Digital Humanities Now

Highlighted Feed: CEDHAR Center for Digital History Aarhus

Colleen Nugent — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:38:12 +0000

The purpose of CEDHAR is to improve and to develop knowledge of all four key dimensions of digital history. These four dimensions are digital methods, digital archives, digital history communication, and new digital sources. Although focused on digital history, these core principles apply to digital humanities more broadly, and this feed (and the resources and events at CEDHAR) are potentially valuable for many DHNow readers.

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Editors’ Choice: Shakespeare and Company Project Data Sets, Version 2.0

Joshua Kotin and Rebecca Sutton Koeser — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:30:00 +0000

Editors’ Summary: Joshua Kotin and Rebecca Sutton Koeser present Version 2.0 of the Shakespeare and Company Project data sets, a major update to the structured datasets documenting Sylvia Beach’s legendary Paris bookshop and lending library (1919–1962). The update significantly expands demographic data on lending library members—from roughly 600 to nearly 1,800 identified individuals—and introduces two new datasets tracking book creators and member addresses, enabling richer analysis of gender, nationality, geography, and reading practices in the interwar modernist milieu. The release is particularly timely as the project transitions from data curation to active research, with new findings already emerging on the circulation of Joyce’s Ulysses and the gendered dimensions of the lending library’s canon.

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Job Announcement: Digital Initiatives & Scholarly Communications Librarian at Macalester College

Colleen Nugent — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:30:00 +0000

The Digital Initiatives & Scholarly Communication (DISC) Librarian is responsible for providing leadership in library digital collections and platforms, scholarly communication, and open access. The individual is responsible for managing and promoting the use of our institutional repository (IR) and coordinating associated services. They collaborate with library leadership and staff to iteratively develop and implement a digital strategy across library platforms. They work collaboratively to manage and continually improve upon the library’s digital presence, unique digital collections, our IR, the library website, and more. In addition, this position supervises the Digital Services Specialist in their efforts to improve integrations, user experience, and accessibility across the library’s platforms.

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Project: Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities

Wed, 20 May 2026 16:30:00 +0000

Mapping the Black Digital and Public Humanities is an interactive and searchable map of digital and public humanities projects related to Black history & culture. The goals of this project are threefold:

to help people find digital and public projects about Black history and culture by topic, type, location, contributors, and more.
to make it easier to see and build connections or networks across similar projects.
to enable deeper analyses of the Black Digital Humanities and Black Public Humanities as fields, including locating gaps and identifying potential interventions for growth.

This project arose out of a desire to make Black digital and public humanities projects more visible to other practitioners and the public.

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Editors’ Choice: The advance of vibe coding

Alastair Dunning — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:30:00 +0000

Editors’ Summary: Paul Taylor, professor of health informatics at UCL, reflects on his lifelong relationship with programming and the rapid displacement of software engineers by AI coding tools. Drawing on personal experience using Claude Code and the fictional Mythos model, he traces how AI has moved from writing code snippets to autonomously developing, testing, and maintaining entire software systems. The piece is particularly timely in its account of the political and economic fallout of these advances—from the collapse of SaaS stock valuations to Anthropic’s conflict with the Trump administration—and raises urgent questions about cybersecurity, labor, and what it means to “know” how to program in an AI-saturated world.

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Event Announcement: Escuela de otoño 2026

Joaquín Solano — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:30:00 +0000

Editors’ summary: This post announces the Red de Humanidades Digitales (RedHD) 2026 Autumn School, a five-session online intensive course running October 26–30 aimed at introducing participants to the theoretical, methodological, and practical foundations of Digital Humanities research. The course is notable for its deliberate centering of non-hegemonic and situated perspectives, particularly those emerging from Latin America and the Global South, and for integrating hands-on data work—collection, cleaning, and visualization—alongside critical epistemological frameworks. It welcomes students, researchers, archivists, librarians, and educators, requiring no prior programming experience.

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Report: Who Digitized Your Sources? Exploitative Prison Labour and the Hidden Costs of Online Archives

Kristen C. Howard — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:30:00 +0000

In today’s increasingly online world, historians, researchers, and students want and expect online access to historical documents offered by galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. This includes not only journal articles and ebooks, but also primary sources and archival documents, which researchers increasingly expect to find online in searchable, digital formats. In turn, cultural heritage institutions have responded by trying to meet these demands, with various levels of success, for items ranging from census data to yearbooks to photographs. But offering access to digital and digitized collections has a very high cost, in terms of planning, scanning, adding metadata and accessibility features, and most crucially maintenance and long-term preservation. The invisible costs and labour behind online collections are frequently overlooked by researchers. This raises a question that few of us pause to ask: who did the work that made our digital sources accessible, and under what conditions?

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Opportunity: Humanitarian Archive Emergency Census

Humanitarian Archive Emergency (HAE) — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:30:00 +0000

Editors’ Summary: The Humanitarian Archive Emergency (HAE), led by the University of Manchester’s Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, is conducting a worldwide census to identify digital archives and datasets held by humanitarian organizations at risk due to cuts in international development funding. The census aims to establish an evidentiary foundation for coordinated preservation action, and submissions are open through October 2026.

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DHNow Newsletter, May 20, 2026

Colleen Nugent — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:30:00 +0000

This issue was curated by Colleen Nugent McLean, DHNow’s Editor and Nico Larrondo, DHNow Guest Editor.

Our Editors’ Choices this week includes a release of a new dataset in Shakespeare studies, a reflective post on the changes AI has brought to programming, and a study that applies digital methodologies to the study of ancient Rome. We have also included events, job announcements, reports, projects and tools, including a report on the unseen labor behind digitized materials. As part of our mission to share interesting and timely DH scholarship, we have a new feature called Highlighted Feeds, where we identify useful sources that may be off your radar.

Editors’ Choice: Funerary Spectacle: Applied Digital Humanities in the Roman Forum

Chuck Jones — Wed, 20 May 2026 16:30:00 +0000

Editors’ Summary: In Funerary Spectacle: Applied Digital Humanities in the Roman Forum (California Classical Studies, 2026), Christopher J. Johanson (UCLA) combines three-dimensional reconstructions of the Roman Forum with traditional philological analysis to reconstruct the funeral of Lucius Aemilius Paullus Macedonicus (160 BCE) across its three stages: procession, eulogy, and gladiatorial games. By applying both close and distant reading methods, the study illuminates how the built environment served as a stage for aristocratic self-representation in the Middle Republican period, offering new answers to longstanding debates about the visibility and logistics of Roman public spectacle.

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