Mark Bell

  • Position: Senior Digital Researcher
  • Specialism: Digital, Digital research
  • mark.bell@nationalarchives.gov.uk

Mark is a member of the Research Team at The National Archives. Mark started his career at The National Archives working on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Traces through Time project, researching methods for probabilistically linking biographical records. Following that he was a researcher on the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council-funded ARCHANGEL project, which was aimed at increasing the sustainability of digital archives through the development of distributed ledger technology (DLT).

His current research interests include: the application of machine learning in the archive, particularly in the UK Government Web Archive, the use of Handwritten Text Recognition for exploring digitised collections at scale, and the implications of machine learning including Explainable AI and representing uncertainty.

Select publications

M Bell, S Ranade, ‘Traces through time: a case-study of applying statistical methods to refine algorithms for linking biographical data’, In Serge ter Braake, Antske Fokkens, Ronald Sluijter, Thierry Declerck and Eveline Wandl-Vogt (Ed.), Proceedings of the First Conference on Biographical Data in a Digital World, pp. 24–32 (2015).

M Bell, S Ranade, ‘Digital Technologies for a Digital National Archive’. Archives and Record Association, 335, 29–30 (2017).

M Bell, A Brown, Tu Bui, J Collomosse, J Fawcett, A Green, J Sheridan, J Tennison, O Thereaux, ‘Using blockchain to engender trust in public digital archives’, Open Science Framework, 304.2, (2018).