The Story
Fifty years of asking what it means to be human
1975
IPHS Founded at Kenyon College
The Integrated Program in Humane Studies launches as an interdisciplinary humanities program, grounding students in philosophy, literature, history, and the arts — the questions that define what it means to be human.
2013
Digital Humanities Begins
Computational methods enter the curriculum. Students begin working with data, text analysis, and visualization alongside traditional humanistic inquiry.
2016
World's First Human-Centered AI Curriculum
Katherine Elkins and Jon Chun launch "Programming Humanity" — the first course in what becomes the world's first human-centered AI curriculum. The premise: AI is too important to leave to computer science alone.
2019
GPT-2 Research & SentimentArcs
Among the first researchers to fine-tune and evaluate GPT-2. Creation of SentimentArcs, an open-source methodology for narrative analysis later adopted globally. NEH-sponsored DivaBot, the first LLM improv chatbot.
2020
"Can GPT-3 Pass a Writer's Turing Test?"
Published in the Journal of Cultural Analytics. Now cited over 362 times — one of the most-cited papers in computational humanities.
2022
Cambridge University Press
The Shapes of Stories: Sentiment Analysis for Narrative — the first book-length study applying computational sentiment analysis to literature. Oxford UP publishes Proust's In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives the same year.
2024
NIST · ICML · Notre Dame-IBM · Meta
Named Principal Investigators for NIST's US AI Safety Institute (now CAISI). ICML oral presentation (top 2%). Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab award for AI behavioral prediction. Meta Open Innovation community.
2025
Schmidt Sciences · OpenAI · Forbes · UNESCO
Selected as one of 23 teams worldwide for Schmidt Sciences HAVI ($330K). Featured speaker at OpenAI Forum. Forbes profile. UNESCO MONDIACULT keynote in Cairo. Bloomberg AI Strategy course. Keynotes at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar, RALLY Innovation, Smith College, Yale, WPI, and more.
2026
100,000 Downloads · 50th Anniversary
Student research reaches 95,336 downloads from 4,760 institutions in 198 countries — approaching 100,000, with 28,118 in the past year alone. Nearly every nation on Earth. NPR covers the Schmidt Sciences archival intelligence project. Ten papers under review at ICML, FAccT, UAI, CogSci, and more. The program launches its next chapter: AI, Humanities & Society.