Digital Humanities

Abstract

This year’s review of digital humanities (DH) continues to position DH at the epicentre of debates around AI, while tracing how these conversations have evolved within disciplinary scholarship from 2024 and early 2025. The surveyed interventions critically examine trajectories in contemporary DH where uncritical endorsements of massive datasets and computational complexity often result in algorithmic reductionism, which can obscure and oversimplify complexities in the domain of the humanities and social sciences. Building on the authors’ emphasis on decolonial approaches in DH—scholarship that frequently develops beyond traditional Anglo-American frameworks—this survey of scholarship reveals that significant DH contributions are not necessarily dependent on vast amounts of data. Rather, meaningful work in the discipline can emerge from relatively constrained information infrastructures that leverage the strength of community connections and focus on granular and localized user experiences. The essay is organized into five key areas: small-scale databases in DH; the limitations of scale in Global South and Global Majority contexts; resistance to bias in AI, metadata, and archival practices; user relationships with archives; and the emerging role of video games as digital archives. Together, these scholarly interventions reveal how DH researchers, educators, and practitioners can and should tactically repurpose strategic digital sites, tools, and methods for nuanced approaches that prioritize humanistic enquiry over the supposed objectivity of large-scale computational paradigms.