Partnerships

Over the past two decades, Computational Humanities has emerged as a robust field of scholarship at the intersection of digital methods and humanistic inquiry. Building on this foundation, the Computational Humanities Initiative seeks to advance this work by bridging humanistic and computational approaches and creating a dedicated space for cross-disciplinary collaboration within the university.

As machine learning, large language models, and other computational methods increasingly reshape knowledge production across the university, partnership between humanists and computer scientists has become more possible and more valuable. The Initiative seeks to develop and support collaborations that explore how such computational tools can be used in combination with such traditional humanistic methods as archival research, close reading, and ideology critique. By pairing traditional methods with computational tools, these collaborations can produce new forms of inquiry and address research questions at scales and dimensions otherwise inaccessible to humanists, while preserving the depth and critical rigor that define the humanities. Such collaborations also create opportunities for humanistic perspectives to inform the design, development, and application of computational methods themselves.

The Computational Humanities Initiative aims to create opportunities for faculty and students from the humanities and technical fields to discover shared research interests, exchange methodological expertise, develop collaborative projects, and disseminate their findings with colleagues across the university. By building a community around computational humanities, the Initiative seeks to lower barriers to entry for humanists curious about digital methods while bringing colleagues in computer science and related fields into contact with questions of meaning-making, historiography, and cultural analysis. As we develop our programming, we welcome inquiries from faculty and students interested in partnering with the Computational Humanities Initiative. To learn more or discuss collaboration opportunities, please contact Nora Shaalan ([email protected]).

Over the coming 2026-2027 academic year, the Initiative will be providing support for “A Structural Model of Literary Character,” an interdisciplinary research project led by Sharon Marcus, Melanie Subbiah, and Kathleen McKeown. This project brings together scholars from English and Comparative Literature with computer scientists to develop a comprehensive account of how characters are constructed across hundreds of nineteenth-century novels.