Humanities for AI

“Humanities for AI” is a series of projects, initiatives, and conversations that centers humanities values and approaches in the development, use, and interpretation of the field broadly known as “AI.”

While the discourse around AI often prioritizes innovation and acceleration, a humanistic perspective highlights continuities, explores context, and fosters critical engagement with algorithms, systems, data, and tools. At a time when the scale of AI is increasingly large, a humanistic approach values attention to smaller scales and a more deliberate pace. Humanities for AI seeks to equalize our understanding of technology with an extensive, and user-friendly, understanding of traditional humanities research topics. Just as we are experts in introducing computational thinking to humanities researchers, we are now committed to introducing humanistic thinking to researchers in AI.

Many of our activities explore how machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and computer vision are both helping and challenging scholars in their goals of understanding and interpreting the human record. We emphasize the continued importance of the stages of the data science process such as data collection, curation, analysis, visualization, and interpretation. Additionally, we focus on the infrastructures —technical, human, and scholarly — required to enable, support, and sustain this work.

One of our guiding beliefs is that the relationship between the humanities and AI is reciprocal: while AI can open new doors to humanistic discovery, a humanistic approach is essential for creating more equitable, fair, and responsible technologies that will better serve our scholarship, communities, and societies. And humanities researchers are experts in context, linguistic nuance, style, character, translation, media history, and the long history of knowledge retrieval. We seek to equip humanities researchers to intervene and collaborate in fields they care about, since no field will be left untouched or unchanged by technological changes we are currently witnessing.

The overarching goal of Humanities for AI is to ensure that Princeton education and research in the field of AI is truly interdisciplinary, spanning departmental and divisional divides. Through external collaborations and partnerships with Princeton scholars, as well as partners at Stanford, Emory, the Author’s Alliance, and the Association for Computers in the Humanities, the Humanities for AI initiative will move the humanities to the center of the conversation about AI research in far reaching ways.

Contact CDH Assistant Director Jeri Wieringa to learn more and get involved with Humanities for AI.