction and Romantic poetry. Both her PhD and MA (awarded by the University of Bristol) concerned the space – fictional and actual – of fin-de-siècle prose. Before joining The National Archives, Rebecca worked as a Research Associate on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded 'Chronotopic Cartographies for Literature' at Lancaster University, investigating how digital tools can be used to analyse and visualise literary texts

Mark Bell

Mark is a Senior Digital Researcher at The National Archives, where he has worked for 7 years. He has a wide range of research interests including handwritten text recognition, crowdsourcing, probabilistic record linkage, and applications of AI to archival challenges. When he’s not experimenting with interesting data, Mark also enjoys training archivists in Machine Learning, and is currently collaborating on an introductory course in AI through Library Carpentries.

More information about the team, both of Scarlets & Blues and of the wider Engaging Crowds project, can be seen at the Engaging Crowds site.