Human-Centered AI at Kenyon

Kenyon's Integrated Program in Humane Studies began in the space now called digital humanities, using computational methods to study cultural materials. The field's questions soon outgrew the label. In 2023, Jon Chun and Katherine Elkins published the first peer-reviewed account of what a human-centered AI curriculum looks like, "The Crisis of Artificial Intelligence" (International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing), naming the new field AI Digital Humanities.

Much of this work happened before the wider research world arrived: students were fine-tuning GPT-2 within months of its staged 2019 release and red-teaming ChatGPT within weeks of its launch. The full record, from 2018 neural networks to today's multi-agent experiments, is on the Student Research page, and every project is archived on Digital Kenyon. The program's signature method was a first of its own: the first ensemble approach to mapping emotion across narratives, published in "The Shapes of Stories" (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and extended by students across novels, translations, film, and memoir.

Student 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.

More about Student Research

The AI CoLab

The AI CoLab is the research engine of Kenyon’s human-centered AI program, a collaborative laboratory where faculty and students pursue both sides of the work together. 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 gives students the tools to conduct original computational research after their first two classes in the AI curriculum.

The CoLab operates as a working research group. Faculty and students collaborate on shared projects, and student research feeds directly into published scholarship. The research is at the frontier, most recently testing models and multi-agent systems for safe behavior.

More about the AI CoLab

Faculty Spotlight

Katharine Elkins and Jon Chun built the human-centered AI curriculum in 2016 on a wager: that the humanities would matter more in the age of AI, not less. A decade later, when the federal government formed a consortium to set national safety standards for artificial intelligence, it chose Elkins and Chun to lead the team representing the Modern Language Association, the largest scholarly society in the humanities.

More About Elkins More About Chun

Recognition and Partnerships

Schmidt Sciences Humanities & AI Virtual Institute: “Archival Intelligence” grant (1 of 23 worldwide from 600+ applications)
NIST CAISI: Faculty lead the Modern Language Association team
The 2023 curriculum article has been cited across AI ethics, education, information science and digital humanities
Kenyon Alumni Magazine: "Written in Code," Spring 2026 lead feature
IBM-Notre Dame Tech Ethics Lab: $60,000 grant (1 of 11 internationally) to study how well AI can predict human behavior
OpenAI Higher Education Forum: Elkins, one of a select few international faculty invited to speak, presented on leveraging AI for humanities and social science research
Forbes: “Where AI Meets the Humanities: Inside Kenyon College’s Bold Experiment”
WOSU/NPR: Feature on Archival Intelligence project (February 2026)
Ohio State Chase Center: Elkins spoke on civic education after AI at the Civics Centers Symposium (2026)
RALLY Innovation: Elkins spoke on human algorithms, Indianapolis (2025)
UNESCO: Elkins gave an invited talk on the dual edge of AI's impact on culture for UNESCO's Cairo office and wrote a contribution to a forthcoming UN publication on AI and cultural heritage
Meta Open Innovation AI Research Community (2023-2025): faculty members across its working groups, with Elkins leading the Transparency Working Group. Collaborations begun there grew into the comparative global AI regulation paper with the Oxford Witt Lab and an open-source generative AI position paper selected for oral presentation at ICML 2024
Public AI: co-authored "If Open Source Is to Win, It Must Go Public" with the international Public AI network — spotlight talk at CODEML@ICML 2025, accepted to ICML 2026
More than 100,000 research downloads from more than 4,000 institutions worldwide