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.

With new developments in areas such as biotech, digital culture, global society, 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 the 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. We don't just comment and discuss, we build: new media, interactive archives, predictive models of social change, new courses, collaborative research workshops, art exhibitions.

The SHL agenda encompasses

Projects.

The Lab offers the opportunity for scholars in the humanities to undertake the sort of mid- to large-scale team-based research projects that have traditionally been the domain of the natural and social sciences. Humanities disciplines have generally received far more modest research funding than the sciences, thus discouraging resource-intensive scholarship as well as collaborative or team-based work. These limitations have resulted in research findings—usually in print form—that are produced and consumed by individual scholars working in isolation, and shared with students exclusively in the classroom setting.

We exist to change that. Whereas institutional pressures have fostered a narrowing of research agendas, SHL promotes a model of the humanities that is flexible and cross-disciplinary at its core and at the same time rooted in the disciplinary traditions of the humanities. By providing financial support for innovative humanities research with results that assume technologically inflected forms, SHL attempts:

After an initial pilot year, projects are typically funded for five to seven years, during which SHL administrative and technical staff are involved in helping to shepherd the work to successful completion. Administrative staff help with working methodology, such pragmatic details as helping to build partnerships with museums and other public institutions, fundraising, and presenting work to the campus and wider community.

Technical staff help researchers imagine outputs and results beyond the limits of their technology skills. They assist in locating digital artist collaborators, programmers, video producers, animators, and others to help realize researchers' ideas. And they instruct research teams not only on how to supervise the creation of technology-driven outputs but also on how to do hands-on programming, film production, animation, etc. of their own.

See a complete listing of SHL projects here.

Teaching.

SHL projects are rooted in the disciplinary traditions of the Humanities, but they involve students from a wide array of Humanities and non-Humanities disciplines. Many SHL projects involve a recurring course or seminar component that allows team members to introduce, develop, and test their research results within the classroom. SHL is a research center, but teaching is central to its mission. Our aim is to lead a revolution in the way knowledge is produced and presented in the Humanities and, in so doing, to provide a compelling new model for Humanities education that:

To this end, our projects involve a new hands-on, laboratory-based model of undergraduate and graduate training, informed by the media and information revolutions of the present. Students learn not only by studying knowledge in the traditional manner, but also by producing knowledge: by being assigned responsibility for the realization of a piece of research within a larger research mosaic, overseen by an experienced senior researcher.

See a representative listing of SHL-relevant courses and seminars here.