Price Lab for Digital Humanities

As the centerpiece of the School of Arts and Sciences strategic initiative Humanities in the Digital Age, the Price Lab supports innovative uses of technology in the study of history, art, and culture. We work in close partnership with the Penn Libraries and Penn Museum of Archeology and Anthropology to help train faculty and students in the latest digital tools and methods, encourage development of new computing-intensive humanities courses, and promote collaborative faculty-student experiments and research projects.

Established in 2015 with a $7 million gift from Michael and Vikki Price, the Lab will soon be located alongside the Penn Humanities Forum in a new humanities hub space being constructed at the heart of campus. The Price Lab already 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. We are rapidly expanding our capacity through the hiring of new faculty and technical staff and, with the support of a four-year, $2 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, are launching an array of fellowship programs.

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 oversee 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 at the Price Lab believe that if the humanities are to survive and thrive, digital research tools for the imagined future of our various fields must be developed by scholars who possess expertise in both humanistic inquiry and digital technology. Only in this way can we ensure that our tools are attuned to the committment of humanities to history, fine-grained analysis, material and cultural specificity, multisensory experience, and the nuances of language and form.