The rise of Digital Humanities and new careers at the crossroads of tech and culture

For much of the last century, the Humanities were understood as a world apart from technology. This enduring distinction is fast dissolving, as Humanities disciplines are increasingly utilising computational tools and other digital methods.

At this intersection of the Humanities and Technology is Digital Humanities, which is becoming a recognised field, complete with dedicated departments and degree programmes. It’s worth considering why Digital humanities is important, especially for students trying to ascertain the value of a Humanities degree in today’s job market.

For years, the assumption was that technology would eventually make such degrees redundant, but the evidence suggests the opposite. Technology has not reduced the relevance of these disciplines; it has widened it. Consider three career paths that illustrate this ongoing change.

As AI advances, one career that is becoming increasingly important is an AI ethics specialist. Algorithms today make numerous consequential decisions, including who qualifies for a loan, whose resume makes it past the screening, what content is allowed, and what gets taken down.

Questions that used to live inside philosophy classes — what fairness actually means, whose values end up coded into a system, who takes the blame when things go wrong — have now landed on the desks of tech companies and government regulators.

That’s the space an AI ethics specialist occupies. Much of the job involves asking hard questions repeatedly: What data trained this model? What assumptions is it quietly carrying? Who could end up worse off because of it?

Getting into this field usually starts with an undergraduate degree in Philosophy, History, or other Humanities subjects, followed by a postgraduate qualification in Ethics, Public Policy, or a newer programme built specifically around AI governance and technology policy.

Then there’s the text analyst working in cultural analytics who takes computational tools and points them at huge volumes of cultural material: novels, film archives, or decades’ worth of old newspapers. Through text mining and natural language processing, researchers can track how language or artistic style have transformed over centuries at a scale that is manually impossible.

To pursue text analytics, an undergraduate degree in Literature or Linguistics along with a postgraduate in Digital Humanities, Computational Linguistics, or any degree that teaches Python alongside statistical methods are necessary.

A digital curator is another exciting career option. Today, museums and historical monuments are creating immersive experiences. What has changed is the toolkit. Alongside curatorial judgement, the role now calls for comfort with digital media, interface design, and often virtual/augmented reality platforms.

This path is generally built on an undergraduate degree in Art History, Museum Studies, or a related Humanities field, followed by specialised training or a postgraduate qualification in Museum Studies, Digital Curation, or Heritage Management, several of which now include modules on digital exhibition design.

Notably, in all three careers, technology is not really the point. Vast amounts of data still require a person’s discernment to ask the right questions and to judge. This is exactly what a Humanities education seeks to cultivate.

Algorithms can detect patterns, not interpret or critically examine them. Economics was seen as a subject to understand how countries cope with issues at different points and how the sequence of theories emerged. Now, with the availability of enormous data and digital support, Economics graduates can learn combinations of Economic Theories, Statistics, Mathematics and computer software packages to handle huge real-time data using Econometric Techniques to provide solutions for complex problems.

When deciding academic pathways, it is not necessary to abandon the Humanities in favour of technology. But it is essential to build an undergraduate Humanities degree with postgraduate study or certification in a digital specialisation and be fluent in both the interpretive and the computational.

The Humanities are not being displaced by technology but are simply being asked to do more. In the process, students now have a wider and more varied range of professional futures open to them than at almost any point in recent memory.

The writer is the Dean, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Business Studies, SRM Institute of Science and Technology (SRMIST), Chennai