Adéla Sobotkova

Adela is Associate Professor of Digital History and Archaeology at the Department of History and Classical Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark, where she co-directs the Center for Digital History Aarhus (CEDHAR). She is the PI of MELICA (Modelling Everyday Life in Cold-War Aarhus), examining the implementation and equity of civil defense infrastructure in Denmark, and co-director of FAIMS, an open-source mobile data capture platform serving over 200 international users across disciplines.

Adela received her PhD in Interdepartmental Classical Art and Archaeology from the University of Michigan in 2012 and has held research positions at Macquarie University, Australia, and UNSW Australia.

Adela's research combines historical and archaeological domain expertise with computational methods to address large-scale questions in ancient and modern history. Her work spans from the assessment of civil-defence amenities in Aarhus, Denmark, to the evolution of settlement patterns, onset of agriculture, and genetic variety in SE Balkans, the automated classification of 500,000 Latin inscriptions to study Roman mobility, urbanization and economic specialization, and the detection of archaeological sites in satellite imagery as well as the creation of geospatial datasets from Soviet military maps to analyze mortuary patterns in Southeast Europe. Throughout her career, she has secured over DKK 10.8 million in competitive research funding, including grants from the AUFF, Augustinus Fonden, Australian Research Council, the Australian Research Data Consortium, or AmericaForBulgaria Foundation. Her publications appear in PLOS ONE, Applied Geography, Journal of Digital History, International Journal of Historical Archaeology, and Nature, among others, with work that critically evaluates the promises and limitations of machine learning for historical research.

As a leader in digital pedagogy and infrastructure development, Adela has designed and teaches the core digital curriculum at Aarhus University's Faculty of Arts, including Introduction to Cultural Data Science, Spatial Analytics, and Digital Archives and Methods, and serves as a certified Software Carpentry instructor. She has co-organized the Aarhus University Nordic Digital Humanities summer school and the Digital Archives stream at Oxford's Digital Humanities Summer School. She is an advocate of reproducible workflows and deep digital practice, and a proponent of the mainstreaming of computational literacy and AI-competence among all Arts students.