Digital Humanities at Emory brings together faculty who teach with—and about—data and digital technologies across the humanities disciplines. These include English and other literary fields, history and art history, African American studies, Middle Eastern and South Asian studies, film and media, philosophy, religion, women’s and gender studies, and all those devoted to understanding the complexity of human experience. With College faculty and expert technical staff located in places such as the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship and the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Emory is home to a vibrant and diverse community of digital humanities scholars with national and international reach.
Digital humanities (DH) integrates digital methods and tools into traditional humanistic inquiry, exploring questions about human culture, expression, and experience at larger scales and in new digital forms. Across a range of disciplines, students learn to produce and analyze data and digital content, and to think critically about how these and other technologies shape culture and society. With this broad field, areas include:
Humanities Data / Computational Humanities — Uses computational methods and data-driven analysis to explore patterns, meaning, and interpretation in text, image, sound, and other forms of cultural expression.
AI & Humanities / Critical AI Studies — Investigates how artificial intelligence transforms culture, knowledge, labor, and power while developing frameworks for designing, deploying, interpreting, and critiquing algorithmic systems.
Information Design and Data Visualization — Communicates complex ideas through clear, ethical, and visually compelling representations of data, processes, and stories.
Media Studies and Media Production — Analyzes how media creates meaning and influences society. Teaches students to design and produce work in a variety of media.
Spatial Humanities and GIS — Uses maps, geospatial tools, and spatial theory to study how location, environment, and movement shape human histories, cultures, and experiences.
Digital Projects and Archives — Creates websites that enable the preservation, access, curation, and analysis of primary sources in digital form.
Science and Technology Studies (STS) — Examines how science and technology shape—and are shaped by—social, political, ethical, and cultural forces.
Digital humanities courses equip students with both the knowledge and practical skills to interpret the past, engage the present, and imagine the future. DH students learn how data and other media forms circulate in society, how algorithms shape public life, and how knowledge can be communicated clearly and ethically, among many other topics. Students develop projects that include journal articles, maps, databases, visualizations, digital exhibits, and machine learning pipelines.
Students develop fluency in data analysis, programming, web design, metadata creation, media editing, archival work, and storytelling—skills that employers in technology, cultural institutions, publishing, public policy, and research consistently seek.
Because DH is grounded in the humanities, students learn not only how to analyze data and digital content, but also why they matter: how they can represent, empower, silence, or mislead; how algorithms can amplify bias; and how technical infrastructures shape power and access.
Emory’s DH curriculum is built on the idea that technical skills alone are not enough for meaningful work in the age of AI. Our DH courses teach students to think critically about technology:
The answers to these questions require both digital and computational tools and critical thinking about data and media. In the process, students develop the skillsets that are the most highly sought by employers across a range of fields: AI research, responsible AI, data science, UX research, digital product design, government analytics, and public-facing innovation by cultural institutions such as museums and libraries, as well as nonprofits and community groups.
Students emerge from our courses ready not only to use new technologies but to shape them, thoroughly equipped to tackle digital internships, graduate study, and leadership roles.
Emory has one of the oldest and well-supported digital humanities programs in North America, distinguished by decades of collaborative institutional and grant-funded work that has brought humanistic research into public spaces. Among Emory’s first initiatives was the establishment in 1996 of the Beck Center for Electronic Collections and Services to support archival digitization and publishing digital scholarly editions using the Text Encoding Initiative. TEI projects included the multi-year Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot, Southern Changes (the journal of the Southern Regional Council), and the Emory Women Writers Resource Project (which pioneered access to rare texts by women from the 17th–19th centuries).
During the summers of 1997–99, in a program to encourage online innovation in teaching, Emory’s Information Technology Division received funding from the Culpepper Foundation that enabled small teams of humanities faculty and graduate students to work daily over four-week sessions to learn the tools for developing rich-media websites and syllabi. This acknowledgment of digital pedagogy at Emory led to the regular teaching of a “Network Society” seminar and provided the impetus for the certificate program in digital scholarship and media studies (DSMS) approved by the Laney Graduate School, and currently directed by Dr. Allen Tullos (History).
In 2001, thanks to a Mellon Foundation grant to the Southeastern Library Network (SOLINET), Emory Libraries launched the AmericanSouth project to develop Open Archive Initiative protocols for interpretive digital tools useful for research on the US South. This project invited scholars’ participation in the launch of an online publication in 2004: the open-access, multi-media, peer-reviewed journal Southern Spaces, edited by Dr. Tullos.
In 2013 the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship was founded to coalesce and build upon the work of earlier units located primarily in the Emory Libraries and to encourage digital research and publishing by Emory faculty. Today, ECDS is co-directed by Dr. Tullos and Chase Lovellette, providing research and pedagogical support for faculty, students, and public partners in digital scholarship across humanities, social sciences, public health, and medicine. Flagship projects include the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, which revolutionized the study of forced migration by creating an openly accessible, searchable record of more than 36,000 voyages; The American Excavations at Samothrace, which uses digital imaging, 3D modeling, and GIS to document one of the most significant sanctuaries of ancient Greece; the Michael C. Carlos Museum’s Odyssey Online, among the first web-based educational platforms for teaching ancient cultures; and the Georgia Coast Atlas. A recipient of multiple rounds of NEH funding, the Sounding Spirit project facilitated the creation of the Readux platform for the reading, annotation, and web publishing of digital thematic collections and scholarly editions. Open Tour Builder, created by ECDS, is a widely-used tour creation app for making culturally- and historically-based geospatial tours that run easily on mobile devices. Together, these and similar initiatives have established Emory as a leader in digitally-supported research, public access, and preservation. Important to this history is a commitment to the long-term sustainability of significant digital humanities projects, exemplified by Emory’s leadership in the creation in 2021 of an inter-institutional consortium for the SlaveVoyages Database.
In 2014, ECDS partnered with the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry in its Mellon-funded project devoted to the development and publication of digital monographs. In 2023, Mellon awarded $1.3 million to Emory University and partners to explore how to ethically employ artificial intelligence. The grant galvanized the Atlanta Interdisciplinary Artificial Intelligence (AIAI) Network, which supports humanities-forward AI research in the Atlanta metro region, with Emory as its major hub.
A decade of intensive recruiting by Emory led to the arrival of outstanding faculty in the new (2025) Data and Decision Sciences Department (founded in 2019 as Quantitative Theory and Methods).
In 2026, digital humanities faculty formed existing coursework into a stream of courses to make them visible and accessible to students. In the coming years, we anticipate digital humanities courses leading to a minor and major as well as departmental tracks, helping interested students navigate Emory’s course offerings and receive credit for their work.