Dream

The NWU Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH) serves 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.

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.

Mission

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.