Data culture is complex. Partly humanistic, it encompasses ethics, education, language, literature, new media, art, and history. It raises questions around the role of evidence and experimentation in humanistic disciplines, the identification and mitigation of biases encoded in digital frameworks, and the epistemological consequences of historical, artistic, and literary archives.
Seeking a collaborative space to grapple with these questions, Boston University’s Center for the Humanities launched the Digital Humanities Initiative (DHI).
The DHI preserves the humanities’ traditional role while encouraging nuanced, imaginative digital research. Aimed at both “digitizing the humanities” and “humanizing the digital,” the Initiative supports tools and methodologies for the curation, preservation, and computational analysis of human culture.
The Initiative raises the visibility of ongoing work, provides a home base for the community of scholars, and coordinates frameworks to support existing projects and create new ones.
The DHI aims to be a hub for collaborating with existing campus programs and initiatives. These programs and initiatives include:
- BU Libraries
- BU Spark!
- The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP)
- The Hariri Institute
- The Shipley Center for Digital Learning & Innovation
- Faculty of Computing and Data Science
In spring 2025, BU’s Center for the Humanities brought together researchers from across the globe for “Beyond the Binge: Ethical Implications of AI for Entertainment and Education – Communication and Philosophical Perspectives.”
The 2024 “Mathematics with a Human Face” conference, part of the Humanities in the World Initiative, gathered speakers from around the world to discuss the role of creativity and the human element in mathematics in the age of AI. It was produced in collaboration with the University of Bergen’s Department of Philosophy and the Norwegian Research Council.