Mia Ridge (she/her)

Dr Mia Ridge is the British Library’s Digital Curator for Western Heritage Collections. As part of the Library’s Digital Scholarship team, she helps enable innovative research based on the British Library’s digital collections, offering support, training and guidance on applying computational research methods to historical collections.

In 2021, she co-authored The Collective Wisdom Handbook: perspectives on crowdsourcing in cultural heritage. This followed her successful bid as Principal Investigator to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for 'Collective Wisdom'.

She was a Co-Investigator on the Living with Machines project (2018-23), where she led public engagement with digital scholarship and heritage collections through crowdsourcing. Living with Machines was a major inter-disciplinary historical and data science research project analysing digitised sources at scale to provide new insights into mechanisation in the industrial revolution. Her work engaged over 5,500 volunteers in research tasks related to the Living with Machines project. She co-curated the Living with Machines exhibition with Leeds Museums and Galleries,  at Leeds City Museum July 2022 – January 2023.

Previous projects involve crowdsourcing the transcription of historical playbills, and experimenting with machine learning-based methods with library collections.

She is a member of several project advisory boards in the fields of digital humanities and digital cultural heritage, and has undertaken peer review for a range of journals and conference programmes. She has led several computer science and digital humanities student projects applying digital scholarship, data mining and visualisation methods to collections within the British Library. She was also a convenor of the Institute of Historical Research's Digital History seminar.