Mguel Vieira

Research Software Engineer + Digital Humanities

About

I am a Principal Research Software Engineer with over fifteen years of experience building research software in academic and cross-disciplinary settings. My work spans digital humanities and computational social science.

I have contributed to editions, archives, prosopographies, and computational projects across history, literature, classics, and film studies, at the intersection of engineering and humanistic inquiry. My technical work covers web applications, data pipelines, natural language processing, applied machine learning, multimodal AI, and retrieval-augmented generation.

I am also interested in open-source research tools, training researchers in computational methods, and leading small engineering teams on funded research projects with academic and industry partners. I currently work at the National University of Singapore (NUS), and previously at King’s Digital Lab, King’s College London.

Selected Work

  • Intelligent Systems for Screen Archives

    ISSA works with UK moving image archives to develop sector-wide understanding of AI technologies in film and television archives. Built prototypes using machine learning to discover, access, segment and semi-automatically describe digital video content.

  • STEP-UP: a Strategic TEchnical Platform for University technical Professionals

    EPSRC project to develop and support digital Research Technical Professionals and their ecosystem. It provides training, peer support, mentorship and career pathways to meet demands on institutional and national research digital infrastructures. Mentored Research Software Engineers.

  • A(I)steroids

    An Asteroids clone developed in Love2D that uses stock market data to generate asteroid characteristics. Asteroid size reflects trading volume, colour reflects price change, and rotation speed correlates with volatility, creating an interactive data visualisation of AI technology market dynamics.

  • Gemini Plugin for Claude Code

    A Claude Code plugin that integrates Gemini CLI capabilities into Claude Code sessions. Provides slash commands for code reviews, general queries, and a rescue subagent that can be invoked when stuck on difficult bugs or architectural decisions.

  • Inkido

    A web app that helps children practise Mandarin Chinese spelling tests. Parents photograph homework worksheets for OCR-based word extraction; children practise with flashcard spelling, stroke-by-stroke writing animations, and tone listening exercises. Includes a dictionary of approximately 145,000 words and 94,000 characters.

  • Klippy

    An enterprise search aggregator and RAG system for ClickUp and GitHub. Harvests tasks and documentation into a semantic index using LlamaIndex and Qdrant, with streaming responses, hybrid retrieval combining semantic similarity with metadata filtering, and synthesised answers with citations back to original sources.

  • AGE-C: Ageing and Gender in European Cinema

    Researches ageing and gender in European cinema and fosters public discourse through curated festival programmes. Developed an intuitive data exploration interface enabling faceted search and visualisation from spreadsheet sources.

  • CROSSREADS: Text, materiality, and multiculturalism at the crossroads of the ancient Mediterranean

    Develops and exploits I.Sicily, an online corpus of ancient Sicilian inscriptions, to study Sicilian epigraphic culture and history from the seventh century BCE to the Byzantine period. Built palaeographic and petrographic tools and redesigned the digital environment.

  • Georgian Papers Programme

    Ten-year interdisciplinary project to digitise, conserve, catalogue, transcribe, interpret and disseminate 425,000 pages from the Royal Archives and Royal Library relating to the Georgian period. Developing a Collaborative Workspace for researchers.

  • King's Past

    Produces a critical, reflexive history of King's College London focusing on thirteen 'moments of making' over two centuries. Built a website on a foundational data model to expose linkages between entities and content.

  • iREAL: Inclusive Requirements Elicitation for AI in Libraries to support respectful management of Indigenous knowledges

    Develops a model for responsible AI systems assessment and development in libraries that embeds Indigenous rights and perspectives. Created a web-based dashboard for workshop participants to explore data and apply machine learning models.

  • Living with Machines

    Multidisciplinary collaboration investigating how machines changed the lives of ordinary people in nineteenth-century Britain. Produced reproducible notebooks for crowdsourcing visualisations, newspaper analysis and language change.

  • KDL Components

    A collection of reusable Nunjucks-based UI components for KDL web projects. Provides templates, filters, and base layouts for 11ty-based static sites, installable as an npm package.

  • Radical Translations: The Transfer of Revolutionary Culture between Britain, France and Italy

    Studies the translation and circulation of democratic and free-thinking texts across Italy, France and Britain during the French Revolution and Napoleonic era. Developed an online database with national timelines showing co-occurrences of events and translations.

  • Digital Humanities Laboratory: Studying the Entanglement of Infrastructure and Technology in Knowledge Production

    Marie Skłodowska-Curie project by Dr Urszula Pawlicka-Deger providing critical analysis of digital humanities laboratory practices and infrastructural influences on knowledge production, using the lab as a case study.

  • African Rock Art

    Partnership between the British Museum and TARA, funded by Arcadia Fund, to curate around 23,000 images and provide context to the diversity of rock art forms across Africa for global open access.

  • Ego Media: Life Writing and Online Affordances

    A collaboratively written digital publication exploring how self-presentation has been affected by digital media. Developed the Django-based publication website for Stanford University Press Digital.

  • Farm-level Interdisciplinary Approaches to Endemic Livestock Disease

    Four-year interdisciplinary Wellcome Trust project researching how livestock disease is influenced by nature, culture, science, society and human and animal actions. Created interactive data exploration notebooks to evaluate survey results.

  • REF 2021 impact data analysis

    Project to support analysis of REF 2021 impact case studies and environment statements using NLP and machine learning, presented through a Streamlit dashboard.

  • Digital Methods for Investigating Online Engagement with Coronavirus

    Develops digital methods to analyse the role of digital cultures, platforms, infrastructures and devices in public responses to the Coronavirus pandemic. Installed and maintained a DMI-TCAT server to collect and analyse Twitter data.

  • Django KDL Wagtail

    A collection of reusable Wagtail components for Django projects, including core page types (RichTextPage, StreamPage, IndexPage), a people module with person pages and indexes, Zotero bibliography integration, custom footer and analytics settings, a proxy page for menu shortcuts, and a public API based on Wagtail's API framework.

  • Django Geonames Place

    A Django application to access and store GeoNames places. Supports creating places by Geonames ID or search address, with integration into Django models via foreign keys. Built on the Python Geocoder library.

  • Django Script Codes

    A Django application providing access to the ISO 15924 script codes standard. Allows referencing script codes in Django models via foreign keys.

  • Shakespeare Holdings in the Royal Collection

    Assesses Shakespeare-related holdings in the Royal Collection and Royal Archives to understand the relationship between the cultural afterlife of Shakespeare's works and the royal family from 1714 to the present. Built a customised backend and frontend for object records.

  • SLA Attribution and Cookie Policy

    A set of scripts and styles to inject an attribution and cookie policy footer into legacy sites maintained under KDL's service level agreement. Provided as a hosted script that can be added with a single script tag, with a helper shell script for batch insertion into static or XML files.

  • Mapping Digital Cultural Heritage in Jordan

    AHRC/Newton funded project to support long-term sustainable development of Jordan's digital cultural heritage. Developed a prototype National Data Catalogue using CKAN.

  • Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition

    Edition of six nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers containing over 400,000 articles. The original AHRC-funded collaboration ran from 2005 to 2008; later replaced the facsimile viewer and explored sustainability through archiving.

  • The Values of French Language and Literature in the European Middle Ages

    Researches the role of French as a supralocal, transnational language, 1100-1450, through a digital edition of the Histoire ancienne jusqu'à César. Created alignment interfaces and a lemmatisation workflow with DEAF colleagues.

  • Ancient Itineraries

    Getty-funded research project exploring digital approaches to ancient travel and itineraries. Developed a prototype visualising the life cycles and journeys of artworks.

  • Inscriptions of Roman Cyrenaica

    Publishes transcriptions of Roman Cyrenaica (modern Libya) inscriptions made by Joyce Reynolds, converted to EpiDoc markup and enhanced with geographical data and photographs. The project began in 2008 and was migrated in 2015.

  • CKAN Extension for Madih

    A CKAN extension for the Madih project, providing custom metadata schemas based on KDL's metadata standards. Designed for cultural heritage data cataloguing within CKAN-based data portals.

  • État Civil: French expatriates in Ottoman Egypt

    Exploratory project processing data from the Egyptian consulate's civil registration to visualise mobility and migration patterns of French expatriates in Egypt (1792-1882). Built a Django proof of concept with map visualisations.

  • The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Britain

    First comprehensive treatment of historical pageantry in Britain from 1905 to the present. The online resource centres on a database of research data, recorded interviews and pageant-related images.

  • Django KDL LDAP

    A Django application providing LDAP authentication for KDL projects. Uses django-auth-ldap with fallback to standard Django authentication, allowing both LDAP and local Django accounts. Includes signal handlers for user management.

  • CKAN KDL Metadata Schema

    A CKAN metadata schema extension used by King's Digital Lab for data cataloguing on their CKAN-based data portal. Provides custom metadata fields and schemas for research data management.

  • Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland

    A Django project for the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland, providing a web platform for cataloguing and browsing medieval sculpture records.

  • Data Portal Explorer

    Explores public datafication and data worlds through digital methods for studying data portals. Built a Python library and command line tool to harvest data from CKAN repositories.

  • Narrative Atoms and Open Scholarship Experiences

    Prototypes tools for exposing multimedia digital assets with narrative metadata to enable creative, accessible, multi-modal expressions of data linked to future publications.

  • Taming the Complexity of the Law

    King's Together project exploring the complexity of legal systems through user interface design, network analysis, legal expertise, geography and informatics. Optimised a workflow to visualise amendments and citations in the Housing Act 1980.

  • Twitter Analytics Platform

    A Twitter Analytics Platform for harvesting and analysing tweets. Built with Django and PostgreSQL, with tweets stored in MongoDB. Uses APScheduler for scheduled harvesting, TextBlob and NLTK for NLP and sentiment analysis, and a Vue.js frontend with chart.js and word cloud visualisations.

  • Omeka S Resource History

    An Omeka S module providing resource history tracking functionality for digital collections.

  • DDH Django Utils

    A collection of Django utilities for DDH projects, including pagination helpers, Haystack search views with improved pagination and faceting, and template tags for adding and removing facet URL parameters.

  • A Publishing and Communication History of the Ministry of Information, 1939-45

    Project studying the publishing and communication history of the Ministry of Information during the Second World War. Built a digital resource to explore the Ministry's publications and communication strategies.

  • Digital Prosopography of the Roman Republic

    Facilitates prosopographical research into the elite of the Roman Republic through a comprehensive, searchable database of members of upper-strata Roman society, including careers, offices, status, life dates and family relationships.

  • Ancient Inscriptions of the Northern Black Sea

    Third, first-online edition of Ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions from the Northern Black Sea coast, built with the Kiln framework. The website offers scholarly detail, indices and Greek text search in English and Russian.

  • German Screen Studies Network

    Hub for knowledge and discussion about German-language film, supporting outreach, schools liaison and recruitment. Built a clean, minimalist website to convey the project rationale and arthouse heritage.

  • Shakespeare400

    Consortium of London cultural, creative and educational institutions celebrating 400 years of Shakespeare with a 2016 season of theatre, music, opera, dance, ballet and exhibitions. Hosts the archive website.

  • Prosopography of the Byzantine World

    Prosopographical database of the Byzantine World. Developed and maintain a Django-based digital resource enabling research into persons and relationships in the Byzantine Empire.

  • Mapping the Medieval Countryside: The Fifteenth-Century Inquisitions Post Mortem

    Major research project creating a digital edition of the medieval English inquisitions post mortem from c. 1236 to 1509.

  • Bacalhau

    A Python tool for automatic topic hierarchy generation using WordNet. Developed at the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London.

  • Kiln

    An open-source multi-platform framework for building and deploying complex websites whose source content is primarily in XML. Brings together independent software components into an integrated whole, with support for TEI P5 and other XML vocabularies. Used to generate more than 50 websites.

  • Henry III Fine Rolls

    AHRC-funded project making Henry III's fine rolls available online in summarised and translated form with indexes of people, places and subjects and high-resolution images of the originals.

  • The AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music

    AHRC research centre studying the history and analysis of recorded music. Developed digital tools and resources to support research into recorded musical performances.

  • Language of Landscape

    Database of Anglo-Saxon estate boundaries recorded in Old English and Latin charters from the seventh to eleventh centuries, with metadata filtering, glossed headwords and full texts in both original and modern editions.

Research Outputs

  • Critical Studies of Tech Stacks: What Can Technologies Tell Us About a Lab Culture? chapter

    · Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities, University of Minnesota Press, 122-139

    Pawlicka-Deger, U., Ciula, A., Vieira, M.

  • Crossreads: Text, materiality and multiculturalism at the crossroads of the ancient Mediterranean website

    Prag, J., Antoniou, A., Coccato, A., Crellin, R., Fendel, V., Fogagnolo, M., Gradante, I., Metcalfe, M., Mignosa, V., Prado, F., Santini, F., Stoyanova, S., Tosques, A., Ciula, A., Jakeman, N., Heuser, R., Lu, Z., Noel, G., Ong, T., Vieira, M.

  • Unlocking the Archive: Local-First Semantic Segmentation for Broadcast Video Heritage conference

    · Digital Humanities 2026, Daejeon

    Vieira, M., Ong, T., Chávez Heras, D., Caton, P., Ciula, A., Noël, G.

  • Analysing the language of mechanisation in nineteenth-century British newspapers chapter

    · Living with Machines: Computational Histories of the Age of Industry, University of London Press

    McGillivray, B., Pedrazzini, N., Ciula, A., Lawrence, J., Ong, T., Ridge, M., Vieira, M.

  • Preserving Access to Three Decades of Digital Humanities Research: Infrastructure Modernisation as Sustainability Practice conference

    · Digital Humanities 2025, Lisbon

    Vieira, M., Ciula, A., Hall, E., Mellen, P., Noël, G., Watts, T.

  • Prototyping a RAG System for Digital Humanities: Ethical Considerations in AI Processing of Indigenous Data conference

    · Digital Humanities 2025, Lisbon

    Vieira, M., Callaghan, S., Ciula, A., Lu, Z., Ong, T.

  • Language of Mechanisation Crowdsourcing Datasets from the Living with Machines Project article

    · Journal of Open Humanities Data, 10

    Ridge, M., Pedrazzini, N., Vieira, M., Ciula, A., McGillivray, B.

  • Radical translators (Britain, France and Italy, 1789-1815) through the lens of a network visualisation conference

    · Historical Network Research 2024, Lausanne

    Vieira, M., Ciula, A., Mucignat, R., Perovic, S.

  • Ego Media: Life Writing and Online Affordances website

    Saunders, M., Ciula, A., Vieira, M., Ferraro, G., Gee, L.

  • FIELD: Farm-level Interdisciplinary Approaches to Endemic Livestock Disease website

    Woods, A., Hall, E., Ferraro, G., Jakeman, N., Noel, G., Vieira, M., Ong, T.

  • The place of models and modelling in Digital Humanities: some reflections from a Research Software Engineering perspective chapter

    · Vielfalt und Integration - diversitá ed integrazione - diversité et intégration: Sprache(n) in sozialen und digitalen Räumen Eine Festschrift für Elisabeth Burr, Universitätsbibliothek, Leipzig, Germany, 261-281

    Ciula, A., Noel, G., Caton, P., Ferraro, G., Ong, T., Smithies, J., Vieira, M.

  • Research Excellence Framework 2021 Impact Data Analysis conference

    · RSECon 2022, Newcastle

    Vieira, M., Ciula, A., Noël, G., Ong, T.

  • Shakespeare Holdings in the Royal Collection - Repository dataset

    Caton, P., Barnden, S., Tambling, K., Hall, E., Vieira, M., Ong, T., Loboda, O.

  • Small Data and Process in Data Visualization: The Radical Translations Case Study conference

    · Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE 6th Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities (VIS4DH), 1–6

    Ciula, A., Vieira, M., Ferraro, G., Ong, T., Perovic, S., Mucignat, R., Valmori, N., Deseure, B., Mannucci, E. J.

  • The Dynamic Edition of the Declaration of Arbroath website

    Broun, D., Taylor, A., Ferraro, G., Noel, G., Caton, P., Vieira, M., Tucker, J., Davies, J. R.

  • The place of models and modelling in Digital Humanities: Intersections with a Research Software Engineering perspective conference

    · Digital Humanities 2020, Ottawa

    Ciula, A., Caton, P., Ferraro, G., Maher, B., Noël, G., Vieira, M.

  • Mechanizing the Humanities? King's Digital Lab as Critical Experiment conference

    · Digital Humanities 2017, Montréal

    Caton, P., Ferraro, G., Figueira, L., Hall, E., Jakeman, N., Mellen, P., Sichani, A.-M., Smithies, J., Vieira, M., Watts, T., Westling, C.

  • Modelling a Prosopography for the Roman Republic conference

    · Digital Humanities 2017, Montréal

    Figueira, L., Vieira, M.

  • The Kiln XML Publishing Framework conference

    · Balisage Series on Markup Technologies, vol. 18

    Caton, P., Vieira, M.

  • Kiln: XML Publishing Framework conference

    · Digital Humanities 2014, Lausanne

    Vieira, M., Norrish, J.

  • The Cambridge edition of the works of Ben Jonson [CEWBJ] website

    Vieira, M., Vetch, P., Caton, P., Gooch, P.

  • The DigiPal Framework software

    Noel, G., Buomprisco, G., Stokes, P., Vieira, M., Galdieri, R.

  • The production and reading of music sources, 1480-1530 [PRoMS] website

    Vetch, P., Vieira, M., Lavygina, A.

  • Automatic Topic Hierarchy Generation Using WordNet conference

    · Digital Humanities

    Vieira, M., Brey, G. A.

  • Bacalhau software

    Vieira, M., Norrish, J.

  • Complex Entity Management Through EATS: The Case of the Gascon Rolls Project conference

    · Digital Humanities 2012, 483-485

    Vieira, M., Litta Modignani Picozzi, E., Norrish, J.

  • Image annotation library software

    Vieira, M.

  • Kiln software

    Vieira, M., Norrish, J.

  • Automatic Generation of Topic Hierarchies Using WordNet conference

    · Osaka Symposium on Digital Humanities, University of Osaka

    Vieira, M., Brey, G. A.

  • Gascon Rolls (1317-1468) website

    Spence, P., Vieira, M., Litta Modignani Picozzi, E.

  • Statistical text-mining on English Woman's Journal conference

    · Digital Humanities 2011, Osaka

    Tabata, T., Short, H., Brey, G., Miyake, M., Kobayashi, Y., Vieira, M., Romanello, M.

  • Tablet Apps or the Future of Digital Scholarly Editions conference

    · The Future Perfect of the Book, University of London

    Vieira, M., Pierazzo, E.

  • xMod conference

    · Tools for Digital Scholarly Editions – Building the Community of Digital Humanities Software Developers, University of Cologne

    Vieira, M.

  • Digital Resource and Database of Palaeography, Manuscripts and Diplomatic [DigiPal] website

    Stokes, P., Brookes, S., Noel, G., Buomprisco, G., Watson, M. A., Marques De Matos, D., Hugel, S., Vieira, M., Caton, P.

  • Calendar of the Fine Rolls of the Reign of Henry III (1216-1248) book

    · Boydell & Brewer

    Dryburgh, P., Hartland, B., Ciula, A., Vieira, M.

  • Complementing and extending TEI documents with an ontology: Henry III Fine Rolls project case study conference

    · 2008 TEI Members Meeting, King's College London

    Vieira, M., Ciula, A., Spence, P.

  • Ereuna Search Framework conference

    · 2008 TEI Annual Members Meeting, King's College London

    Vieira, M.

  • Expressing complex associations in medieval historical documents: The Henry III Fine Rolls Project article

    · Literary and Linguistic Computing: the journal of digital scholarship in the humanities, 23(3), 311-325

    Ciula, A., Spence, P., Vieira, M.

  • Calendar of the Fine Rolls of the Reign of Henry III [1216-1248] -Print publication book

    · Boydell & Brewer Ltd

    Dryburgh, P., Hartland, B., Ciula, A., Vieira, M.

  • Implementing an RDF/OWL Ontology on Henry the III Fine Rolls conference

    · OWL: Experiences and Directions Third International Workshop

    Vieira, M., Ciula, A.

  • Hofmeister XIX dataset

    Vieira, M.

  • LEADERS software

    Vieira, M.