Center for Digital Humanities

#NnediOkorafor @chikaokekeagulu.bsky.social

The Future of Storytelling in the Age of AI: Q&A with Nnedi Okorafor The Future of Storytelling in the Age of AI: Q&A with Nnedi Okorafor

The latest in our #HumanitiesForAI Q&A series: @nnedi.bsky.social joined us in April at @princeton.edu to discuss her new novel, Death of the Author, and the future of storytelling in the age of AI. Read some of her hopes, concerns, and insights on the impact of AI in writing and the humanities. ✨

Modeling Culture is generously funded by a @princetonainews.bsky.social seed grant, with additional support from the Humanities Council and the @princeton.edu Humanities Initiative. Thank you to @princetonenglish.bsky.social for co-sponsorship of the public talks.

How can AI and other computational approaches help us to understand the distant past? @jrladd.com will share work from two cultural analytics projects that address these challenges by combining analog research methods and machine learning to study the print culture of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Welcome back, CDH community! Welcome back, CDH community!

"This year's return to campus feels particularly consequential—it’s a moment when destabilizing shifts in higher education are intersecting with the dizzying pace of AI development," shares @mmvty.bsky.social. Read the full welcome back letter and more on our ongoing 'Humanities for AI' initiative.

Publishing Empire: Modeling Early 20th-Century British Book Culture Publishing Empire: Modeling Early 20th-Century British Book Culture

Nov 18: "Publishing Empire: Modeling Early 20th-Century British Book Culture" with Anna Preus, Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Washington. Info/RSVP:

Viral Authors: Postwar American Literature in the Age of Social Media and AI Viral Authors: Postwar American Literature in the Age of Social Media and AI

Nov 17: "Viral Authors: Postwar American Literature in the Age of Social Media and AI " with Melanie Walsh (@mellymeldubs.bsky.social), Assistant Professor in the Information School and Adjunct Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Washington. Info/RSVP:

Human and Machine Intelligence in Networks of Early Modern Print Human and Machine Intelligence in Networks of Early Modern Print

Sep 29: "Human and Machine Intelligence in Networks of Early Modern Print" with John Ladd (@jrladd.com), Assistant Professor in Computing and Information Studies at Washington & Jefferson College. Info/RSVP:

CDH Launches Modeling Culture: New Humanities Practices in the Age of AI CDH Launches Modeling Culture: New Humanities Practices in the Age of AI

Modeling Culture explores AI not only as a technology to critique, but as a new mode of inquiry for research and interpretation. Three interconnected components will unfold in 2025-26: a faculty and grad seminar, a public lecture series, and an open-access curriculum. Public talk details in thread👇

Welcome back, CDH community! Welcome back, CDH community!

"This year's return to campus feels particularly consequential—it’s a moment when destabilizing shifts in higher education are intersecting with the dizzying pace of AI development," shares @mmvty.bsky.social. Read the full welcome back letter and more on our ongoing 'Humanities for AI' initiative.

Connect with us online Connect with us online

September newsletter tomorrow! 🗞️ You can sign up for that here (where you can also find us elsewhere online).

Advancing Medieval Manuscript Transcription: Insights from the Vienna HTR Winter School Advancing Medieval Manuscript Transcription: Insights from the Vienna HTR Winter School

Here's our story on last year's program: cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/02...

Everything Project Management with Mary Naydan: A Workshop with the Academic Deans Everything Project Management with Mary Naydan: A Workshop with the Academic Deans

In July, CDH Project Manager @marynaydan.bsky.social held a Project Management 101 workshop for the academic deans of Princeton’s residential colleges, covering PM theory, methods, project charters, and best practices for effective meetings. Read more here: cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...

A second SCOOP workshop will be hosted by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, reconvening in Vienna in summer 2026.

This conference was organized by Helmut Reimitz, Christine Roughan, and Lucia Waldschuetz, along with Suzanne Akbari and Natalia Ermolaev.

Christine Roughan presents to a room of graduate students and scholars with laptops out on the table.

The conference also included a comprehensive three-day ATR/HTR Training Workshop designed to train graduate students and scholars with various experience levels and backgrounds in text recognition technology.

Christine Roughan speaks at a podium during the SCOOP conference.

The intensive think tank centered on the challenge of adapting existing technologies for diverse scripts, textual traditions, and manuscript structures, especially for understudied languages and materials. (Photo: @cmroughan.bsky.social presenting to the group)

Humanists and Technologists Join Forces to Advance Historical Text Recognition and Research Humanists and Technologists Join Forces to Advance Historical Text Recognition and Research

In June, an international network of humanists and technologists joined forces to advance historical text recognition and research at the Source Codes of the Past (SCOOP) conference at Princeton.

cdh.princeton.edu/blog/2025/08...

Paul Vierthaler appointed CDH associate faculty director Paul Vierthaler appointed CDH associate faculty director

Welcome, Paul Vierthaler (@vierth.bsky.social), assistant professor of Chinese literature and interdisciplinary data science, to the CDH as our associate faculty director! His expertise in East Asian DH will advance our recent emphasis on multilingual DH. We are lucky to have Paul among us!

HTR Winter School 2025 | Call for Applications! Handwritten Text Recognition of Historical Sources

The call for applications for the HTR Winter School in Vienna is live! CDH/MARBAS postdoc @cmroughan.bsky.social is one of the group organizers and instructors again this year. The application deadline is September 15th, 2025. www.oeaw.ac.at/en/imafo/eve...

Excelling in … Excel? Inside the high-stakes, secretive world of competitive spreadsheeting New documentary Spreadsheet Champions follows six competitors as they head to the Microsoft Office Specialist world championship in Florida

And, finally, competitive spreadsheeting! www.theguardian.com/film/2025/au...

Enough of the billionaires and their big tech. ‘Frugal tech’ will build us all a better world | Eleanor Drage Titans like Musk would love us to believe innovation means top-down solutions that only enrich the wealthy. In fact, we all have the power, says Eleanor Drage, research fellow at Cambridge University

Meredith also shared this one about frugal tech. "Tech bros may want you to believe there is no point in making something new unless it is difficult, inaccessible and exclusionary," writes author Eleanor Drage. "But technological innovation is about collaboration as much as it is about competition."

Gaps in what we know about ancient Romans could be filled by AI - BBC News A new system fills in missing words from ancient inscriptions carved on monuments and everyday objects.

Speaking of AI, @mmvty.bsky.social sent us to this BBC article about an AI system named Aeneas that can "fill in missing words from ancient Roman inscriptions carved on monuments and everyday objects, as well as dating and placing them geographically." Very cool! www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

"How Tech Companies Are Pushing Us to Use AI" (translated from French). One interesting observation: AI buttons and branding are often purple, a color often "associated to magic." limitesnumeriques.fr/travaux-prod...

Time Horizons of Futuristic Fiction – Post45 Data Collective This dataset contains metadata for 2.5k English-language narrative works set in the future, each marked with the year it was released and the year it takes place.

Congrats also to Grant and Teddy Leane (2024 CDH Senior Thesis Prize winner) on the recent publication of Time Horizons of Futuristic Fiction on Post45 Data Collective! data.post45.org/posts/futuri...

Bears Will Be Boys A data analysis of animal gender in children’s books

From our DH strategist Grant Wythoff: "Bears Will Be Boys: A Data Analysis of Animal Gender in Children's Books." Not to give too much away, but birds will be girls! @puddingviz.bsky.social ~ pudding.cool/2025/07/kids...

Newsletter Archive Newsletter Archive

One of our favorite parts of our monthly newsletter? *Links we're digging* shared by the CDH team in our Slack channel. Check the thread below for our August links 👇 And of course, subscribe for more next week!

Meet our new RSE, Hao Tan! Meet our new RSE, Hao Tan!

"I’m looking forward to being a bridge between disciplines, human interpretation and computational scale, and Princeton researchers and the wider DH community."

Join us in welcoming Hao Tan as our new RSE! Read more about her research interests and hopes for her role at Princeton.

Exciting news from our Lead RSE, @suttonkoeser.bsky.social!
This is the first 'Software Paper' published in the CHR journal, part of the series “Missing Data in the Humanities.” Check out the article below, and more on 'undate' here: cdh.princeton.edu/projects/und...

The Incompatibilities Between Generative AI and Art: Q&A with Ted Chiang The Incompatibilities Between Generative AI and Art: Q&A with Ted Chiang

"Writing an essay is hard because it forces you to use your brain in ways you haven't before, and that is precisely why it's useful."

For our August feature, we invited science fiction writer Ted Chiang to respond to a series of questions related to AI and its impact on humanities scholarship.

The @princetoncdh.bsky.social newsletter is always a treat (and you should subscribe if you dont) but having an exclusive interview with Ted Chiang sort of takes the cake!
mailchi.mp/princeton/au...