Technologies are artificial, but — paradox again —
artificiality is natural to human beings


As an internationally active center for research in the digital humanities, we seek to leverage technology to solve intractable obstacles to effective research in the humanities, sharing knowledge by developing and enforcing interoperable standards, and promoting education within and through the digital humanities. The developers in the CDH work closely with researchers in several fields and across a wide range of experience and technical expertise. The result is that each project is tailored to its creators, users, and audience, but remains accessible to all who may wish to engage with it.

The emergence of computation in humanities research continues to proliferate new data and analyses at an accelerating rate. For decades those within the field have been working to find standard and exchangeable ways to encode, transfer, and preserve the growing repository of the world’s digitized knowledge. Our efforts have focused on reaching beyond the field, to enable machine encoding of objects, descriptions, and assertions in a way which may cross languages and disciplines.

Interoperability means data can be understood by anyone who has need of it, encoding allows for the most complete and accurate descriptions available, and attribution and citation is built into contributions so that each new scholar enters into the history of their subject, and academic conversations are open and durable.