What Is Digital Humanities—and Why Does It Matter Now?
 

Digital humanities is an interdisciplinary field that combines humanistic inquiry with digital tools to transform how we study culture, language, history, and society. From digital archives and multilingual publishing to data-driven cultural analysis, the field is reshaping research, teaching, and public scholarship worldwide.

The Roundglass India Center, Technology Ethics Initiative, and College of Arts & Sciences invite students and faculty to explore this rapidly evolving space through a special lecture by Professor Nirmala Menon, an internationally recognized leader in digital humanities.
 

Professor Menon is Chair Professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Indore, where she leads the Digital Humanities and Publishing Research Group and is Chair of the JPN National Centre of Excellence in the Humanities. She also serves as an Affiliate Research Professor at the University of Oxford and is currently a Fulbright Fellow at Northeastern University (2025–26). Her scholarship spans postcolonial studies, digital humanities, and multilingual knowledge systems, with a sustained focus on decolonizing global knowledge infrastructures.

Dr. Menon's Talk:  Digital Knowledge Infrastructures and Digital Humanities Projects: Intersections and Challenges

In this timely talk, Professor Menon examines the uneven and evolving trajectory of digital humanities (DH) in India and the broader research ecosystem. She explores the skepticism and resistance the field sometimes encounters—including concerns about distancing from core humanities questions or borrowing the rhetoric of STEM for legitimacy—while making the case that DH is far more than its critiques.

Professor Menon argues that humanities scholars must actively harness, interrogate, and shape digital technologies to ensure that enduring humanistic questions remain central to technological development and deployment. Drawing on major initiatives—including Project KSHIP at IIT Indore, the DST-sponsored SINDHU project, the Electronic Literature from India anthology, and the work of Open Access India—she highlights efforts to decolonize knowledge systems, expand multilingual scholarship, and make research more accessible and equitable.

The talk will also address the continuing structural challenges facing humanities research infrastructures and invite conversation about the future of digital scholarship in global and Indian contexts.

Students, faculty, and researchers interested in digital scholarship, global humanities, publishing, technology and society, and South Asia are especially encouraged to attend.