Gethin Rees

Gethin Rees is a Lecturer in Digital Products and Industries at King’s College London’s Department of Digital Humanities, Faculty of Arts & Humanities. He previously served as Lead Curator for Digital Maps at the British Library, overseeing legal deposit geospatial data and managing the Georeferencer crowd-sourcing project. He was Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Locating a National Collection project, fostering collaboration between heritage organizations and GLAMs through geographical methods. His PhD from the University of Cambridge, titled ‘Buddhism and Donation: Rock-cut Buddhist monasteries of the Western Ghats’, combined archaeology with GIS.

Education:

• PhD in South Asian Archaeology, University of Cambridge (2010-2013)

His research focuses on heritage, geography, and software development, particularly how audiences engage with digital cartography and visualizations. He explores spatial humanities, GLAM sector integration, and South Asian digital heritage applications. Rees also investigates user-centric software development, leveraging focus groups to bridge accessibility gaps in cultural collections.

Publications Trends: Recent work emphasizes digital map archiving strategies (Legal Deposit Libraries of the UK/Ireland), GLAMs collaboration via web maps, and interdisciplinary projects like Mapping the Jewish Communities in the Byzantine era. His earlier studies applied GIS to Buddhist monastic distributions in India, blending archaeology with computational methods.

Rees serves as Secretary of the Pelagios network, driving standardization of geographical tools in cultural heritage. He co-coordinates the network’s visualization initiatives and contributes to the Computational Humanities Research Group and Research Centre for Data Futures. His work has been adopted by institutions such as the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the Fitzwilliam Museum.

Advising & Grants: Supervises PhD students in geography, heritage web-mapping, and South Asian digital applications. Led AHRC-funded Locating a National Collection and participated in ERC projects Beyond Boundaries and Mapping the Jewish Communities. Teaches courses integrating publishing, software development, and Internet culture with digital humanities practices.