Multilingual Digital Humanities

Multilingual Digital Humanities explores the impact of monolingualism—especially Anglocentrism—on digital practices in the humanities and social sciences.

The volume explores a wide range of applied contexts, such as digital linguistic injustice, critical digital literacy, digital learning, digital publishing, low-resourced, minoritised or endangered languages in a digital space, and multilingual historical intertextuality. These discussions are situated within wider work on language technologies, language documentation and international (in particular European) language-based infrastructure creation. Drawing on both primary and secondary research, this four-part book features 13 diverse case studies of infrastructural projects, pedagogical resources, computational models, interface building, and publishing initiatives in a range of languages, including Arabic, French, Russian, Portuguese, Italian, German, Spanish, Bengali, Hindi, Malayalam, and Tamil. All the debates are contextualised within a wider cultural frame, thus bridging the gap between the linguistic focus of the multilingual initiatives and wider discussion of cultural criticism in DH.

Multilingual Digital Humanities recognizes the digital as a culturally situated and organic multilingual entity embedding past, present, and future worlds, which reacts to and impacts on institutional and methodological frameworks for knowledge creation. It is essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners working in digital humanities and digital studies.

Lorella Viola is Research Associate in Linguistics and Digital Humanities at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, University of Luxembourg. She researches the implications of the digital for the conceptualisation of digital objects, digital practices, and digital knowledge production with a focus on heritage, material culture, and preservation. She also investigates the relationship between language, media, and society and develops critical, data-driven methodologies for digital humanities and digital heritage.

Paul Spence is Reader in the Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) at King's College London, UK. His background is in modern languages, digital pedagogy, digital publishing and structured knowledge representation. His research has recently focused on interactions between languages, multilingualism, linguistic diversity, and digital practice. He researches digital transformations in how we engage with languages, while also analysing the power of language to disrupt digital monolingualism in knowledge infrastructures, methods, and data.