The Digital Humanities has existed as an institutionalized field of research at Stanford for now more than a decade, drawing undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers from around the globe. This series, a collaboration between Arcade and Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, spotlights leading research in the digital humanities at Stanford, and asks key contributors to reflect on the expansion of the field, its culture, and the major misconceptions that remain.

Why has this field sparked so much public engagement in its projects and debates? How has the digital humanities changed what it means to be a more “traditional” humanist? And how is the field engaging new developments in technology like artificial intelligence?

In this interview, Interventions editor, Charlotte Lindemann, speaks with founding director of the Center for Digital and Public Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Franz Fischer, and Faculty Director of Stanford's Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, Giovanna Ceserani.

CHARLOTTE LINDEMANN: I’m sitting with two directors, Giovanna Ceserani and Franz Fischer, of somewhat parallel digital humanities centers at two universities on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Let me start by asking the two of you to introduce yourselves. I would love to hear a little bit about who you are, what your roles are at these centers and at the universities you're a part of.  

GIOVANNA CESERANI: I’m a professor in the Stanford Classics department. I’m also by courtesy in History, which speaks to the fact that my research in Classics is very historical, in fact, it’s on the history of Classics. I’m now the faculty director of the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), the home of the digital humanities at Stanford. I am the third director, so the center is a new center—it’s only eleven years since its founding. On the other hand, eleven years feels like a long time in the landscape of digital humanities, as the field moves so quickly. Technology changes, and the interaction between humanities and technology keeps changing. CESTA originated around three foci: the Spatial History Project (focused on spatial analysis), the LitLab (interested in textual analysis), and Humanities+Design (devoted to visualization and joining design and computer science in humanistic inquiry). Many projects came out of these research lines, often combining multiple approaches, ranging from Mapping Republic of Letters to Text Technologies, from Poetic Media Lab to Mapping Ottoman Epirus and from Chinese Deathscape to Personhood Project. More recently, also Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have become a focus of CESTA research for both graduate students and faculty, and the scope has expanded with projects concerning new areas and time periods (South African Pasts, Open Gulf, Visible Bodies, Mapping Shared Sacred Spaces, Senegalese Slave Liberations Project, The Church of Baghdad, Truth in Fiction, to name just a few).

Thanks to the vision of previous directors, Zephyr Frank (2011-2016) and Elaine Treharne (2016-2019), which I seek to continue, CESTA has been capable of attracting numerous grants and of developing new forms of knowledge and education, transcending the individual projects. Beyond experimenting with using technology for humanities research, we are also developing our own models, technologies, applications, and software, as our interests aren't always reflected in existing ones. Thus this work allows us to evaluate what technologies are out there and identify where they fall short for humanistic inquiry.

We run programs for both graduates and undergraduates at Stanford, having created structures to engage in transgenerational collaborative research in a unique way in the humanities; hundreds of our past research interns are in their own career paths now, in academia, industry and other services, carrying the influence of the critical thinking, teamwork and technical skills they experimented with at CESTA in places far and wide. This has all been thanks to our efforts to build long-term ties and collaborations with different departments and centers, and in particular now with the Stanford Libraries (long a forerunner in digital methods and research) and the Humanities Center (the hub for humanities on campus). And we are still experimenting: that’s something that I really enjoy about the role, that we can create new programs and respond to new faculty joining and keep evolving based on shared research and interests. 

CL: If eleven years is still relatively new for a research center, I believe your center, Franz, is even newer than CESTA.  

FRANZ FISCHER: Yes, in fact, I’m the founding director of the Center for Digital and Public Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. And I was recruited for this position in 2019, almost five years ago. At the time, the Ministry was financing departments of excellence and my dear colleagues at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice had this great idea to create a competence center for digital and public humanities.  

My background is in digital philology and digital medieval scholarship. I was working for a long time in Cologne, which has a very long-standing tradition in digital humanities research and teaching. Since I began my position in Venice, we’ve created a Master’s degree program, we’re initiating new collaborations constantly; we do consultancy, summer schools, workshops, also interdepartmental research—my center is hosted at the Department for Humanities, but we do collaborate with any colleague at Ca’ Foscari working in the wider field of digital humanities—and then also nationally and internationally. So, the center has been growing and has been a very fruitful hub for teaching and research in the past few years. In terms of funding, the project stage has ended and now we need to see how to turn this into a self-sustaining institution that is independent from project funds. We will always have research projects that secure their own third-party funding, but at the core, we are now in the position to make the center sustainable in the long term as regards to staff and infrastructure.  

CL: The way you both describe these centers, they’re really hubs, populated by a large number of researchers and projects and collaborative teams from across the university and even beyond. But if I think back to the origin of this field, it wasn’t so long ago—as Giovanna said—maybe only ten years ago, that this active culture you’re talking about didn’t exist yet. We didn’t even have the term, “digital humanities.” I’d love to know more about your personal trajectories and how you were introduced to these methods. Was digital humanities scholarship always something you had your eye on, or was it a later development in your career?  

GC: Actually, my first job out of my PhD, my first postdoc, was a digital humanities project, but we didn’t have that word, as you say. It was funded by “Culture 2000,” a program of the European Union. The name of the project was AREA, which stood for Archives of European Archaeology, and it had a lot of the markers that we now I recognize its a digital humanities project. It was about collaboration—there were almost ten different European countries involved. And it was about bringing online, and in this way recording, and preserving archives for the history of archaeology. My PhD was in history of archaeology, which was then emerging as a field of research in Europe, and AREA was about grounding the field with some foundations in archival material that we could put online. It went through multiple rounds of founding, so in that sense, it was very successful, and it did give me a rich spread of expertise in project management and international collaboration. 

It’s also one of those early projects that doesn’t have a web presence anymore. I know the data exists still, but we ran into issues with the multilingual nature of the material, and we were so new to this that we didn’t have the tools to resolve such issues back then. But the very idea and the importance of the sustainability of project and of the digital output is one that I learned back then.  

I think it is because of that experience that, when I encountered a different research problem, I thought of a digital solution. I had a question about 18th century travels to Italy and in particular how to identify a particularly elusive traveler. There was this reference resource, a dictionary of travelers, that I tried to peruse back and forth multiple times, and I could never find a traveler that had the characteristics I was looking to match to my archival discovery. At the time, I had a group of colleagues at Stanford trying to think about using digital methods in early modern intellectual history, and I came to the group with this idea—a data and data visualization approach to early modern travel--and that’s what developed as my contribution into the flagship project, Mapping the Republic of Letters, which then developed into Humanities Plus Design, which became one of the three constituent labs of the founding of CESTA in 2012. So, I came to what we now call the digital humanities from that original experience on the European project, a very long time ago, more than 20 years ago. But then, my research question got me involved with the founding people at CESTA. 

FF: That’s interesting. My story is similar, but also different from Giovanna’s. I was also not drawn to the digital humanities because I was fascinated by technology. I started as a very traditional scholar in philology, medieval Latin philology, interested in historical texts, documents and writings and what they tell us about the past. I worked on medieval liturgy. And I started to design a traditional critical edition of unedited texts. But then I had very good friends in DH—though, at the time, it was not labeled DH it was called “Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftliche Informationsverarbeitung”, a very German label for what then became Humanities Computing and then DH. In discussion with friends and colleagues, I realized that there’s much more you can do in the digital realm dealing with complex manuscript traditions and applying textual criticism.  

I came into this field by working on a digital edition, and ever since I’ve been connected to digital scholarly editing. I had a postdoc in Dublin at the Royal Irish Academy creating a digital edition on the work of Saint Patrick. And when I came back to Cologne, we created a very successful international Marie Curie network on digital scholarly editing. That was a very dynamic phase in the development of new formats, new approaches, bringing together new and traditional scholarship dealing with texts from modern literature to Classics, across the various nationalities with their typical academic flavors. That was so much fun, that I stayed there.  

CL: Another very collaborative, interdisciplinary origin story. 

FF: Actually, the very core of the collaboration—at the very beginning, when I was totally ignorant of digital tools, even though there were already lots of things going on in Cologne—that collaboration is still alive. We created a virtual institute for digital scholarly editing and documentology, as we called it at the time, organizing training events, a scientific journal, a publication series, and many other things. It was the starting point of a very successful collaboration between friends, which became more and more institutionalized with various output formats. 

CL: Flash forward however many years and we’re sitting here because of another collaboration between friends that led to another research institute. Can you tell me a bit about the origins of Global Horizons of the Digital and Public Humanities, the research institute which the two of you founded together this past year? 

FF: It started actually from very individual research projects. It was initially two Marie Curie fellows, funded by the EU, who established the connection between our research center and Giovanna’s. That was very fruitful. We brought together the competencies and the domain expertise in various fields from archival, archaeological, historical, philological disciplines in connection with the digital humanities. And while these brave fellows did their research, we realized that we have much in common and that there was a lot of interest in other projects hosted at our respective institutions. We started to think about an exchange. The first visit was a small group, and then the second visit was already the first meeting of the institute, Global Horizons of the Digital and Public Humanities, which we held in Venice.  

The idea of collaboration was supported by also the mutual attraction of these two places. Stanford is connected to all the history and myths of the Silicon Valley, and Venice is a place that has so much to give as regards its history, beauty, and heritage, and has served as a permanent source of cultural inspiration through the centuries. So that was a very obvious and attractive match, and everyone was immediately convinced we should make something out of this. It was very easy to bring in other colleagues who said, yeah, that’s a wonderful idea. Giovanna secured some funding from the Humanities Center to make this possible, and that was the start. And now we are here. 

GC: I can only emphasize how beneficial the two fellows from Venice on the Marie Curie Fellowship were, after they thought of coming to CESTA as their host foreign research center. There had been two previous Marie Curie fellows at CESTA, but not from Venice--one from Rome and one from Padua. In fact there is a long tradition of individual international scholars visiting our center, for briefer or longer times, from the very beginning, and it is one of the reasons that have made it such an innovative, research hub. These scholars have come from England, from Italy, from Germany, from Denmark, from Turkey, from Brazil, from China, and many more countries. But we had not thought before of expanding this exchange beyond the individual visiting scholar.  

The idea for the institute was really about turning something that had been already happening periodically at the individual level into a container for a more sustained dialogue. I had also heard from others, former graduate students for example who were now teaching at other places where they might be the only person in their new institution cultivating digital methods for the humanities. I had been hearing of these cases for some time, and of how it can be lonely to be in a place where you don’t have this larger research community of digital humanists. We wanted to come up with a way to sustain a community across institutions, even if it’s a mobile home. The institute might travel, for example, to Venice, to other places in Europe, maybe. I also think the need for community was particularly strong at the time we started planning this exchange. We just had come out of the pandemic and, speaking at least for CESTA, we were able to go online so quickly in March 2020 with our own programs, our events, our conversations, but that in time also created a profound need for personal interaction and required us to find ways to actively hold on to that. 

The last thing I want to add to the origin story is that we were very intrigued, talking to Franz and his colleagues because their center is for both digital and public humanities. We took that as a challenge to think more explicitly about the public aspect, because that’s not necessarily something at the center of our mission at CESTA. 

CL: I’d love to hear about that. It seems like collaboration, as you’ve both mentioned, but also the public, are themes that kind of swirl in the discourse around the digital humanities. I’m wondering if there is some philosophical reason for this. Is there anything inherent to the digital component of this work that lends itself to collaboration or to public engagement, as opposed to the lone scholar model of the traditional humanities?  

FF: In terms of collaboration, I am not sure if it’s philosophical, it’s really from practice. Digital humanities is so practice driven, and it’s just impossible to do research on a high level without collaboration, it’s just so complex. As a domain expert from a single discipline, you are just unable to realize all the steps and to make sure that your research abides by the standards that have been established in your discipline and in information science and in technology. It’s absolutely impossible to do it all yourself. That’s just a matter of need. You are forced to collaborate, otherwise, you will fail. You need the infrastructure, you need the people with different expertise, you need the people who have the traditional foundation in humanities research and questions, you need specific people who are able then to translate this and operationalize these questions and to model data, and then you need people to interpret that data to answer your research questions and present your findings in a digital environment. That is all so complex. Collaboration is just a requirement.  

As for the connection to public humanities, yeah, that’s a very good question. I came to public humanities like, I don’t know, the Virgin Mary to baby Jesus. When I was recruited to Venice the idea was to create a center that was both, digital and public, and I really love that connection. Of course, digital tools and publication formats lend themselves to communication with the wider public. You can share and disseminate much more efficiently with digital materials, and you can reach out and engage a public or a community that is not by profession humanities scholars using digital technologies. The scholarly output can be more relatable when we use visual and digital aspects than exclusively publishing academic books with a lot of footnotes that aren’t very accessible. Theoretically, you could ignore these opportunities to engage the public, and many scholars do, but it’s part of the spirit of the digital humanities to connect to society and to think about relevance.  

It’s somehow in the nature of working in the digital humanities, and in my position, it’s also an imperative. As director of my center, I get to reflect more on the relevance of our work and how to connect and collaborate with public institutions and museums, and to look for how can we make this more meaningful by getting out of the ivory tower and thinking about other people for whom this might be of interest. That’s very rewarding and satisfying. Another incentive is, of course, the funding structure. In Europe at least, the European Commission, which funds the most advanced and most prestigious research projects, explicitly asks you to consider public outreach. To create a successful research proposal, you’re forced to consider this. I think that’s a great thing. 

CL: And quite different from the US, where I feel like scholars are almost incentivized to speak to their niche, which then becomes more and more siloed. It’s interesting the way you describe the ethos of the digital humanities as always looking beyond the university towards a broader public. I wonder if there’s something about the fact that the field is still relatively new. Maybe because of its newness, it’s still looking toward the future and trying to engage new audiences and is somehow more imbricated in these broader questions about the future of the humanities and the future of higher education. 

GC: To me, these questions and the focus on collaboration originated from certain intellectual investments of the 90s like transdisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity. I grew up as a scholar in that moment. With Mapping the Republic of Letters, for instance, we were a group of scholars from different fields, Classics, History, French and Italian, and the ability to collaborate using digital tools was something we found very exciting. These new tools allowed us to meet colleagues from other disciplines and other fields and have conversations around methodological questions in a very productive way, learning a lot from each other.  

That’s something that, especially now as director of CESTA, has remained central for me. I really love pushing the boundaries between the disciplines. Where do these boundaries break down and where do we still encounter them. Where do we disagree, where might we say, no, no, I think of this differently from you. This is an important topic in our current Mellon Funded Mellon Sawyer seminar series “The Data that Divides Us: Recalibrating Data Methods for New Knowledge Frameworks Across the Humanities” at CESTA, which is about data in the humanities. We are four faculty PIs, collaborators from various departments, Classics, History, English and African and African American Studies, asking questions like, how do we define and use data in our respective fields, and even further afield, thanks to various invited outside speakers, and the graduate students and postdoc supported by the grant. And for me, the most interesting thing is when we disagree. It’s the moments when we reach discomfort that we can really push the conversation. But at the same time, our shared investment in digital methods and in data is what creates the opportunity for us to be collaborating in the first place.  

In terms of the public humanities, we don’t have currently as much infrastructure as in Europe. But there are great precedents at Stanford (the Chinese Railroad Workers project to say one, an early CESTA project) and now, at Stanford a big push, and the institutions asks us to reflect more on the public impact of our work. We are new to this as a sustained practice and interested in thinking more through what we mean by public humanities. Is it the op-ed article? Is it working in the community? And I think it can be both, but it’s something we need to approach more systematically. The opportunity to work with Franz’s center has been really useful for thinking through what these forms of public engagement can be. Our visit to Venice, as faculty and graduates in the humanities together, in October was so extraordinary for this reason, to be exposed to something like a public library, which is one of the oldest libraries in Europe, and also to the Biennale, which is a world-renowned art and architecture exhibit, and how these structures interact with both the local scholars and the global dimension of scholarship. We also had a visit to a community museum that offered a view of Venice that usually people don’t see as tourists. Here at Stanford, we live on a university campus, so it’s such a different task to imagine the relationship between our scholarship and the public, be this local or in the various area where our research takes us. 

The last thing I would say is that scalar representations are what is really at the core of my investment in digital humanities. There is a push in my own field of Classics right now for a global antiquity, and the digital holds this potential for global reach in a way that we didn’t imagine before. One can assume that one’s readership now extends far beyond your immediate, scholarly niche. Which means that the question of how to insert the local or the community back into that conversation is a new challenge. How do we keep that community-scale presence central? That’s also why thinking about two places or communities, in the context of a global collaboration, has been so interesting.  

CL: I love that idea that there’s a scalar component to public engagement as well. We hear about scale a lot in the digital humanities, which often promises to use data to conduct research at a much larger scale than would be possible using traditional, humanitic methods. But public humanities is also something that happens at multiple scales, from global to local.  

GC: Actually, this brings up the question of Artificial Intelligence. AI is what everyone is thinking about right now, scholars as well, and I think this is an opportunity to engage the rest of the community at Stanford in our discussions. Back when I started working in the digital humanities, there could be a lot of resistance from certain colleagues who really thought of the traditional humanities as separate and distinct from new innovations in technology, even if they were soon enough using Google and other tools to do research themselves. Now we have a widespread sense that AI could really change all our lives, and I think this is a moment when it will be easier for me to get any of my colleagues, even the ones that are not digital humanities scholars, to want to understand what’s happening and how this is going to affect them. So, I hope in that sense, thinking about the future, it could be a very good moment for us to expand beyond just the digital humanists at Stanford and reach our colleagues who don’t think that they do digital humanities but feel very impacted by this. 

CL: Right, and so digital humanists might have a new role in the Stanford community to stage these conversations about AI and help explain what’s happening there. Do you want to weigh in, Franz, on how the AI conversation has played out at Ca’ Foscari or in your digital humanities community more broadly?  

FF: There’s definitely hype at the moment about what large language models like ChatGPT can achieve. This technology is fascinating and it’s extremely productive, but it has limits. I think we are now at the stage to calm down a little bit and see what the actual use cases are. Of course, we are pointing to biases in data and so forth, which means we have to be very careful with what is being produced by these models and to be aware of the fact that there might be statistical errors. Next week I’m at a conference where I helped organize a workshop on how to use ChatGPT or artificial intelligence in the process of textual scholarship. Using AI to refine handwritten text recognition could really be a game changer in my field and could give us access to archival documents in such a way that has really not been imaginable in the past. So, even before AI, we used machine learning programs like handwritten text recognition to extract data from image files. Now the question is how to use large language models to clean up that data and also to do encoding to enrich the data. The problem is AI will never be as accurate as we would like it to be so it’s always important to have a clear disclaimer. For example, we’re using AI as an intermediate step to get a grip on a large amount of data, and then we will continue our work with a critical mindset and refine the data from this perspective. We need to keep the data quality in mind and be critical about when is it able to respond to our questions and where it might have biases. I think now that the hype around AI has gone on for a couple of months, we are also beginning to see the limits of these technologies, and beginning to test around to see what is useful and what isn’t.  

CL: It’s so interesting to hear about the workshop that you’re running, and it makes me wonder, does this sort of education around AI, even public education around AI, now fall under the purview of the digital humanities?  

FF: Absolutely. We have to take a stance or to provide some framing to accompany these developments, because they’re in the hands of the big tech companies. As humanists with a certain critical understanding of technology and who are collaborating with people with technical expertise, it is our responsibility to say something and to influence policy makers. I mean, we can’t just let it go and assume it will be fine. We have something to say about it, and we should say it. And we can use this technology productively. Actually, the workshop is not about teaching but experimenting. We invited experiments about what you can do with data using large language models and applications. We are at the stage right now where we need to see what we can do, and then draw together some conclusions about it together. It’s exciting to see what’s coming out of this.  

GC: I totally agree with Franz. This is the moment. And this is also the moment when colleagues who have not been involved with the digital humanities before will seek us out because they want to understand. Even if some of these tools are new to us as well, we have been thinking about technology in the humanities for so long, and we have to put that to use. The big turn I see in the last ten years is that some of the most cogent criticism of the digital humanities is actually coming from digital humanists themselves, who have thought deeply the about how the digital is different from other mediums. The most sophisticated critical thinking about the humanities and technology is by now inside the digital humanities. This expertise in thinking with the limits as well as the potentials of technological innovation is what makes us ready to meet this moment. I think there is a responsibility to the public to demystify and explain AI, and also what these new developments in technology mean for a study of the past and of culture more in general. The public is interested in understanding that. 

In that sense, it’s an exciting moment. Not remotely because AI might solve everything. But because also of exciting developments that allow for more sophisticated conversations. For example, in Classics, there is the new fact that now Herculaneum papyri that were carbonized and pulverized at the lightest touch in earlier attempts can start to be read again. That we might have more texts from antiquity is just something that one didn’t think was possible, and mind blowing. But this is also a perfect example to illustrate that this can work because so much is known about the context already. This is an opportunity to explain our domain expertise, how much knowledge goes into this kind of work, and what other parts of the world need more attention and scholarly research—this important argument for the humanities is something that I think we are poised to do and it’s very important for the public humanities, and that’s exciting. 

CL: It kind of positions digital humanists right at the center of all of these conversations. That is exciting. Giovanna, since you mentioned the critiques of digital humanities even coming from inside digital humanities itself, I was wondering if there are any misconceptions about the field or persistent critiques of the field that you find unjust and want to respond to. Digital humanities has been a hotly debated topic at the university level since its origins. Is there anything either of you want to set the record straight on? 

GC: Something came up again in a class I was teaching just yesterday. We were talking about data and ancient economy. The students were very sophisticated expressing how they don’t believe in neutrality of data. And of course, I was very pleased to hear them saying this. , But they also thought of the digital humanities as a place for acolytes of data, where we believe in data in a non-critical way. To the contrary I believe that critical attention to data curation and editing and the very idea that the data is “capta” not just given, these are some of the first lessons you learn in working on a digital humanities project. Or, for example, the early work on these big corpora, which are extraordinary and exist for English, but not for other traditions. We now know that something even like the European Cultural Heritage Online corpus (ECHO) needs so much curation and additions. The necessity of describing the data and documenting the data set is something that the digital humanists have long been advocating for. Yet there is still a misconception that, instead, the digital humanities is about uncritically using big data. We’re not even about big data, or at least not big in any comparative sense like in some of the science fields, but rather small and rich data. Just in the past three years there have been various flagship humanities journals had special issues about data which powerfully display how digital humanists critically think about data, with essential contributions to data science at large. So it pains me whenever instead there’s a perception that we are uncritically adopting big data.  

CL: We’re still humanists.  

GC: Yeah. 

CL: What about for you, Franz?  

FF: I couldn’t agree more. There is a lot of criticism out of ignorance, and the most pertinent critiques come from the community itself. We are humanists with a critical thinking approach. Our goal is to understand the implications of the use of data and of creating data and generating knowledge out of data, what this implies and where are the problems in these processes and how to make them more accurate, to facilitate the process of knowledge creating and understanding humanities content. That’s what we are interested in. And that’s the exciting thing of it.  

I would say, it’s only a question of how digital you are nowadays. You can't be a non-digital humanist. So that means you can’t ignore digital knowledge resources. You have to use the computer anyway. That’s a given. The resources, publications, primary source catalogs all these data editions and linguistics and bibliographies, all these databases, you can’t ignore this anymore. You are part of this and benefit from these ecosystems in any case. And then there’s the question, what do you do with the knowledge you get from these resources that have been created in the past decades? And if you don’t share it and make it accessible online, then it’s bad science. So, you know, you can’t ignore this knowledge base and say, no, only I will benefit from it, and I’ll publish a book that costs €300 and it’s only in specialized libraries. You have to take care of the data that you produce. If you don’t produce data nowadays, then what? You can of course make lots of hypotheses which are brilliant and interesting, but if you don’t produce data that you share, then I think, nowadays, something is wrong with your research. You have to give something back to the community to support further research, to advance your field and to connect to other fields.  

CL: So, the future of humanities must be digital and must be open access. You cannot be a non-digital humanist. That’s quite polemical. Giovanna, would you agree? 

GC: I do agree and maybe soon we will not need to say, “digital humanist,” just humanist.