EDDH

Digital Humanities has become a vibrant, rapidly growing field in recent years. It witnessed major innovations, new technologies and methods, bringing together research initiatives in the arts and humanities with cutting edge empirical methods from data science, machine learning, visualization and other fields.

The EPFL PhD program in Digital Humanities (EDDH) educates a new generation of scientists, who will bring together domain knowledge with current quantitative methods and are able to analyze, model and critically reflect on problems and challenges from real world contexts. The PhD program is directed to computer and data scientists, engineers, mathematicians, life scientists as well as to broadly skilled students from Humanities and Social Sciences interested in the range of interdisciplinary research questions covered by the overarching Digital Humanities framework. The program stimulates close collaboration between students, researchers and professors in Digital Humanities. Our doctoral students are trained to provide intellectual contributions and leadership in Digital Humanities as well as social and cultural issues at large.

Admission is on a competitive basis. All admissible students will have to be accepted by a host lab within the EDDH to be admitted to EPFL. At their host labs, PhD students will receive a salary. At the time of enrollment future students are required to have a Master’s degree in a related field.

Prospective students are strongly advised to contact potential host lab directors in advance of their application.

Research opportunities

Research opportunities in the program include:

– Empirical research in the areas of art, music, history and literature

– Data sculpting and experimental museology

– Social computing

– Social, political, cultural and ethical dimensions of digital technology

– Data science, machine learning, distributed information systems

Upcoming public defense

EDDH News

“The frontiers between antiquity and AI fit me very well”

Published:24.03.25 — Sven Najem-Meyer of the Digital Humanities Laboratory explores the intersection of machine learning and classical studies, tackling the challenges of document processing for texts in Ancient Greek. On March 27, he will compete in the finals of “My Thesis in 180 Seconds” at EPFL.

Interpreting music through the lens of linguistics

Published:13.08.24 — For his PhD thesis “Hearing Structure in Music”, Gabriele Cecchetti of the Digital and Cognitive Musicology Lab at CDH investigated how to structurally interpret the way we hear music using concepts from linguistics.

“An opportunity to discover a hidden layer of historical information”

Published:21.02.24 — Beatrice Vaienti, doctoral assistant in digital humanities at EPFL, uses computational tools to study errors in 19th century maps of Jerusalem.