Professor Paul Millar

Programme Director

Professor Paul Millar coordinates the University of Canterbury's English, Cinema and Digital Humanities programmes. He researches and teaches in the areas of New Zealand Literature and Literary Biography, and has published extensively on the poetry of James K. Baxter. His most recent book is the co-authored study The Snake-Haired Muse: James K. Baxter and Classical Mythology (VUP, 2011), and his acclaimed literary biography No Fretful Sleeper: A Life of Bill Pearson (AUP, 2010) was a finalist in the New Zealand Post Book Awards. Millar has twice judged the New Zealand Book Awards, and in 2000 he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to teach and research at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Millar's long association with digital humanities projects dates back to 2001 when he co-founded the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre (www.nzetc.org).

Dr Christopher Thomson

Co-Director, UC Arts Digital Lab

Research Associate, UC Digital Humanities Programme

Since completing a Ph.D in English at the University of Canterbury in 2008 Chris has taught there regularly as a fixed-term lecturer and teaching assistant, and has also worked in the fields of audio transcription and e-Learning. As a Research Associate in Digital Humanities he is working closely with the Macmillan Brown Library on projects involving the digitisation of archival collections, and is a collaborator on a digital edition of a bibliography of Māori writing in English.  His interests include the use of XML-based tools for representing literary and historical texts, digital bibliographies, eLearning, and twentieth and twenty-first century fiction (particularly the English and Irish novel). For more see www.christopherthomson.co.nz.

Kaspar Middendorf

UC Arts Digital Lab Manager

Kaspar is the ADL’s Manager. They were part of the team that developed the CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive, and have contributed to a number of other major research projects, including QuakeBox Take 2, Understanding Place, and the Canterbury Roll digitisation project. Kaspar has qualifications in mathematics, linguistics and secondary teaching, and completed their MLING thesis in 2017, using statistical modeling to compare syntactic structures in the QuakeBox spoken language corpus with the written language of the Christchurch Press.