The BT Group Archives (BTGA) and University College London (UCL) are pleased to announce the availability of a fully funded doctoral studentship from 1st October 2026 under the AHRC’s Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships (CDP) scheme. The student will critically investigate, develop and make use of new research methods, based on advances in machine learning and knowledge organisation, for exploring the significant moving image collection at BT Group Archives. This project will be jointly supervised by James Elder and Elspeth Millar (BTGA), and Professor Andrew Flinn and Dr Daniel Wilson, in the Department of Information Studies (DIS) at UCL. The student will be expected to spend time at both BT Group and UCL, as well as becoming part of the wider cohort of CDP-funded students across the UK.
Project Overview
BT Group Archives is engaged in a decade-long effort to digitise eighty years of moving image material held on vulnerable film and videotape formats. ‘Lossless’ digital copies are being created, linked to metadata, and made available. This throws up timely questions in relation to knowledge organisation and access that this PhD project will address in theory and practice.
The collection begins in the 1930s with the work of the GPO Film Unit (part of the UNESCO Memory of the World register) and continues without interruption to the present. The overriding theme of the collection is the transformation of communications and the creation of an ‘Information Society’, as recorded in the archive of this unique organisation, whose development charts key changes in twentieth-century British history. As the Post Office and then British Telecom, this changed from being a Government Department to a nationalised industry and then a private company. The archive therefore records the activities of a very significant organisation: employer of thousands, providing communications services to millions of customers.
Despite the collection being an important historical source, it would be prohibitively labour-intensive to make it available to potential users by cataloguing and organising it manually. Recent developments in audio recognition and computer vision, could potentially help create new catalogue metadata automatically, which could be structured and linked in flexible ways. The student will explore and develop the potential of these new methods, and themselves conduct a substantive piece of research showcasing new insights into the collection and new forms of enquiry more generally.
Outcomes of the doctoral project could include: comprehensive new metadata for the moving image collection; publishable code and documentation and a substantive research paper. The student may also develop workshops and teaching material to widen engagement with this new material, as well as a proof-of-concept – practical and theoretical – for the creation of re-usable methods for BTGA as well as other archives facing similar challenges. Such methods should aim to aid discoverability while addressing the complex challenges facing the uses of ‘AI’ in the sector as a whole. The written component of the thesis will be adjusted to reflect these other forms of output.
Moving the Frame: New Computational Practices for the Description and Organisation of the BT Film Collection
AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) Studentship
Closes: 24 April 2026
Details: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/arts-humanities/news/ahrc-collaborative-doctoral-partnership-cdp-studentship-0
