Featured Initiative

Transform human inquiry for the information age 

The Critical Digital Humanities Initiative equips scholars with technical and design expertise and fosters collaborations that deepen our understanding of power, culture, and social justice.

On a tabletop holding scrolls, papers and a laptop, 2 young women unroll and measure an ink drawing of windswept trees.

From philosophy to history, law, literature, and more, we rely on the humanities to understand ourselves and our values, address questions of justice, and envision a more equitable world. Yet today, social media, digital surveillance, and other advanced technologies are reshaping the production and circulation of knowledge and power in our society, creating new forms of inequality and disinformation that skirt our laws and confound our best intentions. To understand and address the threats they represent, humanities researchers need opportunities to grasp and deploy these new digital tools.

With an emphasis on anti-racist, feminist, queer, and decolonial scholarship and research, the CDHI gathers together researchers, students, and collaborators from both the humanities and the data sciences to tackle some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

Elspeth Brown, Director,
Critical Digital Humanities Initiative 

The Critical Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI) at the University of Toronto enables trans-disciplinary collaborations that emphasize questions of power and social justice in digital humanities research. Digital humanities researchers use an array of digital tools, such as data mining, data visualization, and even video games. Through research workshops, a speaker series, conferences, project incubators, fellowships, and a unique design atelier, the CDHI is equipping humanities researchers with the technical and design expertise to use these and other digital tools to ask new questions, share new knowledge, and analyze power and inequality.

Join us to enable U of T’s world-class researchers to harness the very tools of the digital revolution and help establish a new, global vanguard for critical humanities scholarship for the information age.

To learn more about how you can help advance new developments in humanities research, please contact Institutional Strategic Initiatives Advancement.

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