The Critical Digital Humanities Initiative (CDHI) enables trans-disciplinary collaborations that emphasize questions of power, social justice, and critical theory in digital humanities research. Its vision is to harness the very tools of the digital revolution to forge a new paradigm of critical humanities scholarship, one that bridges the humanities’ emphasis on power and culture in historical perspective with the tools and analysis of digital technology. The CDHI is new mix of research workshop and design atelier, equipping humanities researchers with the technical and design expertise to use digital tools to ask new questions, share new knowledge, and analyze power and inequality in historical perspective.

We provide consultation for faculty and graduate students; offer fellowships to graduate and undergraduate students; host postdoctoral fellows; organize critical digital humanities learning communities on specific topics/approaches; offer seed funding for emerging faculty research; provide bursaries for training in critical DH methods; support emerging curricula on all three campuses; program workshops, talks, events and conferences to support critical digital humanities research; host public events through our Lightning Lunch series and our annual speaker series; host an annual conference; foster a community of practice for critical DH researchers create; support research communication to broader publics; steward a bi-weekly newsletter and list-serv; and advocate for DH lab space.

The CDHI builds on the foundation of the Digital Humanities Network (DHN), which has supported research in the digital humanities at the University of Toronto since 2016. We define the digital humanities broadly, to include all the communities and methods, tools, and platform-based approaches often associated with the digital humanities, such as archiving, digitizing, curation, analysis, coding, editing, visualization, mapping, modelling, versioning, and prototyping. We have an inclusive agenda that encompasses interpretive or theoretical work on digitality. We bring together over 80 faculty members, 11 digital scholarship librarians, 10 research staff, and scores of graduate students, undergraduate researchers, and postdoctoral fellows working on over 40 DH research projects and teams.