Experiment – Collaborate – Innovate

Welcome to the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. Our mission is to empower humanities scholars to become more confident creators and critics of technology. Toward that end, we provide a space for exploratory collaborations across the disciplines, as well as digital skill-sharing at all levels of experience and expertise. We value curiosity and creativity, process over product, embodied experiences, and fine-grained analysis attentive to material, historical, and cultural specificity.

Today, this mission is more vital than ever. Advances in AI have forced us to change how we teach writing, even as the same tools are cracking open exciting new perspectives on history, art, and culture. Open accessdigital publishing can connect humanities research to a wider audience but comes with challenging questions about copyright, credit, and sustainability. More troubling, all this data seems to be accelerating our current climate crisis and ecological disaster.

We at the Price Lab believe that to understand our moment, we need the humanities. Through seminars, workshops, lectures, and symposia, we provide forums for presentation and discussion of work by leading scholars from on campus and around the country. Through our curricular initiatives, we facilitate the development of courses in digital methods specifically aimed at humanities majors and graduate students. These courses are designed to enhance students' ability to use computational tools, improve their collaborative learning and research skills, and better position them for 21st-century careers. We also host ongoing working groups in topics like digital poetics, computational humanities, and the ethics of AI. And we have specialists available to consult or collaborate with you on a project.

As the centerpiece of the School of Arts and Sciences strategic initiative Humanities in the Digital Age, the Price Lab was established in 2015 by Professor James English with a $7 million gift from Michael and Vikki Price and $4 million of generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Today, it serves as a central node of communication and exchange across Penn's many departments, centers, and schools with expertise and interest in the digital humanities. In all these endeavors we are committed to maximizing the diversity and inclusiveness of DH.