Lorna Richardson

Lorna-Jane Richardson is Lecturer in Digital Humanities and Heritage in the School of Art, Media & American Studies. Her research and teaching responsibilities are focused on both digital media and cultural heritage.

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 was 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 aimed 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 (2014), funded by the AHRC, from the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, titled 'Public Archaeology in a Digital Age'. She also has an MA in Public Archaeology and a BA in Medieval Archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology, UCL.

Prior to joining the UEA in 2018, 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.

Prior to returning to HE as a mature student and undertaking her PhD, Lorna worked in the archaeological sector in a number of roles. This included time as a field archaeologist and community archaeologist. 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. She is a Trustee of the Norfolk and Norwich Archaeology Society, and the Bungay Museum Trust, and is currently the Curator of Bungay Museum in the Waveney Valley.

Lorna's research focuses on the use of digital technologies to support, exclude and contain public discourse, encourage creativity, alternative ideas, lived experience, and the repurposing of expert knowledge in online communities. She has written extensively about public engagement and community participation in archaeology, especially with and through digital media.

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. You can access a comic about her research on Stonehenge here.

Lorna would welcome applications for postgraduate supervision on these aspects of digital media research, including archaeology, archives, museums, digital cultural heritage, or digital humanities more broadly.

Undergraduate Teaching:

Digital Media: Concepts, Technologies & Cultures

Digital Humanities: Theory & Practice

Digital Storytelling

Introduction to Archaeology 

Postgraduate Teaching:

Critical Perspectives in Museums & Heritage

Cultural Heritage & Archiving in a Digital Age 

Lorna's field of expertise is focused on issues of public engagement with archaeology and cultural heritage, especially through digital media.