Price Lab for Digital Humanities

April 22: Powered by Smart: A Prehistory of Everyday AI, a book talk with Professors Sarah Murray (University of Michigan) and Rahul Mukherjee (Penn). Murray's recently published book reveals an alternative feminist pathway that seeded hospitable ideas about AI by showing how smartness was a techno-cultural ideal long before the digital age.

Wednesday, April 22 - 3:30-5:00pm
Humanities Conference Room, Williams Hall 623, 255 South 36th Street

Cosponsored by Penn's Digital Culture and Society; Penn Cinema Studies Program; Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies - GSWS at Penn; and Price Lab for Digital Humanities.

Free and open to the public. Registration is required.
https://wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/events/murray

Formed Spring '25, our Critical Approaches to AI Working Group meets regularly to discuss how the rise of AI has impacted teaching, learning, and research.

This past fall, the group drafted a white paper meant to address the challenges that generative AI poses for instruction in critical reading, writing, and research—skills vital to the humanities and foundational for all learning—and advocating for new forms of AI-free instruction.

History PhD candidate & Summer Mellon Fellow Eleanor Webb joined Professor Emily Steiner’s inter-disciplinary team to help bring a 15th-century genealogical roll held by the Free Library of Philadelphia online. Created sometime between 1461 and 1464, the roll is 15 feet long and consists of 11 sewn parchment membranes.

For the digital edition, Eleanor contributed annotations that identify the legendary and historical characters depicted on the roll, point to sources the roll-makers might have used, and offer important historical context for users.

Eleanor says the digital edition will enhance and aid interaction with the physical manuscript, both making scholars’ research more efficient and students’ first forays into medieval manuscripts less intimidating. Next up for Eleanor is Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts Ms. 1066—another, much larger genealogical roll.

From Angelina Eimannsberger (Price Lab Fellow 2021-22) in Public Books: a review of Federico Pianzola’s Digital Social Reading: Sharing Fiction in the Twenty-First Century.

Been stuck in a daydream 💭 and forgot to register for Dream Lab 2025? No worries—early bird pricing has been extended until May 1. Register for one of our workshops by then to save $100.