About

The Center for Digital Humanities (CDH) at Princeton is where the rich traditions of the humanities meet the evolving landscape of emerging technologies. Since our founding in 2014, we have cultivated a vibrant community where scholars at Princeton and beyond take risks, pursue new ideas, and collaborate in radically new ways to deepen our understanding of human culture and forge new pathways for our research, disciplines, and communities.

The CDH is driven by a commitment to interdisciplinary inquiry that brings together the humanities and data science as reciprocal partners. We believe that data-intensive, computational methods enrich our study of the human record. And we believe that core humanities principles — critical thinking, contextual understanding, creativity, close reading, and attention to the diversity of human perspectives, values and histories — must guide the development of more fair and inclusive technologies. Rather than pursue innovation for innovation’s sake, we encourage the use of data and computation to amplify silenced voices and to generate more diverse scholarly conversations, both in the humanities and across STEM fields.

The dozens of projects and programs we run each year empower researchers at all levels — from faculty and postdocs, to graduate and undergraduate students — to explore the potential and test the limits of the computational humanities. Our annual grants program offers collaborators the opportunity to work with one of the strongest Humanities Research Software Engineering teams in North America and benefit from our flagship Project Management program.

Beyond partnering and advising on projects, CDH staff dedicate Research & Development time to experimenting with cutting-edge methods and creating infrastructures for advanced research and teaching.

We are especially committed to training the next generation of scholars, and offer a variety of curricular and co-curricular opportunities to ensure that Princeton undergraduate and graduate students will be leaders across multiple career paths.

Throughout the year, we organize and co-sponsor talks, workshops, and outreach activities that enrich Princeton’s intellectual landscape through discussions and debates that build bridges across disciplines and perspectives.

Whether we are writing code, collaborating, or teaching, our work is characterized by rigor and deliberation, and by the value we place on process, workflow, and people over product.

The CDH is an independent research center housed in Princeton’s Firestone Library. We collaborate closely with various university units — including the Princeton University Library, the Humanities Council, Research Computing, the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning, the Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence (AI Lab), and the Data-Driven Social Science Initiative — to build the curricular, technical, and scholarly infrastructures that ensure the humanities remain central to Princeton's distinctive interdisciplinary approach to data and computational science.

Our collaborations with scholars and organizations beyond Princeton further enrich our work, bringing in diverse perspectives and expanding our impact.