h.lab

Case Western Reserve University, College of Arts and Sciences

Timothy Beal, Director

Short for “humanities lab,” h.lab is a hands-on, distributed laboratory dedicated to providing humanities students and scholars with access to new and emerging computational technologies in order to foster technological innovation in the humanities while also empowering substantive, informed public engagement concerning the ethical and existential implications of these new technologies.

New computational tools and methods are radically altering education and scholarship in the humanities and in higher education generally. The future of the university is more open than it has been in centuries. At the same time, because most scholars in the humanities lack hands-on experience with these emerging technologies, we are missing opportunities to make our own research come alive in new ways and to contribute meaningfully to public conversations about the future of technology and what it means to be human in a rapidly changing world. If we want to participate meaningfully in the discovery — indeed the invention — of the future of the humanities, we must embrace new forms of scholarship focused on technological experimentation and creative design.

Humanists face challenges to engaging these new tools. On the one hand, there is still pressure in many corners of the academy to stick with traditional media technologies and methods of research and publication. On the other hand, these new tools can be very difficult to learn; most are highly specialized, math- and programming-intensive, and oriented toward commercial markets.

We must find creative ways to provide scholars and students in the humanities with both access to these new tools and opportunities to experiment with them -- to learn by doing. This is not only the most effective way to bring real technological innovation to the academic humanities but also the most meaningful way for scholars in the humanities to contribute to public discourse concerning the ethical and existential implications of these new technologies.