Price Lab for Digital Humanities

April 22: Powered by Smart: A Prehistory of Everyday AI, a book talk with Professors Sarah Murray (University of Michigan) and Rahul Mukherjee (Penn). Murray's recently published book reveals an alternative feminist pathway that seeded hospitable ideas about AI by showing how smartness was a techno-cultural ideal long before the digital age.

Wednesday, April 22 - 3:30-5:00pm
Humanities Conference Room, Williams Hall 623, 255 South 36th Street

Cosponsored by Penn's Digital Culture and Society; Penn Cinema Studies Program; Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies - GSWS at Penn; and Price Lab for Digital Humanities.

Free and open to the public. Registration is required.
https://wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/murray

Formed Spring '25, our Critical Approaches to AI Working Group meets regularly to discuss how the rise of AI has impacted teaching, learning, and research.

This past fall, the group drafted a white paper meant to address the challenges that generative AI poses for instruction in critical reading, writing, and research—skills vital to the humanities and foundational for all learning—and advocating for new forms of AI-free instruction.

Registration for Dream Lab 2026 is OPEN!

This annual week-long training opportunity is designed to help humanists—especially grad students and early-stage scholars—become more confident and thoughtful users, creators, and critics of digital technology.

This fall, the “Reinventing Aristotle” exhibit opened in Penn's Kislak Center. Curated by Eva Del Soldato, Lynne Farrington, and Hannah Marcus, the exhibit shows how the philosopher has been refigured and reimagined in the centuries since his death. Thanks to the work of graduate students Youri Buyle and Sarah Marie Leitenberger of the Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies department, the exhibit has been brought online, too—explore it now:

Reinventing Aristotle | Manifold Scholarship Manifold @ Penn. An Intuitive, collaborative, open-source platform for scholarly publishing

History PhD candidate & Summer Mellon Fellow Eleanor Webb joined Professor Emily Steiner’s inter-disciplinary team to help bring a 15th-century genealogical roll held by the Free Library of Philadelphia online. Created sometime between 1461 and 1464, the roll is 15 feet long and consists of 11 sewn parchment membranes.

For the digital edition, Eleanor contributed annotations that identify the legendary and historical characters depicted on the roll, point to sources the roll-makers might have used, and offer important historical context for users.

Eleanor says the digital edition will enhance and aid interaction with the physical manuscript, both making scholars’ research more efficient and students’ first forays into medieval manuscripts less intimidating. Next up for Eleanor is Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts Ms. 1066—another, much larger genealogical roll.

Former Price Lab faculty director Professor Jim English + Associate Director of Digital Research in the Humanities J.D. Porter are in the Journal of Cultural Analytics on “eclectic” reading practices as documented by Goodreads users.

Price Lab executive committee member & Associate Professor of History Brent Cebul is in the Journal of American History with co-author Mike Glass on FHA housing and segregation. Their project draws from a Department of Housing and Urban Development database—which (with a team of undergraduate student collaborators), they’ve enhanced & mapped with GIS.

This summer, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow & Ph.D. student Jordan D. Ross sifted through fraternity archives, oral histories, student publications, local Black newspapers, alumni bulletins, and commencement programs. On the hunt for the origins of his own fraternity’s University of Pennsylvania chapter, he discovered much more. Jordan has gathered photographs, documents, timelines, and biographies into a searchable platform that explores how Black students at Penn in the early 20th century navigated the racial dynamics of predominantly white institutions.

Jordan says this is just the beginning: “There are more stories to tell—about the students who came after 1930, the influence of the Civil Rights Movement on Black student organizing at Penn, and the broader networks of African American student life at other predominantly white universities.”

From Angelina Eimannsberger (Price Lab Fellow 2021-22) in Public Books: a review of Federico Pianzola’s Digital Social Reading: Sharing Fiction in the Twenty-First Century.

Been stuck in a daydream 💭 and forgot to register for Dream Lab 2025? No worries—early bird pricing has been extended until May 1. Register for one of our workshops by then to save $100.

Dream Lab presents: “Digital Humanities in the Classroom,” co-taught by Dr. Amanda Licastro and Roberto Vargas.

This course tackles questions like: How do we integrate DH into the classroom in ways that are substantive, critical, inclusive, and acknowledge the confines of the four walls of the room? How do we navigate the always unique and often complex challenges posed by DH instruction in a semester?