The AI Lab is the virtual digital humanities lab at Kenyon College. Students and faculty work side by side to explore new computational approaches and create innovative research projects.
The lab just completed a $60,000 IBM/Notre Dame Tech Ethics grant, "Can GenAI predict human behavior" jointly with Yong Suk Lee (Notre Dame), culminating in the Notre Dame Tech Ethics symposium in January 2025 at Notre Dame, where we presented our findings.
Over the course of the academic year, student Digital Humanities Research Fellows will work alongside faculty to hone computational methods, create an interactive website, and seed the website with sample narratives. As a public digital humanities project, the goal is to make sentiment analysis easy and accessible to a wide audience of students and scholars interested in storytelling, narrative and emotion.
Current lab projects include work on emotion analysis and facial recognition, human-chatbot interaction and building multi-agent pipelines for social good.
The lead faculty researchers are Katherine Elkins, Jon Chun, Jesse Matz, Matthew Suazo and Kathleen Fernando.
Digital Humanities Research Fellows
Fellows work alongside faculty on the current AI Lab projects.
Students who have taken at least two digital humanities courses at Kenyon are invited to apply to become Digital Humanities Research Fellows. Contact Professor Kate Elkins at elkinsk@kenyon.edu for details. Kenyon alumni fellows include Olivia Frey and Miles Shebar.
AI Lab Talks
All AI Lab talks are open to the Kenyon community. Talks this year include:
- Can AI (GPT-3) Pass a Writer’s Turing Test?
You may have seen the recent media hype surrounding the release of OpenAI’s GPT-3. Since 2019, students and faculty at Kenyon have been experimenting with its earlier version, GPT-2. - AI in the Writer's Room
A reprise of a workshop for OSU’s Humanities and Cognitive Science Summer Institute. This is hands-on and interactive. - AI Improv Theater
Learn about our AI experimental theater project and talk to our Divabot, coded/created by Jon Chun and based on the new transformer model of AI language generation. This talk is sponsored with a generous grant from Denison University. - The Shape of Stories
A sneak peak into the research behind our forthcoming book in the Cambridge Elements Digital Literary Studies series.
Katherine Elkins
