CASCADE

10 August 202610 August 2026

From Texts to Robots: My Nimbus Secondment Story

One of the real pleasures of being an Early-Stage Researcher within CASCADE is the way secondments are designed to push you somewhere you might never have gone on your own. From April to July 2026, mine took me to the Nimbus Research Centre at Munster Technological University, where I spent three months working alongside researchers in robotics, Human–Robot Interaction, conversational AI, agentic systems and trustworthy AI. My PhD at University College Cork normally keeps me firmly in the world of texts and language. When I started with CASCADE, I did not imagine that any part of it would involve standing beside a robotic arm, watching it decide what somebody had meant.

Robotic Glossolalia

My starting point at Nimbus was the inTRUSTED project, a TU RISE initiative concerned with a deceptively difficult question: what does it take for people to trust the technologies they increasingly have to live and work with? Its approach is deliberately broader than technical security alone. Drawing on the idea of a Living Lab, inTRUSTED brings technological development into real-world, interdisciplinary settings where researchers, users and other stakeholders can participate in shaping how systems are designed, evaluated and ultimately trusted.

4 August 20264 August 2026

Summer Learnings at the ICEHL-23 in Milan

ESR Maria Flores Alejo during her panel presentation at ICEHL-23

The ICEHL or the International Conference of English Historical Linguistics is a biannual conference started in Durham in 1979. Its second most recent installment was hosted by the University of Sheffield in 2023. ICEHL has evolved from a regional meeting to a leading international forum dedicated to the study of the history and development of the English language, attracting researchers worldwide. Specifically, the 23rd ICEHL’s 4-day programme was jam-packed with over 140 presentations and 3 plenary talks by scholars across Europe, America, and Asia.

This 23rd edition of the conference was hosted by Universitá degli Studi de Milano in a building known as the Ca’ Granda. This large venue has played a prominent role in the history of the city that dates back to the 15th century. Its main purpose was to serve as a hospital and community center, hence the name which can be translated to ‘Big House’. This was certainly a fitting place to come together, as Milan offered us a very warm welcome that was both literal and figurative. However, the heat was no impediment for the attendees to participate in the stacked program which offered over one hundred parallel sessions and some intriguing plenary talks, with just enough time between them to catch-up with others while sipping espressos in the courtyard.

25 May 20264 August 2026

Chasing the Hansard “Spirit”: My Glasgow Secondment Story

Beaming with excitement: The secondment started with a campus tour, led by Michael Pidd, the Director of the Digital Humanities Institute (University of Sheffield)

One of the greatest perks of being an Early Stage Researcher (ESR) within CASCADE is the uniquely designed secondments at renowned institutions. For my PhD project, The ‘Spirit’ in the Chamber: Capturing Zeitgeist in UK parliamentary debates, I had an invaluable opportunity to engage in an intensive 11-week secondment at the University of Glasgow from 30 October 2025, together with my fellow Sheffield ESR, Maria. I enthusiastically dived deep into the quirky yet fascinating history of parliamentary reporting, stories of data mining throughout the years, and hopeful prospects of yet another captivating research story of the UK parliamentary discourse.

31 March 202631 March 2026

Major Developments in Morocco – An ESR tale from EACL by Bách Phan-Tất

Main conference room at EACL 2026 in Rabat, Morocco

Travelling to the Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) in Rabat, Morocco was one of the highlights of my PhD so far. It was my very first paper presentation at my very first big conference, so naturally I arrived with equal amounts of excitement, nerves, and the vague feeling that I should try very hard not to look too obviously starstruck.

24 February 202624 February 2026

Learning the Ropes in Leuven – ESR Maria Flores Alejo reflects on the first CASCADE convention.

On the 28th and 29th of January the CASCADE Network came together once again for what would be our 4th official reunion and first convention, this time the venue was the charming town of Leuven, Belgium. Unfortunately, since we arrived the evening before the start of the convention after a full day of travel from Sheffield, our wanderlust would have to wait.

One and a half years in, the network seems to have developed a tacit routine during these meet-ups with some of us choosing to use breakfast time to socialize and talk about the upcoming activities while others prefer to catch-up on sleep. However, this time, the interactions had an underlying nervousness as ESRs prepared to present their research projects to both peers and supervisors.

Presenting my research project to the CASCADE team in Leuven

21 January 20264 August 2026

A November of AI: From Finnish to Nordic Networking by CASCADE ESR Yu Wu

Last November was a busy month for me. I had the chance to attend two major events back-to-back: the FCAI AI Day in Espoo and the Nordic AI Meet (NAIM) in Sweden. I gave the same talk at both events: “Detecting Latin in Historical Books with Large Language Models.” This represents the core of my PhD work during my first year. I also presented a poster at NAIM.

4 September 20254 August 2026

ESR Ángela Gómez speaks on CASCADE’s third reunion in Helsinki

It was Tuesday, August 19^th,2025, and we were travelling to the third CASCADE MSCA Doctoral Network training camp. This time around, it was taking us to Helsinki, and the trip to the airport reminded me of how far we would be going this time (until now, the KU Leuven team had travelled by train for every meeting). What would we learn? What sights would we see? What connections would we strengthen?

Camp Day One: Wednesday, August 20^th

*Training camp opening session, led by Helsinki’s Mikko Tolonen.* Photo by Emer Yip

As everyone slowly started coming down from their hotel rooms, ready for breakfast and our first day of training sessions, I started seeing familiar faces. Over breakfast with a few of my fellow ESRs, we excitedly discussed travel mishaps, current and past projects, and our expectations for the days to come. After eating, we all met in the hotel lobby (ESRs and supervisors alike) for what has now become a tradition: walking together to where the camp would take place. On this occasion, it would be the main building of the University of Helsinki.

11 August 202513 August 2025

From Cork to Lisbon: My #DH2025 Conference Experience by Rasika Edirisinghe

Stepping Into a New Kind of Energy

There’s a special kind of buzz that comes with a big international conference, the hum of conversations in a dozen different accents, the shuffle of people moving between sessions, and the lively exchanges over coffee in crowded corners. Until this year, I’d never experienced it. I found it for the first time in Lisbon, at the Digital Humanities 2025 conference.

This was no ordinary trip for me. It was my first in-person international conference and my first time presenting at one. On Thursday, July 17, I’d be co-presenting a long paper with my colleague Rachel McCarthy: Rewriting Tradition: Quantifying Change in Lady Gregory’s Irish Legends.

The Journey to Lisbon

I set off from Cork on Sunday, July 13, catching an early flight through Amsterdam’s bustling Schiphol Airport. By mid-afternoon, Lisbon was unfolding beneath me, golden in the summer light. The city met me with two kinds of warmth, the sunshine, of course, but also the easy friendliness in the way people smiled and greeted me. The Mercure Lisboa Hotel became my base for the week, a comfortable spot to return to after the conference bustle.

14 July 202514 July 2025

Notes from DARIAH by Rachel McCarthy

Earlier this June, I had the pleasure of attending the 2025 DARIAH Annual Event in the historic city of Göttingen, Germany. Set in the impressive Göttingen State and University Library (SUB) and Alte Mensa, the conference brought together a vibrant community from the fields of digital humanities, cultural heritage, and data science under the unifying theme: “The Past”. Spanning four dynamic days, the event provided an inspiring forum for exploring how the digital humanities are reshaping our relationship with historical knowledge – from immersive archives and machine learning to educational games and inclusive metadata.

Of course, the primary debate focused on the place and role of artificial intelligence in digital humanities today. Dr Andrea Scharnhorst’s presentation, “Archiving for the Future Past – Multimodality and AI – Challenges and Opportunities”, explored how to enhance digital archival infrastructures with AI-driven solutions. Drawing on open-source infrastructures like the Dataverse project, the team demonstrated how innovative tools like Ghostwriter AI can support more inclusive annotation, metadata enrichment, and access across sensory modalities. Beyond the technical dimension, the presentation emphasized the importance of collaborative knowledge organization and the need to support smaller or vulnerable data communities, ensuring that the diversity of cultural expression is not lost to time – or technology. As Dr Scharnhorst explained, while AI will most certainly change human behaviour, it does not have to erode our humanity.

18 June 20257 August 2025

Anastasiia Vestel at NAACL 2025

About two months ago, I had the privilege to attend the 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), which took place in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on April 29–May 4. This was my third big international in-person conference and second ACL experience, as I previously went to EAMT 2023 (the 24th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation) and EACL 2024 (the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics) during my Master’s studies. But it was the first time I would present a paper at such an event, making NAACL 2025 a crucial step in my academic career.

What made it even more meaningful was the fact that my paper was accepted at the 9th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL 2025), co-located with NAACL. Last year, when I attended EACL in Malta, I felt somewhat overwhelmed at the beginning of the conference. As someone coming from a translation background and only starting to learn programming, I found most of the talks too technical and difficult to understand. At the LaTeCH Workshop, however, which took place on the last day of EACL, I felt much more in my element: the topics discussed there focused on the humanities rather than the computational aspect, which aligned closer with my interests. Little did I know that the workshop organizer, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, would later become my supervisor during my PhD.