The Story
Fifty years of asking the same question
Different tools. Same humanism. The technology has changed; the inquiry has not.
1975
IPHS Founded at Kenyon College
The Integrated Program in Humane Studies launches as an interdisciplinary humanities program. From the start: philosophy, literature, history, and the arts working in concert to ask what it means to live well, what we owe one another, and how knowledge should be made and shared. These are the questions everything that follows is built on.
2013
Computation Joins the Inquiry
Digital humanities enters the curriculum. Computational methods join close reading, archival research, and historical interpretation as ways of working through humanistic questions — not replacing them, extending them.
2016
The 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's most consequential questions are humanistic, and humanists should be asking and answering them as principal investigators.
2019
GPT-2 Research & SentimentArcs
Among the first humanistic researchers to fine-tune and evaluate GPT-2. SentimentArcs is created — an open-source methodology for narrative analysis grounded in literary theory and later adopted by researchers worldwide. NEH supports DivaBot, an early LLM improv project.
2020
"Can GPT-3 Pass a Writer's Turing Test?"
Published in the Journal of Cultural Analytics. Cited 362+ times — one of the most-cited papers in computational humanities. The question is humanistic; the method is computational; the verdict is interpretive.
2022
Cambridge & Oxford University Presses
The Shapes of Stories: Sentiment Analysis for Narrative (Cambridge UP) — the first book-length study applying computational sentiment analysis to literature, framed within a long tradition of narrative theory. Oxford UP publishes Proust's In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives the same year.
2024
NIST · ICML · Notre Dame · Meta
Named Principal Investigators for NIST's US AI Safety Institute (now CAISI), representing the Modern Language Association in the humanities track. ICML oral presentation on open-source generative AI risk (top 2%). Notre Dame Tech Ethics Lab award. Meta Open Innovation community.
2025
Schmidt Sciences HAVI · OpenAI Forum · UNESCO
Selected as one of 23 teams worldwide for Schmidt Sciences HAVI ($330K) — humanities-led AI for community-governed cultural heritage. Featured at the OpenAI Forum. Forbes profile. UNESCO MONDIACULT keynote in Cairo. Bloomberg AI Strategy course. Keynotes at Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar, Smith, Yale, and more.
2026
~100,000 Downloads · A Movement Takes Shape
Student research is downloaded ~100,000 times from 4,760 institutions in 198 countries, with more than 28,000 downloads in the past year alone. NPR covers the Schmidt Sciences archival intelligence work. NEH and Mellon Foundation portfolios in humanistic AI grow. IPHS turns fifty as AI, Humanities & Society — one node in a movement that needs many more.
By the numbers, the same question, refined.
50
years of humane studies
10
years of human-centered AI
~100K
research downloads worldwide