MIT Programs in Digital Humanities

Founded in 2018 with a $1.3 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the MIT Programs in Digital Humanities (https://digitalhumanities.mit.edu/) aim to advance computational methods and digital approaches to humanistic inquiry through code, communication, and community. Taking advantage of MIT’s rich STEM expertise and seeking to enhance humanities education among engineering and computer science students, the lab is centered on a diverse group of undergraduate research associates (over 70% female and 35% underrepresented minorities) who work closely with fellows, graduate students, staff, and MIT faculty on groundbreaking research and teaching projects in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Recent projects include analyzing gendered language in 19th century novels, developing machine learning approaches to produce metadata for archival photos, and creating games to teach concepts about democratic development in Africa. All of the lab’s work is open source and available at https://github.com/dhmit/.