Articles

New Horizons: Confronting the Digital Turn in the Humanities

  • Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH)
    07 April 2025
  • Category
    Event summary
  • Topic
    Digital hermeneutics, Digital methods, Digitisation

A C²DH Lecture Series

As a result of the so-called digital turn the humanities are currently in a process of rapid transformation, with consequences that reach far beyond the confines of academia. This lecture series explores how the digital turn is changing research, teaching and dissemination in the humanities. At the same time, the series will historicise and contextualise this process. Amid far-going claims of shifting research paradigms and a possible scientification of humanities research it is more urgent than ever to cast a critical eye on the continuities as well as discontinuities that new technologies bring, in order to avoid techno-scientific essentialism. How exactly are the humanities being transformed as a result of the digital turn? To what extent can we speak of hybridity as the new normal; a situation where most humanists combine traditional/analogue and new/digital research practices?

The programme has been developed to address three interconnected issues relating to the digital turn in the humanities:

  • Transformations : How has the digital turn transformed the humanities in recent years? What affordances has it brought?
  • Practices : Case studies: how are humanities research practices changing as a result of the digital turn?
  • Genealogies : What is the ‘pre-history’ of digital humanities? How did we arrive here? 

Lectures and interviews 2019-2021

  • Interview Christine Borgman

    Big Data, Little Data, or No Data? Scholarship, Stewardship, and Humanities Research

    Prof. Dr. Christine L. Borgman (8 April 2021)

  • Bricoleurs

    Scholars as Bricoleurs: The Plurality of Digital Humanities

    Dr. Smiljana Antonijević (4 March 2021)

  • Julianne Nyhan DIGITURN interview

    New findings and new questions about the origins of Digital Humanities: on the state of the art of histories of the Index Thomisticus project of Fr Roberto Busa S.J.

    Dr. Julianne Nyhan (18 December 2019)

  • Melvin Wevers DIGITURN interview

    Signals and Noise: Extracting Patterns of Cultural Expressions from Digitized Sources

    Dr Melvin Wevers (27 November 20219)

  • Steven Jones DIGITURN interview

    A New Humanism’: Expo ’58, Robert Busa, and the First Humanities Computer Center

    Prof. Dr Steven E. Jones (6 November 2019)

  • Jane Winters DIGITURN lecture

    Reflections on the past, present and future of digital archives

    Prof. Dr Jane Winters (18 September 2018)

  • David Bodenhamer DIGITURN lecture

    The Spatial Humanities, Deep Mapping, and the Future of History

    Prof. Dr David Bodenhamer (26 June 2019)

  • Tim Hitchcock DIGITURN lecture

    Beyond Close and Distant Reading: Strategies for the radical contextualization of historical text

    Prof. Dr Tim Hitchcock (29 May 2019)

  • The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Photo by John Lewis Marshall (2014)

    Digital Cultural Heritage: the case of the Rijksmuseum’s past, present and future

    Saskia Scheltjens (25 April 2019)

  • Patrick Svensson DIGITURN interview

    Unframing Infrastructure: The Story of Research Infrastructure in and through the Humanities

    Prof. Dr. Patrik Svensson (6 March 2019)

  • Andrew Prescott DIGITURN lecture

    Digital Transformations in the Arts and Humanities

    Prof. Dr Andrew Prescott (30 January 2019)

With the support of

FNR

Author(s)

  • Assist. Prof Gerben ZAAGSMA

    Assist. Prof Gerben ZAAGSMA

    C2DH
    Assistant professor / Senior research scientist