WHERE TRADITION MEETS HIGH-TECH SCHOLARSHIP

INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
AIDED BY TECHNOLOGY

Jo Guldi, a professor in the Department of Quantitative Theory and Methods, was recruited to Emory through the university-wide AI.Humanity initiative in 2023 and describes her arrival here as a “homecoming.” She says the AI.Humanity initiative, which builds on Emory’s intellectual strengths to shape the AI revolution, offers a collaborative and enthusiastic environment for her work with “the most robust community of digital humanists anywhere in North America.”

As one of the founders of the subfield of digital history, Guldi transforms traditional humanities research by using AI and machine learning, particularly text-mining tools, to sift through vast historical, economic, legal and sociological datasets to understand changes in culture, ideas and political institutions over time.

“The growing volume of digitized historical records makes grappling with this tsunami of information impractical,” says Guldi. “AI tools can democratize historical research by making archives and resources more accessible. Researchers can analyze global trends, uncover connections across time and geography and better visualize complex historical processes. For example, AI might reveal shifts in political discourse or social movements that would otherwise remain unnoticed.”

As part of the Emory Climate Research initiative, Guldi is currently collaborating on a project with Mindy Goldstein, clinical professor of law and director of the Turner Environmental Law Clinic, and Yang Liu, chair and Gangarosa Distinguished Professor in the Gangarosa Department of Environment Health at the Rollins School of Public Health.

The team is using LLMs to compile data on climate-related laws and policies in Georgia, starting with a taxonomy of county ordinances governing solar panels. Their methodology can be extended to track data and trends across multiple climate initiatives from electric vehicle infrastructure to urban farming, and from flood mitigation to water conservation. By visualizing this information and layering in public health data, they can provide a full picture of what is working for local communities. This will enable comparisons of future scenarios and support more informed policy decisions for climate action.

"We asked: what can a historian do with AI in the context of climate research? The use of language models will help link isolated information and policy, uncovering the dynamics of decision-making at local and state levels. Building this project across different disciplines and leveraging technology provides a ground truthing for evaluation and action," says Liu.

“At Emory, the digital humanities transcend the act of merging data with discourse; they serve as a catalyst for amplifying the voices and narratives that define our world. By weaving together technology and human curiosity, we empower scholars to rethink the essence of knowledge – how it’s created, shared and safeguarded for the future. This is not just innovation; it’s a commitment to preserving the human story in all its depth and complexity for generations to come.”

—Barbara Krauthamer, Dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences

USING DATA TO UNCOVER
HIDDEN TRUTHS

An institutional focus on digital humanities is supported by Emory’s publishing wing, the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS), which fosters the development of open-access, digital journals. These include Southern Spaces, Nonsite and Post 45, which was brought to the university in 2019 by Dan Sinykin, associate professor of English.

Branching off the Post 45 journal, Sinykin started the Post 45 Data Collective, a peer-reviewed, open-access repository for literary and cultural data from 1945 to the present.

Making literary and cultural data from this period more accessible and valuable has generated a wealth of powerful scholarship, according to Sinykin. For instance, one dataset provides 100 years of data on major literary prizes. In addition to identifying the prize and the name of the winning author, it also contains the names of the prize judges, the author’s academic degrees and their advisors.

“The data shows how much more likely a writer is to win a major award if they earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop or a BA from an Ivy League school; and it shows how the circulation of prizes is insular among insider networks,” explains Sinykin.

Other datasets include New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers, records of Nordic crime fiction translations and winners of literature prizes from the National Endowment for the Arts. In August 2024, Sinykin was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant that will allow his team to build on the existing digital infrastructure and achieve interoperability between complementary datasets.

“We want to continue to build on these datasets and potentially use AI to allow them to talk to each other so that researchers can create a bigger and bigger map of sociological factors that influence the world of literature,” says Sinykin. “Who is most likely to get a publishing deal or a literary award? How do race, education and even personal connections influence those odds?”

Sinykin also explores the intersection of AI, humanities and social justice as a member of the steering committee for the Atlanta Interdisciplinary Artificial Intelligence (AIAI) Network. Directed by Lauren Klein, associate professor in the Departments of Quantitative Theory and Methods and English and funded by a $1.3 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, the AIAI Network unites scholars from across Atlanta institutions to foster interdisciplinary research and public engagement that blends humanistic ways of thinking with technical expertise.

“We brought together partners from Clark Atlanta, Georgia Tech and the DataedX Group to highlight Atlanta as a leading example and center for research for digital humanities. Atlanta’s diversity and historic role in the civil rights movement provides a strong foundation for advancing ethical AI research and innovation across multiple fields,” Klein says.

“Digital history has the winning ticket for designing AI that is factually reliable. Historians have tools for thinking about how to get from many words to a consensus around fact, evidence and data. Silicon Valley should be talking to us. Interdisciplinary collaboration is the best route to move from an AI of rumor, hearsay and hallucination to an AI that delivers truth on demand to high-stakes disciplines like medicine, law and finance, where facts drive decisions.”
— Jo Guldi, Professor Department of Quantitative Theory and Methods

EMBEDDING DIGITAL HUMANITIES
INTO EMORY EDUCATION

Emory’s role in community building and collaboration between humanities scholars and technical researchers is rooted in a deep commitment to digital humanities within its own walls.

Klein, a longstanding leader in the field of digital humanities and editor of the field-defining “Debates in the Digital Humanities” book series, describes Emory’s focus on digital humanities as unique among peer institutions and “fundamentally interdisciplinary.” The community is anchored by faculty who integrate technical sophistication with humanities research and teach a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in areas ranging from quantitative literary analysis to digital scholarship and media studies to data and archives.

One mechanism for study is a Quantitative Sciences (QSS) degree, which functions almost like a double major combining core QTM courses with additional courses in other disciplines like film, marketing, classics, history and political science. Graduate students can also earn a Certificate in Digital Scholarship and Media Studies (DSMS) through the Laney Graduate School.  

“Emory’s digital humanities curriculum is very customizable. At the center of the QSS degree, for example, is a fundamental understanding of the mathematical and statistical basis of digital tools and methods. But beyond this technical core, students can push forward in several different directions,” says Klein. “If your interest is in society and culture, you can learn the core and then go in that direction. If your interest is in statistics or computer science, you can go in that direction.”

Experiential learning opportunities are also available through Emory’s Center for AI Learning and individual research labs. 

Junior Odelia Larbi-Amoah, for example, has worked on a variety of projects through Klein’s Digital Humanities Lab. As a double major in QSS and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the issue of bias in technology is a focus for her.

One of the projects she worked on involved using census data to assess how well large language models recognize names that aren’t traditionally American and whether gender can be correctly inferred from them. Expanding datasets to include names from non-English-speaking countries can provide more inclusive outcomes when using data to make decisions about social policies. 

“A software engineer may let their individual bias slip into their code, which can affect a lot of people once it’s released. When we have humanities intersecting with tech, we can consciously break down stereotypes to enhance coding practices and hopefully cut off bias before it becomes a bigger issue,” says Larbi-Amoah.

Dani Roytburg is a senior majoring in computer science and QTM. His choice of study stems from broad interests that include politics, debate and architecture. Roytburg was fortunate to meet with Klein early in his undergraduate experience which led him to add QTM as a major and join her lab.

“I was looking for a way to merge technical rigor with the adaptability of debate,” says Roytburg. “Using modern systems to analyze text at scale and understand and answer research questions in the humanities and social science contexts is the perfect merging of technology and creativity.” 

As part of a Digital Humanities Lab project, Roytburg joined a combined student and faculty team to work on another study involving the language of online social movements. 

The research explored how political ideas move from the margins to the mainstream, and which groups, such as activists, politicians or the media, are responsible for introducing these new ideas into public discourse. To conduct the analysis, Roytburg developed his own model of online language change using advanced AI techniques.

Roytburg values this bidirectional approach to digital humanities, saying, “I’m not only employing state-of-the art technologies to understand the political culture but also using research techniques and decades-long scholarship in the humanities to develop new uses of AI itself.”

ACCESS, CONVERGENCE
AND TRUTH-TELLING

Digitizing content has allowed for the democratization of vast amounts of information. Text on a page read by just a few people can now be viewed and consumed by anyone with access to a computer. Scholarly research, novels, artwork and historical records are at our fingertips. 

Combining this data with computational methods and digital tools to push the boundaries of traditional humanities education and research opens scholars to even more insights and expands the impact of their work. A simple spreadsheet can be transformed into a user-friendly interactive map, a dataset can resurrect answers to questions lost to history and hidden patterns can emerge from writings of the past. 

While technology can breathe life into humanities research, it is important to remember the reciprocal influence between the two, says Klein—humans shape technology just as much as technology shapes us.

“Digital humanities is about approaching technology from a humanistic perspective,” says Klein. “The focus is on two things at once: how digital technologies can be used to address humanistic research questions and how humanistic ways of thinking can be used to understand and inform the use of digital technologies. Emory has the right people and infrastructure in place to model how this important work should be done.”

RESOURCES AND SUPPORT FOR DIGITAL HUMANITIES AT EMORY

Digital Publishing in the Humanities Initiative

Based at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, the initiative supports the development and publication of digital and open access monographs by faculty at metro-Atlanta institutions. The initiative also provides funding and expertise on digital publishing options.

Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS)

In addition to hosting digital journals like Post 45, ECDS collaborates with faculty, students and external institutions to produce innovative models of digital scholarship via multimedia production, digital exhibits, network and text analysis, and virtual/augmented reality, among other methods. ECDS also integrates digital pedagogy into classrooms, advancing research and outreach
in the digital humanities.

Project Management for the Digital Humanities

This collaboration between ECDS, Emory
Libraries and the Information Technology Services Project Management Office provides free curriculum for managing digital projects in libraries and other settings.