The Digital Theory Lab studies artificial intelligence and computing from a broad-based humanistic perspective. Founded in 2018, the Lab is an international network of researchers in literary and media studies, philosophy, and other humanities disciplines. Its goal to fuse theory from the humanities with theory from data science, computer science, and cognitive science.
Humanistic inquiry is sometimes treated as ‘purely’ ethical and social, rendering computing an application domain in fields such as “ethical AI” or “critical AI studies.” In the “digital humanities”, by contrast, computational tools are instrumentalized to study traditional objects of the humanities, such as literary texts or artistic images, without fundamentally transforming the nature of the study itself. In contrast to these approaches, the Lab aims to produce both new knowledge and new technical insight from the premise that humanistic inquiry and digital technology are epistemically entangled from the get-go. The nature of ethics, critique, and scientific rigor in the present are open questions that can only be answered by updating theory and technique simultaneously.
To this end, the Lab conducts data-scientific experimental research, conducts a seminar on the history of machine learning and computation, and holds regular public lectures and symposia.