About

The Center for Digital Humanities is a vital academic unit at Princeton—a cornerstone of interdisciplinarity, where computation, data science, and the humanities converge. Over the past decade, the CDH has established itself as a leader in innovation, shaping the field of digital humanities (DH) on campus, nationally, and internationally. We are guided by the principle that the humanities and technology must evolve together to create a more just future. Without critical thinking, close reading, and contextual understanding, the costs of today’s rapidly advancing technologies could soon outweigh the benefits.

The CDH equips humanists to intervene in a world increasingly dominated by tech. Although our name references the longstanding field of “digital humanities,” the acronym “CDH” more accurately stands for what we do: “Computational and Data Humanities.” In a society increasingly shaped by massive datasets and opaque, “black box” algorithms, we advocate for critical perspectives on data and computation. We empower Princeton scholars to engage with emerging technologies in a responsible, balanced, and historically informed way. Our goal is not to instrumentalize the humanities or reduce the complexity of human culture to numerical form. Quite the opposite: we reveal how any technological approach is always, inherently, human. Together, our research team, faculty, and student collaborators develop technologies that meaningfully reflect the nuances of humanities research and the richness of human culture.

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), the Humanities Initiative, 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.