Dream

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?”

Vision

The NWU Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH) aspires to be the premier transdisciplinary hub in Africa for human-centred digital innovation, where critical posthumanist inquiry, Afrocentric epistemologies, and metamodernist aesthetics converge to care for, understand, reinterpret, and reanimate intangible and tangible heritage and creative products. By 2030, we envision a network of co‐created archives, interactive labs, and participatory platforms that empower scholars, students, and communities to author their own digital narratives, foster sustainable creative economies, and inform policy dialogues around culture, technology, and social transformation.

Visual and Audio Creative Labs

At the NWU Centre for Digital Humanities, we collaborate with scholars, artists, and community members to:

1. Document and curate tangible and intangible heritage through ethically grounded digital archives and immersive storytelling tools;
2. Co‐design multimedia and creative labs that equip local stakeholders with the skills to reframe and remix their cultural practices;
3. Leverage data visualisation and sonification to surface hidden patterns in social challenges, amplifying marginalised voices;
4. Develop and disseminate Open Educational Resources that integrate critical, Afrocentric perspectives into digital tools and methodologies in the humanities and beyond; and
5. Advocate for caring policy frameworks and practices that ensure technology remains a conduit to care for the human and more-than-human world.