About Computational Humanities

The Computational Humanities Center’s focus is twofold: it creates a space where computational methods extend the reach of traditional humanistic research questions and provides opportunities for theoretical and practical computational approaches to be tested against the concerns of research and teaching in the humanities. Starting from Duke faculty’s and partner researchers’ ongoing and emerging questions, the Computational Humanities Center facilitates the formation of multi-disciplinary research collaborations and provides the resources for training of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty, in the integration of computational methodologies in humanistic studies.

The Computational Humanities Center supports both short- and long-term projects, spanning from class-based projects and research collaborations to a two-year graduate fellowship to cross-institutional collaborations on multi-year research and public humanities projects. The projects that have grown out of the Computational Humanities Center contribute to the investigation of central questions in literature, ethics, visual arts, history, and philosophy. Our undergraduate and graduate researchers and students know that computational problems become more rewarding to solve when they help to address urgent questions about the representation of Syrian Refugees in the media or illuminate how we can better understand current political tensions by analyzing their historical roots in the textual archive. They also demonstrate how traditional humanities concerns can come alive in the classroom, in research projects, or in museum exhibits by thoughtfully developing and deploying computational methodologies.