Digital Humanities, Conspiracy, and the Age of AI: An Interview with Matthew N. Hannah

In this interview, Matthew N. Hannah reflects on the development of the digital humanities and on the place of humanistic inquiry in a rapidly changing information environment. Moving between his own formation as a literary scholar, his research on online conspiracy movements, and his work building digital scholarship spaces within university libraries, he considers how platforms, conspiracy narratives, and generative artificial intelligence are reshaping the ways knowledge is produced, circulated, and trusted. The conversation also addresses questions of access, multilingual scholarship, and international collaboration, and closes with reflections on teaching difficult subjects and on the responsibilities of preserving endangered knowledge. Throughout the interview, Hannah argues for computational methods as an extension of, rather than a replacement for, humanistic modes of thinking, and for interdisciplinary community as the foundation of the field’s future.