Rate My Professor James Smithies

James Smithies is Professor of Digital Humanities and founding Director of the HASS Digital Research Hub at The Australian National University's College of Arts and Social Sciences, a position he assumed in 2024. A New Zealand historian by training, he earned his doctorate from the University of Canterbury, where his thesis examined post-war New Zealand literary critique, exploring the history of ideas in late twentieth-century Aotearoa/New Zealand. Prior to ANU, Smithies served as Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London, where he was founding director of King's Digital Lab and deputy director of King's eResearch. Earlier, as a senior lecturer at the University of Canterbury, he contributed to the development of the UC CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive and designed New Zealand’s first digital humanities teaching programme. He also held roles in government and commercial IT sectors in the United Kingdom and New Zealand as a technical writer, editor, business analyst, and project manager.

Smithies is a historian of culture, ideas, and technology with expertise in Research Software Engineering. His research applies computational tools and methods to humanities, arts, and social sciences subjects, including digital product development such as websites, electronic books, and mobile applications; data analysis of text, image, and social media archives; and provision of digital services like libraries and archives across history, literature, philosophy, sociology, political science, and linguistics. He has published widely, including the monograph The Digital Humanities and the Digital Modern (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), the co-edited Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press, 2026), and Digital Modernity: Why We Need to Think Historically About the Digital Age (Routledge, 2026). Other key publications include “The Kindle™ as Necker Cube” (Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 2024), “Towards a National Data Architecture for Cultural Collections: Designing the Australian Cultural Data Engine” (Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2024), and “Large Language Models and Transnational Research: Introducing the AI as Infrastructure (AIINFRA) Project” (2024). As principal investigator on funded projects such as AI as Infrastructure exploring large language models for historical research, the ARDC Research Software Engineering Capacity Enhancement Project, and the Social Science Research Infrastructure Network, Smithies leads interdisciplinary efforts advancing digital HASS infrastructure in Australia and internationally.