Are the Digital Humanities an Oxymoron?

Laura Chapot is a Neukom Postdoctoral Fellow in the Departments of German Studies and Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College. Laura's research brings together comparative literature, modern languages, cultural history and computational text analysis to study the ways in which different representational practices shape how we perceive, interpret and act in the world. As a Neukom fellow, Laura plans to investigate the intersections between literature and computation as complementary cultural practices of representation at the German and Swedish fin de siècle.

James E. Dobson is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is a literary and cultural critic who specializes in intellectual history and U.S. autobiographical writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He uses a number of approaches--theoretical, historical, formalist, and computational (sometimes called "digital humanities" or "cultural analytics")--to answer persistent intellectual problems. He is thus also interested in the critical analysis of twentieth-century and contemporary computation methods including machine learning, computer vision, and various approaches to text and data mining. His book Critical Digital Humanities: The Search for a Methodology (University of Illinois Press, 2019) establishes a new theoretical paradigm through an account of new computer-aided techniques that are increasingly used in the humanities, including machine learning and text mining and their relation to literary hermeneutics and critical theory.

Luca M. Possati is a researcher and lecturer at the University of Porto, Portugal. Educated as philosopher, he has been lecturer at the Institut Catholique de Paris and associate researcher of the Fonds Ricoeur and EHESS (Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales). His research focuses on the philosophy of technology and in particular on the social and ethical impacts of artificial intelligence. His approach combines philosophy, psychology, and the actor-network theory.

He has published numerous papers and books on phenomenology, and history of contemporary philosophy. He is the author of The Algorithmic Unconscious. How Psychanalysis Helps in Understanding AI (Routledge, 2021).

Alberto Romele is an assistant professor of digital communication at the ICM, the Institute of Communication and Media, University Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle. He is also a part-time researcher at the ISR, the Center for Religious Studies, Bruno Kessler Foundation (Trento, Italy). He has been a research associate at the IZEW, the International Center for Ethics in the Sciences and Humanities, University of Tübingen (Germany), and an associate professor of philosophy of technology at the Catholic University of Lille (France). He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Verona (Italy). His research focuses on philosophy of technology, digital hermeneutics, and imaginaries of AI. He is the author of Digital Hermeneutics: Philosophical Investigations in New Media and Technologies (Routledge, 2020).

At Utrecht University Karin van Es is Associate Professor of Media and Culture Studies, project lead in the Humanities at Utrecht Data School, Netherlands, and part of the steering committee of the focus area Governing the digital society. Her research focuses on the impact of datafication and algorithmization on culture and society. Karin is author of the book The Future of Live (Polity Press, 2016). She is co-editor of the volume The Datafied Society (Amsterdam University Press, 2017) and the special issue "Big Data Histories" (2018) for TMG- Journal for Media History . She has published in outlets such as Television and New Media, Media, Culture and Society, M/C Journal and First Monday.