About
My interests lie in the uses and users of heraldry across all countries and time periods. My current research focuses on early modern English pursuivant and heraldic writer John Guillim. Education
MLitt, Family and Local History, Dundee University (2017)
DPhil, Particle Physics, University of Oxford (2007)
MSc (Hons), Physics, University of Auckland (2003)
BA, Ancient Greek, BSc, Physics and Applied Maths, University of Auckland (2001) Mastodon Feed
In honour of the release of "The life of a showgirl" I've finally gotten around to adding "Unicode burlesque" to my website of DH songs – "What is #DigitalHumanities? The Album" – after only two years! (That's quick in academic time, right?) Thanks again to @quinnanya for the inspiration https://what-is-dh-the-album.netlify.app/singles/unicode-burlesque/ (2025-10-05 ↗)
Yesterday I was more than pleasantly surprised to discover that Renata Defelice has published a review of my side project "What is #DigitalHumanities? The Album" including translating one of my songs into Spanish! https://revistas.unlp.edu.ar/publicaahd/article/view/15070 (If anyone knows the reviewer, please tag them!) This project is one part fun (writing new lyrics for popular songs to describe elements of digital humanities), one part engaging with the preoccupation of the field in defining what constitutes Digital Humanities (via examples), and one part provocation (does this project count as DH? why or why not?) (2025-08-12 ↗)
It is such a rush to correctly deduce the location of a fully functioning *unadvertised* API when you need to get structured metadata out of a GLAM institution's catalogue! Today's success: [Library] catalogue uses the Primo platform from Ex Libris. But links in a national union catalogue show Alma instead. Ex Libris is everywhere, so surely it supports OAI-PMH? Docs say that Alma does, if it's enabled. Getting the base domain is easy enough by comparing the example URL to the catalogue, but what about the institution code? This all-caps string containing INST in the catalogue URLs looks plausible. No? How about without the :NEWUI suffix? Success! #DigitalHumanities #OAI (2025-06-30 ↗)
I am delighted to announce that my data paper "Locations of Markets in English Market Towns, 1813: Constructing a dataset" has just been published (open-access!) in @ZfdG This is a deep dive/behind the scenes look into the process and decisions that went into creating a GeoJSON data set of locations of markets, based on a list in a 19th century text. It's also very fitting that this is announced first on Mastodon since this platform played a significant role in bringing my work to the attention of the editors. The dataset itself is deposited with KCommons Works (@hello) and I've just used the editing feature to add the data paper as a related work with the "is documented by" relation. #PublicationDay #AcademicChat #MarketTowns #DigitalHumanities #KCommons https://doi.org/10.17175/2025_005 (2025-04-30 ↗)
I've just used Knowledge Commons Works to upload a new version of a dataset! Very nice to be able to include multiple files, and the range of file types supported has expanded compared to CORE. I still can't quite work out how to set a publisher though. @hello (2024-12-21 ↗)
Projects
- Transcription of a c1610 manuscript notebook by John Guillim, at the time Portsmouth pursuivant of arms. (Folger MS V.a.447).
Phase 1 (ongoing) is the production of a TEI-encoded transcription (current output at https://github.com/philipallfrey/guillim-folger-va447)
Phase 2 will be the production of a digital scholarly edition of this text, and an updated biography of Guillim.
- Creation of a digital map of English Market towns circa 1820 in GeoJSON format.
Phase 1 (complete) is the geolocation of all the market towns listed in a contemporary source.
Phase 2 (ongoing) is the reconciliation with identifiers in the Ordnance Survey OpenNames ontology.
This is a sub-project of the following.
- Case study of armorial bearings usage in England in 1821, based on assessed taxation returns in TNA series E182.
Phase 1 (ongoing) involves data entry for ~15,000 parishes.
Phase 2 will involve analysis and correlation with other sources
Memberships
Associate of the Académie Internationale d’Héraldique
Member of The Royal Society of New Zealand – Te Apārangi
Member of The Heraldry Society
