Introduction
This year’s pieces for Digital Humanities in General have covered various aspects of the practice and theory of Digital Humanities, providing a variety of thought-provoking perspectives on developments in technology and methodology within the field. Before diving into this year’s contributions, however, as a first-time Editor for The Digital Orientalist, I feel compelled to introduce myself.
I am Orestis Georgalas, currently working as Archival Programs Designer at the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT), and occasionally contributing to various academic publications and projects as an editor and/or proofreader. I have a background in International Relations (BA), Global History (MA), and Digital Humanities (MA). My main research foci include postcolonialism, the history of the global Cold War, and especially the history of development in Africa and Asia within that period, as well as digital historical cartography.
This Editor’s Digest covers all publications made by the Contributors and Editors of the team Digital Humanities in General in Autumn 2025 and Spring 2026.
Publications of the Digital Humanities in General Team
The fall season began with Rachael Griffiths’ “Overview of Digital Tools and Resources for Central and South Asian Studies Reviewed by The DO Members”. In her piece, Rachael provides a comprehensive list of publications by members of The DO, covering a broad array of categories such as Art, Archaeology, and Musicology, Databases and Digital Manuscript Collections, Research Platforms and Technical Frameworks, Text Processing and Language, and Digital Media and Outreach. Listing over 40 relevant pieces published by The DO members, Rachael’s overview is an invaluable starting point for new and seasoned researchers looking to expand their digital horizons in relation to Central and South Asian Studies.
The piece “From Rigid Taxonomies to Networks of Relationships: When the Semantic Web Redesigns Cultural Narratives” by Tiziana Pasciuto explores how ontologies in Digital Humanities, especially in relation to Oriental Studies, can be transformed and utilized in order to provide a more comprehensive description of the complex relationships of cultural heritage objects. She argues that ontologies, when not approached with a deep understanding of these relationships, can often contribute to an Orientalist narrative that exoticizes specific objects and thus prohibit our understanding of their provenance and historical journeys. To avoid such pitfalls, Tiziana provides an approach filled with examples on how professionals may utilize ontologies to uncover and highlight the true historical relationships of historical objects.
In the third and final piece for Autumn 2025, Zachary Butler highlights the affordances of using Marimo Notebooks for projects that require coding. He provides ample examples of the software’s features, discusses its various interconnections with other pieces of software, its type of version control, and compares it with more traditional approaches to coding.
Both pieces published during the spring season belong to Rachael Griffiths. In her first spring piece for The DO titled “AI-Generated Feedback: Preliminary Thoughts”, Rachael explores how artificial intelligence can be used in the paper review process. To that end, she experiments with paperreview.ai, an open access AI system whose aim is to analyse papers and provide relevant feedback. Rachael thoroughly discusses the system’s workflows and operations, before presenting the results of her experiments and discussing her point of view on the role of AI in the review process.
Finally, in her second spring piece, “ERROR 404: Failure not Found”, Rachael touches upon a subject that is often uncomfortable for the majority of digital humanists and researchers in general: failure. In her incisive piece, Rachael discusses how the silence surrounding the notion of failure in academic endeavours can eventually prove to be harmful for research itself. Through a personal academic example, she urges researchers to treat failure as data, that is, information regarding what can and should change in a research workflow, instead of a sign of inadequacy on the part of the researchers. Openness about failure, she claims, can lead to better communication and eventually improved workflows, which will benefit a research field as a whole.
Conclusion
Overall, it has been a bountiful year for Digital Humanities in General. The contributors’ pieces have touched upon the numerous and complex possibilities of digital tools and approaches within the field, while also showcasing the affordances of specific software through concise and well-documented experiments. I hope that this Editor’s Digest has provided enough starting points for anyone interested in finding out more about the work published by The DO team. Happy reading!
