The Leiden University Centre for Digital Humanities (LUCDH) is an interdisciplinary centre that brings together students and faculty from across the Leiden community. Together, we are committed to the study of human cultures using computational approaches and to rethinking the role of the humanities in a digital age.
LUCDH promotes the informed and critical uses of digital technology and computational approaches in art, literature, history, area studies, linguistics, philosophy, religion, and other disciplines of the humanities. Today, cultural artifacts are increasingly available in digitised or born-digital form and computing power, which has grown exponentially over the last several decades, is more accessible than ever. The centre aims to bring together students and faculty from across the Leiden community to explore the crossroads of the humanities and computing.
LUCDH’s inclusive approach envisions the digital humanities as an umbrella under which researchers and students adapt computational and computer-aided methods to access, analyse, sequence, and present cultural artifacts in new ways. Faculty affiliated with LUCDH and its collaborators from a wide range of disciplines engage in many aspects of the digital humanities, including, but not limited to, the digitization of analogue objects, digital curation, text analysis, data visualization, storytelling in new media, and critical theory. Our extended community involves scholars from across Leiden University, the Netherlands, Europe, and the world. LUCDH is one of few research centres in the digital humanities with balanced coverage of Western and non-Western languages and cultures.
Faculty within the LUCDH work to attract funding to Leiden University for a variety of digital projects through grant-writing. We organize events and offer advising for research, teaching, career development, and networking. Anyone within the university community interested in the digital humanities is welcome to get in contact with us. We aim to help faculty learn how digital methods can improve their research and teaching. For students, we hope to provide access to the digital humanities through these events and a minor program, to enrich their studies and their job prospects after they graduate.