Lorna Richardson

Lorna-Jane Richardson is Lecturer in Digital Humanities in the School of Art, Media & American Studies, and her main research interests are in the fields of public and community archaeology, digital cultural heritage, digital public engagement and digital research methods, especially those using social media. She is a core staff member in the Digital Humanities Incubator Group.

Lorna is interested in the interface between digital communications, social media, and concepts of elitism and academic/professional expertise. Her digitally-focused work explores how digital media can support, exclude and contain alternative ideas and lived experience.

She works predominantly with data drawn from public digital discussions and online communities, most recently working with data about archaeological sites, ancient DNA and material culture, as well as data on the lived experience of people with endometriosis. 

Lorna would welcome applications for postgraduate supervision on any aspect of public archaeology, heritage or digital/social media, or any digital humanities related research.

The Invisible Women – Developing a Feminist Approach to Film Archive Metadata and Cataloguing

Lorna is Co-I on this UK-Ireland Digital Humanities project, led by UEA and the Irish Film Institute. The project intends to explore how film archives can take practical action to update, enhance and improve catalogue metadata via feminist research methodologies. By using this approach, it will reveal the hidden heritage related to women's creativity.

The Endo Project

Lorna is currently Co-I on 'The Endo Project' a three year research project funded by the Stiftelsen Marcus och Amalia Wallenbergs Minnesfond, with the University of Umeå, Sweden. This project aims to understand how people suffering from endometriosis use the internet and social media to cope with their condition. This work relates to a broader research interest in how embodied health movements are using the affordances of digital media to enable user-driven forms of knowledge gathering, and knowledge production, as well as peer-support practices. 

Lorna has a PhD in Information Studies (2014), funded by the AHRC, from the Centre for Digital Humanities at UCL, titled 'Public Archaeology in a Digital Age'. She also has an MA in Public Archaeology and a BA in Medieval Archaeology from UCL's Institute for Archaeology.

Prior to joining the UEA, Lorna worked as an AHRC Creative Economy Research Fellow at the University of York, as a postdoctoral researcher in the Digital Social Studies Unit, Department of Sociology at the University of Umea, Sweden, and as an AHRC funded visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge Museums.

Lorna is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Post-Medieval Archaeology. She is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a member of the Association of Internet Researchers, and is an Ethics Officer for the Computer Applications in Archaeology International.

Lorna's main areas of research interest are in the fields of digital archaeology and heritage, digital ethics, and social media research methods. Her current archaeological research explores the ways in which digital technologies support wider access to, and create, discuss and repurpose expert archaeological knowledge in non-expert online platforms and communities. Lorna is currently working on a project centred on Stonehenge. This examines public perceptions of the site and it's importance to non-experts, using data drawn from online communities.

Lorna worked in the archaeological sector in a number of roles including field archaeologist and community archaeologist prior to her academic career. She has worked for a number of organisations including the Thames Discovery Programme, Wessex Archaeology, MOLA, L-P Archaeology and the Council for British Archaeology. Building on her background in community archaeology, she established the Waveney Valley Community Archaeology Group in Norfolk in 2013.