CDH Open: From between millstones, loaves of bread.

Jennifer Edmond is Professor in Digital Humanities at Trinity College Dublin. She has been the PI or co-PI of 10+ large-scale funded research projects, with total grant capture of ca. €15 million. Her research explores interdisciplinarity, humanistic and hybrid research processes (with a special focus on the infrastructures they require), and critical digital humanities as a contributor to both research and technology development. In these fields, she has a publication record including more than 60 internationally peer-reviewed articles, chapters, reports, datasets and books and has also served in leadership roles in a wide range of European-level policy and infrastructure organisations.

The digital humanities appear, at times, not merely to be inherently interdisciplinary, but indeed situated at the confluence of two different epistemicidal trends. On the one hand, the so-called ‘crisis of the humanities,’ with its deep roots in the mid-20th century massification of higher education, can lead integrative, interdisciplinary approaches such as those fostered by DH to be viewed as a saviour for the traditional disciplines, or alternatively as some form of neo-liberal plot to destroy them once and for all. On the other side, emerging technologies – in particular those based on generative AI – are rapidly shifting the landscape for knowledge retrieval and creation, leading to new forms of bias and elision, exploitation and marginalisation.

Recognition of these negative side effects to how AI development is consolidating access to resources has led in turn to numerous voices calling for greater humanistic input in the development of these tools, a call which has, to date, largely gone unanswered. What affordances resulting from their position of betweenness might digital humanists engage in order to play a role in advancing this much-needed transformation in the development and deployment of AI-based technologies, and the social hierarchies and power dynamics that accompany them? Could the epistemicidal tendencies of the current (and near future) generations of LLMs and their kin be an opportunity for hope, rather than just for despair, in this respect?

The presentation will close with a reflection on the model of Democracy-in-the-Loop (Ohren et al. 2026) as an inspiration for how DH might contribute to the movement to enhance, rather than threaten, human agency, autonomy and cultural participation in the digital age.

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Image: Lone Thomasky & Bits&Bäume / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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