Cambridge Conversations: Digital transformation - a revolution in the humanities?

Technologies are intimately bound up with our hopes for the future – and with our deepest fears and anxieties. Living in a world that is saturated with digital technology, we swing between enchantment and disenchantment, and with good reason: tech is famously neither good nor bad nor even neutral, but instead reflects ourselves and our cultures and societies in all our complexity and ambiguity.

Whether we know it or not, the humanities have always shaped our relationship with technology. They continue to play an integral role in the way we understand and respond to global digital transformations. But are we now on the cusp of a ‘moment of automation’ that will profoundly alter our human existence? Or is the digital ‘revolution’ more a process of evolution that has been quietly unfolding over decades?

Vice-Chancellor Professor Stephen J Toope and panellists from Cambridge Digital Humanities: Professor Caroline Bassett, Professor of Digital Humanities and Dr Siddharth Soni, Isaac Newton Trust Research Fellow. Together, explore what we mean by ‘digital humanities’ and examine the humanities’ crucial role in understanding our digital past, present and future.

[grantyoung]

A very important and stimulating conversation