The NWU Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH) dreams of serving a South Africa where every community’s stories, knowledge systems, and creative expressions thrive in dynamic digital ecosystems, ushering in an era in which technology amplifies local wisdom, bridges generational divides, and catalyses just, equitable futures across the continent and beyond.

In an era marked by rapid technological change and a growing digital divide, African voices need to be at the centre of our innovation plan. Communities across South Africa face complex challenges that affect their interactions with both tangible and intangible cultural products. At the same time, technological solutions are often designed in isolation from the very people they claim to serve, reinforcing inequalities rather than addressing systemic problems such as social fragmentation, cultural erasure, and economic exclusion. Without a deliberate, human-centred intervention, we risk losing an invaluable shared cultural memory, underutilising the arts as catalysts for positive social change, and perpetuating a one-sided narrative in which digital innovation trumps local epistemologies and lived experiences.

In response to these challenges, the Faculty of Humanities established the Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH) in 2024. The CDH is a forward‐thinking, transdisciplinary scholarly centre focused on addressing complex societal problems by placing the human at the heart of technological and digital development in the humanities. At the CDH, we are dedicated to exploring how intangible heritage and the arts can be documented, curated, shared, and leveraged for inclusive social and economic development. We are passionate about telling impactful local stories using multimedia platforms and sharing data in creative and storied ways to give insight into complex social problems. By marrying metamodernist and critical posthumanist perspectives with Afrocentric methodologies, we ask hard questions about “who tells our stories” and “how can emerging technologies support, nurture, and amplify local knowledge?”