Penn State Center for Humanities and Information (CHI)

The Center for Humanities and Information supports research on the role information plays in the production of social meaning and value across the human sciences, from the orality-literacy transition to the new digital media. Addressing questions of information’s role in governmentality, social memory, communication, literature and culture, philosophy, and history, the Center supports faculty and graduate students with postdoctoral, predoctoral, and internal faculty fellowships, bringing together each year an interdisciplinary group of scholars who read and think widely across fields, and across information as a concept that includes, but is by no means limited to, the digital humanities. CHI seeks each year to recruit a wide range of fellows who will reflect its broad interests in information theory and its commitment to the humanities’ traditional interest in the long history of human culture.

CHI is a collaboration between Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts and the University Libraries, and works extensively with the library’s digital curation area and its arts and humanities librarians to provide scholarly, research, and technical support. As part of this collaboration, CHI explores (and provides) research tools that involve a wide variety of kinds of information and their uses. This includes support for (and historical evaluations of) such methods as data mining, geographical mapping, or visualization, but also scholarship that studies the role information plays in the production of such concepts as “evidence,” or “the case study,” so central to humanistic research in all its forms).