Welcome to the new academic year!

Welcome to the new academic year! I write to you from this, my 20th year (!!!) at Princeton and my 12th (!!!!) at the helm of the Center for Digital Humanities. Thank you for your ongoing support of our unique interdisciplinary community. It’s been fantastic to have Associate Director Paul Verthaler join me this past year as we continue our mission of centering the humanities in conversations about the technologies that are transforming our research, culture, and society.

As always, we remain at the cutting edge of developments in AI, while continuing to foster thoughtful, timely, and urgent discussions about a future where humanistic approaches and values play a central role in our increasingly technical world.

Over the past year, we took up this core question — how AI and the humanities intersect — with Princeton faculty and graduate students in our Modeling Culture seminar, and by the campus-wide audiences who attended our workshops, events, and talks. Across CDH-affiliated labs, Princeton scholars join their domain expertise with testing the benefits and limits of AI applications. As always, we partner and advise on a wide range of projects — from curating data from ancient Middle Eastern texts, to developing technologies for African languages, to learning the possibilities of how AI might sustain long-form narrative. Our research software engineers are building custom tools for scholars who want to analyze complex, often multilingual or historical texts that conventional AI systems weren't built for, while also exploring open models and experimenting with new ways of accessing and exploring research materials.

A major milestone for the CDH in 2026 was taking on the role of publisher for the long-running Journal of Cultural Analytics (JCA), a leading journal for scholarship on the computational study of culture. JCA is just one piece of our involvement in a broader "Cultural AI" initiative. We’re also launching a working group, a collection of pedagogical experiments and discussions, and new graduate student and faculty opportunities. In collaboration with the newly launched Princeton Societal AI group at the newly launched Data and Intelligent Systems Initiative, we’re happy to support and participate in new cross-campus efforts to ensure that culture and society are at the forefront of how Princeton approaches data science, computational science, and AI.

We invite you to join these important and timely conversations. CDH is always looking for new collaborators, and we welcome inquiries from scholars at any level or from any division. Sign up for a consultation to discuss research or teaching ideas. Students can find us through our growing slate of undergraduate courses under the CDH course code. Subscribe to our monthly newsletter to hear about what's new and what's happening. Please join us at our Open House on Wednesday, September 16, and in October for a series of events with Leif Weatherby from NYU, media theorist and one of the most important voices in our understanding of how AI is affecting culture.

Last but not least, we're delighted to share news about the CDH family: Seyi Olojo joins us as a Postdoctoral Research Associate working on epistemological questions about African language technologies, and Christine Roughan has been promoted from postdoc to the staff position of CDH Project Manager.