Digital Humanities

Abstract

Current conversations around the manifestations of artificial intelligence have led to binary viewpoints that either predict apocalyptic visions of imminent human obsolescence or forthcoming machinic sentience and technological singularity. Amid these polarized perspectives, the materiality of massive digital infrastructures that regularly exploit vulnerable labour forces and the environmental costs driving such emerging forms of digitality are being systematically erased. As a field bridging humanistic enquiry and computational methods, digital humanities finds itself at the epicentre of such debates around the potentials and pitfalls of what artificial intelligence and its futures imply for scholarly and humanistic practices. Therefore, this chapter identifies and reviews interventions from 2023 and early 2024, across both discursive and physical locations, to show how current disciplinary conversations in digital humanities must emerge from both traditional and unconventional sites, which navigate the intersections between artificial and human domains, while emphasizing the provocations and issues that will shape the future of the field.