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AbstractFuture Humanities highlights the rise and convergence of new and critical humanities by publishing trans‐ and interdisciplinary research focused on diverse subjects and methodologies. These include, but are not limited to, philosophy, cultural and historical studies, religious studies, linguistics and semiotics, literature, and the arts as they intersect with various fields of study such as digital transformation and artificial intelligence, health ethics and biomedical technologies, climate change and biodiversity, and new media and communication. Special attention is given to the public dimension of these intersections and to the role that today's intellectuals play in their creation and development.

The distinction between scientific judgment & the judgment of scientists has been increasingly blurred. Generalizations from social sciences lead to the popularization of unproved or unprovable social theory. Social scientists' acceptance of antiscientific frames of mind threatens the theoretical gains of a previous generation. An interest in human psychology has turned to a poetic, human mythology. Science & moral judgment are valuable in intellectual activity but not in social science. Scientists influenced by supportive values must free themselves from extrascientific influences. Applied social humanities attempts analysis to support or change the preferences of individuals for different kinds of behavior patterns. The meaning of life, quality of life, academic questions, & policy issues would be the concern in social humanities. An intellectual basis for new institutions to replace the depleted spiritual & judgmental resources would develop a core of research to form a learning tradition. Applied social humanists would be consultants with professional ethics similar to priests & psychiatrists. They would lecture, give seminars, & groups of social humanists, audiences & clients would form schools to provide cultural ferment centers. Religions cannot be manufactured, but a basis can be formed for the functional equivalent of religion. Modified HA.

Wang Hui's article, which is part of the author's larger project on the multiple origins of the Chinese humanities, examines the impact of the modern Western education system on disciplinary divisions in China. The article looks specifically at the development of humanities in China after the 1970s, and in particular since the 1990s.

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This chapter examines material published in the field of digital humanities in 2020. It begins with an article in Digital Humanities Quarterly by a group of early-career scholars taking a novel approach to understanding the field, using topic modelling to query a dataset of definitions of digital humanities. The article brings into focus the proliferation of texts in this area, and the extent to which this ongoing discourse impinges on those, particularly early-career, scholars seeking to enter the field. It also observes the upsurge in writing about the lack of diversity and inclusion in the digital humanities, making the arrival of Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein's Data Feminism all the more welcome. This hugely important text offers an intersectional approach to the study of historical and contemporary social and cultural data, urging scholars to take up their seven principles for uncovering the ways in which power can be uncovered, examined, analysed, and challenged. They offer a vision of what data justice could look like in theory and in practice. Richard Jean So's Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction takes just such an approach to the analysis of literary culture in post-war America. Using an incisive combination of data science and traditional literary scholarly methods, So paints a compelling picture of the persistence of whiteness in literary culture, analysing the whole cycle of literary production to uncover the ways in which power moves through the system.

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The absence of an entry on digital humanities in the last volume of The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory due to the Covid-19 pandemic as well as the exacerbation of academic precarity (that was acknowledged in the editorial preface of the last volume) predicates that this chapter develop a narrative bibliography of notable scholarship in the digital humanities from both 2021 and 2022. Therefore the unprecedented circumstances that have extended the scope of scholarly review for this chapter beyond a single chronological year also provide the unique opportunity to not only 'trace and expand upon currents in critical and cultural theory, and to engage in [the] areas' key debates' (Quinn and Ghosh, 'Preface' to YWCCT 2022) but also (and more importantly, one might argue) understand some of the radical thematic transformations brought about and anticipated by the legacies, presents, and futures of digital humanities within the supposedly 'new normal' of a post-Covid world.
Through consolidating diverse conversations from varied contexts that are shaping contemporary digital humanities and in anticipating the futures of the discipline, this chapter locates scholarship in the digital humanities and related fields from the years 2021 and 2022 within the interconnected themes of resistive ontologies, organizations, and new directions in the digital humanities. While the focus remains on the scholarship produced within the aforesaid chronological period, our methodological attempt in this intervention has been to acknowledge and put into dialogue relevant contributions related to the three primary themes of analysis that may fall beyond the ambit of a specific period.

AbstractThis chapter examines material published in the field of digital humanities in 2019. Key work published this year has grappled with longstanding conflicts at the heart of the field, on whether and how computational methods should be applied to humanities data, and who should validate such methodologies. The chapter begins with new work by Ted Underwood, who makes the case for hypothesis-driven methods and the modelling of humanities data. It discusses how recent work in computational literary studies had appeared to resist the trap into which much previous work had fallen, that is, work that was perceived to fall into the binaries of distant vs. close reading, computation vs. engagement, objectivity vs. subjectivity. The continued friction over the appropriateness of certain computational methodological approaches was amplified by new work that called into question the statistical methods of a number of key works in the field over past years. Nan Z. Da's critique of computational literary studies through the lens of statistical rigour imploded the uneasy truce between computational methods and the more traditional questions and methods at the heart of literary studies. Da's article reopens the debate about how digital humanities scholars use statistical methods, and how greater reliance on such methods may demand greater cross-disciplinary oversight to ensure that they are used in a way that is both robust and appropriate. Her contribution is examined alongside the rash of responses to it from key scholars in the field which produced an important snapshot of the fractures and fundamentals of data-driven literary studies. I then turn to new and timely work by James E. Dobson, which argues for a third way, a Critical Digital Humanities that engages critically with computational as well as humanistic scholarship.I survey important contributions on the impact of mass digitization, historicism and the archive, and how to study history in the age of digital archives and the historic web. Ian Milligan's work provides a much-needed introduction to the potentials and pitfalls of studying recent history through the digital traces left behind. It self-consciously identifies areas in which greater cross-disciplinary scholarship and critical engagement will be needed as this area of study matures. Discussion then turns to work by Nanna Bonde Thylstrup on digital waste, which shows how connecting new media theory to waste studies can provide an important frame through which to examine issues of data toxicity and pollution. This work sets the stage for two landmark books on sex and race which implore us to take a more careful look at the toxic technologies we build and the questions we ask of them. Both Caroline Criado Perez and Ruha Benjamin examine the damage done by the reliance of data systems on the 'default', frequently a white male, forcing us to see anything that departs from this norm as deviant. These works make a powerful case for reinventing the systems we increasingly rely on, questioning the underlying prejudice that created them, and rethinking the modes of meaning-making ascribed to them, especially when that narrative so often assumes a benign neutrality. Finally, I examine these works alongside a new volume of essays on digital humanities and intersectionality edited by Barbara Bordalejo and Roopika Risam, which serves to amplify and contextualize the need for the approaches taken by Criado Perez and Benjamin, showing how deeply enmeshed within the field these power structures are.

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This chapter examines material published in the field of the digital humanities (DH) in 2018, all of which explores the relationship between the digitalized present and its pre-digital past(s). In one publication, Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age, Alan Liu notes: 'The signal sense of history […] is not just like a plot on a radar scope. It is like the unfolding epic plot of Tolstoy's War and Peace' (p. 157). As political scandals over the use of social media and the role of cyber-targeting to influence electoral outcomes continue to dominate the news, it is becoming increasingly evident that not only are social media ushering in an era in which we are alienated from our personal data, but that today's digitalized world builds on and replicates pre-digital hegemonic structures. Books by Andrew Piper and Alan Liu discuss ways in which scholars can approach the complexities and challenges of literary tradition and historical transmutation through the application of computational methods and digital tools. Discussion then turns to the ways in which digital practices have converged with wider cultural and political developments since the second half of the twentieth century. Lee Humphreys examines this transformation through the traces that we leave as the record of our daily lives while on social media, while Felix Stalder considers how such practices have wider ramifications as symptoms of a 'digital condition', for good and ill. Exploring the pressure points of the digital condition more closely, Safiya Umoja Noble scrutinizes the ways in which algorithmic processes, notably those that drive Google's search engine, are shaped by and sustain discriminatory regimes at the expense of vulnerable minorities. Finally, Roopika Risam's critique interrogates the field of the digital humanities itself, which—notwithstanding good intentions—remains dominated by the Global North and is at risk of perpetuating the very power structures that it seeks to dismantle.