Welcome back, CDH community!

Welcome back, CDH community!

I hope that you had a chance to unplug a bit. 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. I'm reminded of the insights shared by Ted Chiang and Nnedi Okorafor, the speculative fiction writers we invited to Princeton last year as part of CDH’s 10th anniversary. Their perspectives on AI—ranging from critique to curious exploration to grounded optimism—remind us that the future of AI depends not on the technology itself, but on how we choose to shape and use it within our communities, institutions, and lives.

The role of humanistic thought in shaping AI lies at the heart of our ongoing "Humanities for AI" initiative. Building on last year's momentum, we're launching an ambitious new project for 2025-26: Modeling Culture: New Humanities Practices in the Age of AI. This collaborative effort features three interconnected components: a year-long faculty and graduate seminar, a public lecture series, and an open-access curriculum for humanities researchers. Developed in partnership with talented colleagues from Princeton and beyond, this project aims to offer specifically humanistic frameworks for engaging with AI both creatively and critically.

As we look ahead to our eleventh year as a Center, I’m impressed with the diversity of scholarship that the CDH continues to foster. CDH affiliates published two significant books last spring—Grant Wythoff's A User's Guide to the Age of Tech and my own Poetry's Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody. Our Research Software Engineering team collaborated with faculty and supported digital humanities across Princeton: they developed custom software pipelines that advance historical research, published high-quality humanities datasets, adapted open-source tools for Princeton researchers exploring manuscript culture, transformed an existing database project for computational analysis, published peer-reviewed articles, mentored award-winning computer science undergraduate independent work, and taught project management skills to the broader Princeton community. And I am pleased to announce that long-time collaborator Marina Rustow’s incredible Princeton Geniza Lab has become a CDH Affiliate Lab, highlighting our role as both a research catalyst and a research infrastructure.

As Princeton’s computational humanities research scholarship continues to evolve, we’re delighted to announce an expansion of CDH’s faculty leadership team: Paul Vierthaler, in East Asian Studies and hired through the Interdisciplinary Data Science initiative, will serve as CDH's inaugural Associate Faculty Director. Paul brings a wealth of experience in text mining and natural language processing for late imperial Chinese literature, and will be teaching exciting undergraduate and graduate CDH courses this year. In addition, Elizabeth Margulis (Professor of Music and Director of Princeton’s Music Cognition Lab) will be our new Director of the Graduate Certificate. Paul and Elizabeth’s expertise and experience will be invaluable as we navigate the challenges and opportunities of the year ahead, and I am encouraged to have their support.

We’re equally proud to see how CDH students are meeting the AI moment. Over the last year, they’ve used AI tools on projects ranging from analyzing Sigmund Freud's handwriting to identifying patterns in nineteenth-century Chinese painting. CDH students won awards for developing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to analyze historical documents, traveled to Kenya to create technologies for African languages, and explored digital mapping practices to illuminate contested urban histories in Greece.

We are excited to continue to collaborate with you on questions of how to engage computational technologies within the humanities. Ahead of our call for new research software collaborations this spring, we encourage you to reach out with project ideas through our consultation program. In addition, we are excited to announce a new offering this year: the Digital Humanities Accelerator. This program offers personalized project design and strategy support for humanities faculty with digital research projects at any stage and is accepting applications on a rolling basis.

As always, I continue to welcome all faculty and students—regardless of discipline or technical experience—to engage with CDH through our projects, programs, and events.

We look forward to an exciting year ahead.

Warmly,
Meredith Martin
Faculty Director, Center for Digital Humanities