Human-Centered AI at Kenyon

Kenyon's Integrated Program in Humane Studies (IPHS) began in the space now called digital humanities, using computational methods to study cultural materials. But the field's questions quickly outgrew that label. In 2023, Jon Chun and Katherine Elkins coined the term AI Digital Humanities (AI DH) in a peer-reviewed article, "The Crisis of Artificial Intelligence: A New Digital Humanities Curriculum for Human-Centered AI" (International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing), arguing that AI had fundamentally changed what computational humanistic inquiry could and should look like. That article has since been cited across AI ethics, education, information science, biodata mining, hybrid intelligence, and digital humanities.

Today, the program's work spans computational humanities, computational social sciences, AI safety, and AI governance. Students analyze political discourse across hundreds of thousands of tweets, evaluate LLM decision-making for the NIST CAISI, build multi-agent simulations, and produce original work in text, image, and sound using generative AI. This is no longer digital humanities as the field traditionally defines it. It is human-centered AI: using the intellectual tools of humanistic and social scientific inquiry to investigate, evaluate, and shape artificial intelligence.

The program has been developing this approach since 2016, years before the current wave of generative AI made these questions urgent. The curriculum, the AI CoLab, and the student research archive on Digital Kenyon document a decade of sustained work at the intersection of AI and humanistic inquiry.