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.
Search Research in Human-Centered AI
Human-centered AI research at Kenyon spans many domains, each organized around a central question. Students choose their own path, and many projects draw on several domains. A guiding principle of every project is the premise that AI is most powerful when shaped by humanistic and social scientific thinking.
The AI CoLab
The AI CoLab is the research engine of Kenyon’s human-centered AI program, a collaborative laboratory where faculty and students investigate artificial intelligence through the lens of the humanities and social sciences. Co-founded in 2016 by Katherine Elkins and Jon Chun, the CoLab addresses a structural gap in higher education: humanities and social science students rarely get access to the kind of hands-on, lab-based research experience that defines STEM education. The CoLab changes that equation, giving students the tools to conduct original computational research after their first year in the AI curriculum.
The CoLab operates as a working research group, not a drop-in resource center. Faculty and students collaborate on shared projects, and student research contributes directly to ongoing scholarly conversations.
Current research threads include: the Schmidt Sciences HAVI project on archival intelligence and endangered cultural heritage in New Orleans ($330,000 grant); AI safety evaluation including LLM decision-making profiling, ethics auditing, negation sensitivity, and robustness testing; theory of mind in large language models; comparative global AI regulation (with the Oxford Witt Lab); and the many-model methodology for testing how different AI architectures handle the same humanistic or social scientific question.
Faculty Spotlight
Professors Katherine Elkins and Jon Chun co-founded the world's first human-centered AI curriculum in 2016. Elkins was featured in Forbes for building the program and serves as PI for the U.S. AI Safety Institute (NIST CAISI). Chun’s work spans network security, NLP, AI systems design, and explainable AI; he co-developed the many-model methodology and leads the technical infrastructure of the AI CoLab.
Recognition and Partnerships
- Schmidt Sciences Humanities & AI Virtual Institute: “Archival Intelligence” grant (1 of 23 worldwide from 600+ applications)
- NIST CAISI: Faculty serve as Principal Investigators
- IBM-Notre Dame Tech Ethics Lab: $60,000 grant (one of 11 internationally)
- OpenAI Higher Education Forum: 1 of 6 talks from 1,000+ applicants
- Forbes: “Where AI Meets the Humanities: Inside Kenyon College’s Bold Experiment”
- WOSU/NPR: Feature on Archival Intelligence project (February 2026)
- RALLY Innovation: Elkins invited to speak on human algorithms
- UNESCO: Collaboration on international AI education initiatives
- Meta Transparency Working Group: Faculty participant (dates TBD)
- Public AI: Contributing to debate over AI for the public good
- Almost 100,000 research downloads from 4,000+ institutions worldwide
By the Numbers
- 2016: Founded the world’s first human-centered AI curriculum
- Almost 100,000: Downloads of student research worldwide
- 4,000+: Institutions that have accessed IPHS student work
- ~400: Student research projects mentored
- 6 domains of research
- 50 years: IPHS history (est. 1975)
- 10 years: Human-centered AI curriculum (2016–2026)
Partnerships and Affiliations
Katherine Elkins
Jon Chun
