The United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals outline the massive challenges humanity must face to survive on Planet Earth in the 21st Century. All knowledge and experiences accumulated by human societies across time and space could be essential to address these grand challenges. Thus, we should find a way to make this knowledge readily available wherever and whenever decision-makers, heritage stakeholders, and scholars might need it. Professor Andrea Nanetti, an award-winning and internationally recognised expert in Digital Humanities, recently published an open-access paper exploring the opportunities and challenges of using artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to leverage human heritage and empower societies to see beyond what is thinkable.

A new way of reading and engaging with modernist authors such as Virginia Woolf and Karel Čapek might help us to better understand our time of environmental uncertainty. In his recent paper, Professor George Micajah Phillips of Franklin College draws on formalism and material feminism to argue for a new approach in modernist studies, which he terms ‘formalist materialism’. This approach may enable us to engage with early-twentieth-century modernist texts in fascinating new ways, helping us to form fresh understandings of climate change, outside of standard, crisis-oriented narratives.