The Johns Hopkins Center for Digital Humanities (CDH) was established to capitalize on several unique academic and practical strengths of the university and take a distinctive leading role among its peers at the intersection of computational and humanistic scholarship. This involves a particular focus on the development, application, and justification of computational intelligence, to create insights in traditional humanistic domains while also directly driving research in the machine learning community. On the computational side, we focus on areas such as:

• Unsupervised machine learning and discovery

  What happens when we let a computational model infer its own definition of "interesting"?
• Knowledge representation and augmentation

  Can we productively represent the primary sources of a domain alongside the variety of conceptual frameworks that different scholars bring to bear on them?
• Interpretable models for scholars

  How can meaningful insight move dynamically between human and computational models of the world?

The CDH is closely linked to the Computer Science department and Center for Language and Speech Processing, one of the nation's pre-eminent machine learning research groups focused on computational models of human language and understanding. Johns Hopkins, a historical center of gravity for the evolution of semiotics and structuralism and debates surrounding these and other topics at the intersection of science and the humanities, is in a unique position to consider the unique and shared strengths of human and computational intelligence, while pursuing applied research that incorporates both.