Stanford Humanities Lab: 8/21/05

Stanford Humanities Lab: 8/21/05 - 8/28/05


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The Stanford Humanities Lab is a Center for Transdiciplinary/Post-Disciplinary Study. We discover fascinating futures to be explored in ignoring and crossing disciplinary borders.

SHL believes that some crucial questions — about what it is to be human, about experience in a connected world, about the boundaries of culture and nature — transcend old divisions between the arts, sciences and humanities; between the academy, industry and the cultural sphere.

We engage in experimental projects with a "laboratory" ethos — collaborative, co-creative, team-based — involving a triangulation of arts practice, commentary/critique, and outreach, merging research, pedagogy, publication and practice. Beyond commentary and discussion, we build: new media, interactive archives, predictive models of social change, collaborative research workshops, art exhibitions.

The SHL agenda encompasses

• animating archives - regenerating, bringing to life, and fostering new modes of interaction with the storehouses of human, cultural, artistic, scientific achievement - our focus is on the question of the relationship of the human past to efforts at conservation and preservation

• building bigger pictures - putting specialized in-depth research into the context of big human questions; questions, for example, of rapid social change and innovation, the ethical implications of information technology, the character of distributed digital communities, the politics of digital citizenship, the past, present, and future of intellectual property

• enabling co-creative collaboration - developing successful models of teamwork, learner-centered models of training (thinking through doing), and collaborative authoring tools and processes

• building bridges - establishing innovative partnerships between industry, museums, foundations, and high-level university-based research

SHL PI heads newly formed Western Institute of Irish Studies

With support from the Irish Consulate in San Francisco and a grant from the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, the Western Institute of Irish Studies (WIIS) was officially launched in July 2005. The Institute facilitates and supports in-depth research into the varied and distinct experiences of the Irish in the Western United States and their link to contemporary Ireland.

The Institute is directed by former SHL PI Matthew Jockers of the Stanford English Department. The Humanities Lab provided three years of support for the development of the Irish-American West project, which is now a primary asset of the Western Institute of Irish Studies. Jockers was thrilled to be able to offer the project to the new Institute, and the WIIS board of directors are committed to the continued growth of the Irish American West database and digital text collection. For more on the Institute and to access the Irish-American West archive, visit the WIIS website at http://www.wiisonline.org/.

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SHL PI heads newly formed Western Institute of Irish Studies