Humanities Informatics is emerging as a new field in response to these developments. There are clear connections here to the work done in digital humanities, including the manipulation and visualization of data. But humanities informatics is less concerned with the actual computation of data than it is with the ways in which data structures and algorithms inform political economy, humanistic cultural production, human scientific endeavors, and studies of the evolution of human life itself. The 2018 CHCI conference on Humanities Informatics showcased the power of the humanities to address these urgent questions about the ‘human’ in our information age.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she combines and mutates in her current work on digital media. She is author of Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (MIT, 2006), Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (MIT 2011), and Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (MIT 2016).. She is co-editor (with Tara McPherson and Patrick Jagoda) of a special issue of American Literature entitled New Media and American Literature, co-editor (with Lynne Joyrich) of a special issue of Camera Obscura entitled Race and/as Technology and co-editor (with Anna Fisher and Thomas Keenan) of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, 2nd edition (forthcoming Routledge, 2015). She was a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow, ACLS and American Academy of Berlin Fellow, and she has been a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and a Wriston Fellow at Brown. She has been the Velux Visiting Professor of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School; the Wayne Morse Chair for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon, Visiting Professor at Leuphana University (Luneburg, Germany), Visiting Associate Professor in the History of Science Department at Harvard, of which she is currently an Associate.