Emory has one of the oldest and best-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.