DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly
2020
Volume 14 Number 3
Volume 14 Number 3
The Laboratory Turn: Exploring Discourses, Landscapes, and Models of Humanities Labs
Abstract
The goal of this paper is to track the path of the formation of the laboratory turn in the humanities and understand the conditions, meanings, and functions of humanities labs. The first section investigates three discourses that gave rise to the emergence of a laboratory in the humanities: the transformation of the humanities infrastructure within the university, paradigm shifts in the social sciences, and the expansion of cultural categories of innovation, the maker movement (the proliferation of makerspaces), and the idea of community. Next, the author presents a history of the laboratory in the humanities and determines the shift from a laboratory as a physical place to conceptual laboratory. The last section analyses five models for humanities labs based on laboratories’ statements and operations: the center-type lab, the techno-science lab, the work station-type lab, the social challenges-centric lab, and virtual lab. The research shows that the laboratory turn has emerged in the humanities as a part of a wider process of the laboratorization of social life, which has been occurring since the 1980s. Next, the study indicates the role of digital humanities as the driving force behind building a laboratory space, which supports situated practices, the collaborative, and technology-based projects. The paper shows that the humanities lab does not simply imitate the science lab but adapts this new infrastructure for its own purposes and needs.
Introduction
Owen Hannaway defined a science laboratory as a place that “involves observation and manipulation
of nature by means of specialized instruments,
techniques, and apparatuses that require manual
skills as well as conceptual knowledge for their
construction and deployment”
[Hannaway 1986, 585]. A scientific
laboratory implies a physical location, material
instruments, equipment, and hands-on skills for knowledge
production. With the proliferation and diversification of
laboratories in city space, in cultural institutions
(libraries and museums), in the virtual environment, and on
the university campus, this definition seems difficult to
maintain. One realization of labs that resists this
elucidation is a humanities lab. A laboratory has emerged in
the humanities as part of their rich infrastructure that
includes a library and archive, the seminar and workshop,
the classroom, the graduate program, the conference, the
university press, the journal, the academic newsletter, etc.
These all have been and remained institutional forms for the
production of knowledge in the humanities. However, in
recent years, we have observed how the present forms of
infrastructure have been renamed “laboratories”: a
library’s reading room at Yale University Library has been
redesigned as the Franke Family Digital Humanities
Laboratory, the University of Arizona College of Humanities
has launched a new set of courses as the Humanities Lab, and
research groups and seminars have been called a
“laboratory”, for instance, Representing
Migration Humanities Lab in the English Department at Duke
University. The humanities labs have been built upon
different types of existing infrastructure giving rise to
new forms of their realization and interpretation. They
include situated and virtual digital humanities labs as well
as non-digital, seminar- and project-based humanities labs.
In this essay, I argue thus that the idea of a laboratory has
been expanded and altered by social initiatives, such as
library creative spaces, makerspaces, and hackathons. A
laboratory goes beyond the notion of a physical place
dedicated to scientific exploration, becoming, instead, a
widely understood project (lab as concept,
initiative, and program) focused on “labbing problems”
(the approach to solve problems by applying the practices of
labs; see more [Kieboom 2014]). Seen as a
project, it insinuates that society is,
in a certain sense, in a projection state,
seeking new ways to tackle local and global challenges. The
shift from a laboratory as a physical location
to conceptual laboratory is thus crucial for
the discussion of a new cultural paradigm. Referring to
Thomas S. Kuhn’s paradigm concept [Kuhn 1996],
the laboratory turn entails fundamental changes in the
practices and function of the humanities at large.
The purpose of this article is to track the path of the formation
of the laboratory turn in the humanities and understand the
conditions, meanings, and functions of humanities labs
situated in North America, North-Western Europe, and
Australia. In the first part of the article, I analyse
briefly three discourses that gave rise to the emergence of
a laboratory in the humanities: the transformation of the
humanities infrastructure within the university, paradigm
shifts in the social sciences, and the expansion of cultural
categories of innovation, the maker movement, and the notion
of community. Next, I present a history of the laboratory in
the humanities and examine a wide range of application of
the term “laboratory” to the humanities that cover
institutional and technology-based labs (physical and
virtual spaces engaging digital tools and technologies) and
conceptual, non-digital labs (entities and projects that
call themselves “labs” and don’t have an explicitly
digital component). Drawing on this analysis, I indicate
five models for humanities labs based on laboratories’
statements and operations: the center-type lab, the
techno-science lab, the work station-type lab, the social
challenges-centric lab, and virtual lab. These five types of
laboratories grew out of various origins and discourses. The
goal is thus to grasp the complex landscape of the
humanities labs, comprehend their functions, and reflect on
their development and features. The result section presents
the main findings of the research related to the emergence
of the laboratory turn, the uniqueness of the humanities
labs, and the implications of labs for the positioning of
the humanities both within and outside of academia.
Three Discourses of the Laboratory Turn
Infrastructure Changes in the Humanities
By looking at the history of the humanities, we can
discern moments of significant shifts occurring at
the time of cultural, social, and economic changes.
Each significant moment in the history of higher
education — the beginning of the twentieth century,
the 1960s/1970s, the 1980s/1990s, and 2007/2008 — is
hailed as a transformation period for the humanities
(see more about the history of university and
humanities: e.g., [Bérubé et al. 1995]
[Readings 1996]
[Kerr 2001]
[Klein 2005]
[Donoghue 2008]
[Gottschall 2008]
[Kagan 2009]
[Wissema 2009]
[Collini 2012]
[Bod 2013]
[Jay 2014]). The discipline is seen as
a reactive field seeking to adapt to new conditions
and needs. One method which can be used to reimagine
and strengthen the humanities is institutional
change that entails new organizational structures
and, alongside these structures, new research
practices. Here, I outline briefly the
infrastructural transformations which have been
taking place in the U.S. since the 1980s/1990s.
However, prior to doing so, it is worth recalling
the most significant institutional change which
occurred in the nineteenth century.
At that time, the humanities were under the influence of
the growing scientification of knowledge. The
humanities were strongly engaged in precise and
analytical research typical for scientific
discourses. As Julie Thompson Klein describes it,
“The tendency toward
painstaking research and minute methodology became
as evident in historiography as in science. The
humanist’s equivalent of the laboratory was
analytic abstraction, reinforced by description,
classification, comparison, and compilation. Like
laboratory specimens, humanistic objects could be
manipulated, dissected, and embalmed; measured,
counted, and calibrated; and subjected to precise
methodologies”
[Klein 2005, 28]. In a certain
metaphorical sense, the scientific laboratory was
the first place in which humanistic research
determined its methodology and infrastructure. At
the beginning of the twentieth century, the
university developed the modern system of
disciplinarity, which consequently contributed to
the independence of the humanities discipline. The
moment of separation of the humanities from science
meant that the humanities could shape the
discipline’s own methodology. This new independence
of the humanities and the building of the
discipline’s own physical place became a key moment
in the history of the humanities. Departing from a
laboratory methodology was
accompanied by moving from a metaphorical
laboratory towards an office and a
library: spaces that for a long time served as the
main places for humanities research.
Significant changes occurred in the 1980s as a result of
the transformations in the academy. The phenomenon
of mass universities, the weakening of disciplinary
boundaries, and expanding globalization and
corporatization led to a crisis in universities in
the 1990s [e.g., Bérubé et
al. 1995, Readings 1996]. This crisis rhetoric has
started to penetrate any discussion about the
university, which is attacked for its
corporatization and ignoring social problems, as
well as the state of the humanities, which is
accused of being unprofitable and impractical. Under
these conditions, the humanities were transforming
gradually into an interdisciplinary field, engaged
in sociological, political, cultural, and feminist
discourses. The shift towards inter- and
transdisciplinary practices and social engagement
was accompanied by the symbolic gesture of moving
the humanities “beyond the walls
of the office” into the public domain. The
humanities moved out of their usual spaces — the
office and the library — into a new territory — the
center — to intensify interdisciplinarity and public
engagement. The implementation of new practices was
thus reinforced by institutional changes.
Consequently, since the 1980s, the humanities have
established many centres, aiming to foster
interdisciplinarity, build bridges with the medical,
technical, and natural sciences, and create a common
space for the university and the local community
[Klein 2005, 76].
Next to the interdisciplinary research center, a new unit
emerged with a focus on computing in the humanities.
This center underpinned the development of
humanities computing, renamed the digital humanities
in the twentieth-first century. It played the role
of a work station equipped with computers and other
devices, gathering in the same place humanists,
computer scientists, and programmers. However, the
computing center was more than a physical work
space; it was a significant ground for building new
practices engaged in manipulating complex digital
analysis tools and applying computing techniques. To
advance computing within humanities practices, the
discipline “required
institutional investment in an entirely different
infrastructure of courseware specialists, on a
large scale and at an urgent pace”
[Flanders et al. 2002, 379]. These
infrastructural changes were necessary in order to
express these new practices within the humanities
and, along with that, the new function and place of
the humanities in the larger institutional arena.
Therefore, the center played an important role in
restructuring the humanities within the university
as well as reconceptualizing the field as a meeting
place for interdisciplinary researchers and the
local community.
The university entered the twenty-first century along
with the accelerating power of technology, the
emerging cyberinfrastructure, and intensifying
globalization and internationalization. The
university of the twenty-first century is an
economically-driven institution centred on applied,
profitable, and competitive research and training
students in order to provide them with practical and
useful skills. Based on J. G. Wissema’s
considerations of the third generation university,
the academy of the twenty-first century is
distinguished by seeking alternative funding for
cutting-edge scientific research, intertwining the
two worlds of academic and industrial research,
operating in an internationally competitive market,
and the commercialisation of knowledge [Wissema 2009, 31–2]. These
technological, economic, and academic conditions
have affected the humanities, which, particularly
after 2007, entered a state of crisis. The
humanities were seen as unproductive and out of
touch with contemporary science and the technology
culture, leading consequently to a decline in
funding, reduction in the number of majors, and
shrinking job market. Under these conditions, the
humanities sought to find a strategy with which to
reinforce their position. One of the implementations
of the “tactical
humanities”
[Pawlicka 2017] is a “scientification of the
humanities”
[Stratilatis 2014], i.e., moving the
humanities closer to the sciences [Gottschall 2008]. The process of the
scientification of the humanities has taken
different forms, including the use of new research
data and applied methodologies (qualitative methods,
data mining), new research practices (collaboration,
experimentation), new methods of evaluating research
(parameterization, falsifiability, the ranking
system of universities), as well as reconceiving
institutions (forming laboratories).
Consequently, the humanities took a step towards
revamping their infrastructure, aimed at fostering
and enhancing growing computational, collaborative,
and interdisciplinary practices. In this light,
drawing on Amy E. Earhart’s reflections, a
laboratory emerged in the humanities discipline as
“more than a space, but a
symbol of our hope”
[Earhart 2015, 399]. It became a
new institutional structure that was supposed to
fuel the development of the humanities with new
working models and research practices. The
laboratory was intended to work as a driving force
to develop a new model of the humanities based on
collaboration, partnership, interdisciplinarity,
situated practices, technology-focused work, and
alternative, empirical education.
The laboratory idea was thus applied to the humanities
field in response to its structural crisis; the
existing infrastructure (offices, library, seminars)
was insufficient to meet contemporary scholars
needs, such as advancing collaborative and
interdisciplinary research and fostering frequent
meetings and interaction [e.g., Hiatt 2005, Joselow 2016, Breithaupt 2017].
Therefore, a lab was not only seen as a new
institutional unit for the humanities but also as a
conceptual model for conducting research embedded
and entailed in a laboratory’s set of practices. In
“Designing a Lab in the
Humanities”
[Breithaupt 2017], Fritz Breithaupt
described his experience in creating the
Experimental Humanities Lab at Indiana University,
Bloomington in 2015, which arose from simple weekly
meetings that the students called “lab
meetings”. “Sure, we had
done several joint presentations and written some
small articles, with more pending. But was this a
lab?”; Breithaupt’s striking question shows
that firstly, the concept of the humanities lab is
still far from a clear definition, and, secondly,
that the lab idea grows out of the simple necessity
of frequent meetings and conversations as well as
the need to work together instead of remaining
isolated in offices. The term “lab” is thus used to
imply specific values embedded in a particular place
or initiative. However, this tactical naming
strategy doesn’t necessarily transparently disclose
the actual workings of knowledge production.
The impulse to establish laboratories in the humanities
is also related strongly to the utilization of
technology in research projects. Following the
report of the American Council of Learned Societies
Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities
and Social Sciences, “Our
Cultural Commonwealth”, we can see that
physical laboratories have been established as a
place for facilitating new research practices
(collaboration, experimentation, and
interdisciplinarity), advocating technological
innovation, and developing a robust
cyberinfrastructure [Our Cultural Commonwealth 2006, 29]. A laboratory entails physical
situatedness, i.e., work is performed in a
particular place and context. Traditional models of
humanistic research involve work in an office, a
library, or at home since it is not attached to
place and does not demand any particular equipment
and devices. In contrast to this model, digital
humanities require equipment, tools, and software
that are accumulated and provided, physically and
through licenses, in one space. This place gathers
people from different disciplines and institutions:
programmers, engineers, librarians, curators, and
archivists. It becomes a work space for
collaborative, interdisciplinary, and
technology-based research. Thus, humanities research
has been transformed from placeless and isolated
work into the collaborative and situated practices
of the digital humanities. As a result, the digital
humanities have become the driving force behind
building a laboratory space. This new vision of the
humanities propelled the creation of laboratories
with missions related strongly to the idea of
reconstructing the humanities in the vein of
technological innovations. Good examples are the
following statements made by digital humanities
labs: “LINHD mission is to
redefine the way of working in digital humanities
by promoting innovation and technology in the
environment of the new information society”
[LINHD n.d.] by the Digital Humanities
Innovation Lab (LINHD) established at the National
University of Distance Education in 2014, and “We at the Price Lab believe that if
the humanities are to survive and thrive, digital
research tools for the imagined future of our
various fields must be developed by scholars who
possess expertise in both humanistic inquiry and
digital technology”
[Price Lab for Digital Humanities n.d.] by Price Lab for Digital
Humanities launched at the University of
Pennsylvania in 2015.
Therefore, along with the development of the digital
humanities, we can track the infrastructural changes
in the humanities of the twenty-first century as
moving from a center [Zorich 2008]
[Sample 2010]
[Fraistat 2012] to a laboratory [Emerson et al. n.d.]
[Svensson 2015]
[Svensson 2016]
[Svensson 2018]
[Earhart 2015]
[Lane 2017]
[Pawlicka 2017]
[Pawlicka-Deger n.d.]
[Smithies et al. 2017]
[Smithies et al. 2020]
[Foka et al. 2018]
[Pask 2018]
[Ricaurte Quijano 2018]. The years after 2010
are particularly significant period in the history
of the laboratory. First, we have experienced
tremendous growth in numbers of labs launched in the
academic and societal areas. Second, 2010 was
proclaimed to be the year of “the death of the centre”
[Sample 2010], which was now seen as
an unsustainable place in which to house collective
activities within the humanities. Third, in 2010,
the Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI) at Duke
University founded the Humanities Laboratories,
heralded as a “new architecture
of multiple humanities laboratories”
[FHI-DU Humanities Labs n.d.]. This structure marked the
beginning of a new model for a laboratory in the
humanities as one that was created for a fixed
period and a specific purpose, but which was not
particularly related to physical situatedness and
not necessarily involved a digital component. This
model gave rise to conceptual
laboratories, which were seen more as
projects and programs entailing different types of
learning and research practices in the humanities
rather than physical work spaces. The good examples
of conceptual labs are Humanities Labs at Colby
College, which were launched as innovative courses
in 2014 [Colby College Humanities Lab n.d.]. The notion of the
laboratory is used in terms of new modes of research
and community outreach which do not necessarily
require a fixed physical location and equipment.
This significant change reflects the meaning of the
laboratory turn: the lab does not refer to a
physical place anymore; instead, it is related to a
way of thinking, communicating, and working.
The last reason for the laboratory boom
after 2010 is related to the growing interest in the
concept of community, public engagement, and
do-it-yourself culture. It entails
popping out labs as makerspaces and hackathons in
the academic space (e.g., the Curtin Library
Makerspace at Curtin University) as well as
establishing labs in city space; for instance,
OpenLab was launched as a “challenge-driven innovation community” by
Karolinska Institute, KTH Royal Institute of
Technology, Stockholm University and Södertörn
University in 2013 and located in the City of
Stockholm [OpenLab n.d.].
Laboratory Studies and Conceptual Changes in the Social Sciences
The second discourse on the laboratory turn brings us
back to the 1980s and 1990s when the conceptual
shifts in the social sciences occurred. The new
concepts had a significant impact on emerging new
theories and the research approach of the
twenty-first century. Based on Don Ihde’s
reflections, the following theoretical changes are
indicated: the emergence of the new sociology of
scientific knowledge, namely, social constructionism
and the actor-network theory of the 1970s; the new
philosophy of technology in the 1980s; and the
concept of science as a cultural practice in the
late 1980s and 1990s [Ihde 2009, 7]. This concise timeline reveals the most
significant shifts in the notion of science, namely,
moving away from science as a knowledge towards
science as a practice [Pickering 1992]. As Hannaway claims: “Science
no longer was simply a kind of knowledge (one
possessed scientia); it increasingly became a form
of activity (one did science). That there should
have arisen in this period a place specially set
aside for such activity and bearing a new name
serves to measure the force of that shift”
[Hannaway 1986, 586]. A new
approach to thinking about science was based on a
conviction that knowledge is produced as a part of
social and cultural practices; therefore, scientific
knowledge itself should be understood as a social
product.
The perspective of science as a social practice opened up
new questions regarding a place in which to
construct science [Latour et al. 1979]
[Galison et al. 1999], a community of
practice [Wenger 1998], and material
instruments and artefacts [Latour et al. 1979]
[Lynch 1985]
[Latour 1987]. It was a move towards
unveiling scientific practices and investigating the
network of actors that take part in constructing
scientific knowledge, i.e., space, material
instruments, technology, and community. By the late
1980s, there was no doubt that major changes were
coming, driven by research in science and technology
studies: Laboratory
Life by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar
(1979), The Manufacture of
Knowledge by Karin Knorr Cetina (1981),
Art and Artifact in
Laboratory Science by Michael Lynch
(1985), and Science in
Action by Latour (1987).
Such a perspective on science entailed establishing new
fields to explore the various aspects of the social
construction of science. One area refers to a
contextual theory of knowledge, assuming that the
knowledge is situated in practice, in contrast to
conceptual knowledge, which is abstracted from
situations [Brown et al. 1989, 32]. This
means, to put it slightly differently, that situated
knowledge is a part of the activity, context, and
culture in which it is constructed and used. Viewed
in this way, space for knowledge production began to
be one of the key research issues. Place defines the
condition of scientific knowledge construction and
determines the research mode and perspectives. Under
these circumstances, laboratory studies arrived
eventually as a new field focused on the
investigation of the space used for scientific
inquiry [Knorr Cetina 1995].
In this light, the emergence of the laboratory in the
humanities entails a significant shift from the
text towards the place
where it is constructed. The laboratory draws
attention to the space in which humanities
experiments are conducted, the knowledge is
produced, and scholarly communication occurs.
Consequently, the humanities are seen as a
practice and process
that engages space, interactions, and equipment.
Like the natural sciences and techno-science, the
humanities involve “infrastructural thinking”
[Svensson 2015, 337], according
to which the architecture of the humanistic inquiry
determines the process of knowledge construction.
The 1980s and 1990s, as Robert E. Kohler observed
astutely, were thus recognized as a productive time
for laboratory studies, and the laboratory itself
was seen as a social institution. After that time,
the notion of the laboratory was neglected until
interest was revived again in the twenty-first
century [Kohler 2008, 761].
Kohler’s article “Lab
History” from 2008 is a significant
gesture, implying that there was a surge in lab
activity again after 2007 and a need for tracking
its history. In this context, it is worth recalling
another important publication, namely, Representation in Scientific
Practice. Revisited
[Coopmans et al. 2014], a revised book
originally published in 1990. The manuscript
suggests that research topics come back again after
twenty-four years. One key issue it addresses is a
return to the idea of laboratory, which, as the
editors note, “extends to other
spaces and places via collaborative ventures,
shared data centers, and information and
communication technologies”, challenging
“the very distinction between
laboratory and field”
[Coopmans et al. 2014, 1]. Both
publications draw a connection between the study of
scientific laboratories in the 1980s and
laboratories of the twenty-first century, which have
popped out in the humanities, social sciences, and
outside of the university.
Cultural Categories: Innovation, the Maker Movement, and Community
The last line of development of the laboratory turn runs
through the prevailing cultural categories of the
twenty-first century. Let us now take a look at the
following three cultural discourses and their
impacts on changes within the university and
humanities. The first category of innovation has
dominated cultural and social rhetoric and given
rise to new concepts, such as the innovation society
and innovation paradigm. According to this rhetoric,
to tackle the complex social, cultural, and economic
problems of the twenty-first century, society must
turn into an innovation society, which drives
breakthrough solutions and cutting-edge
technologies. Such discourse has led to the design
of the manifold varieties of innovations labs that
have popped up like mushrooms within the university
and city space as social institutions; for instance,
the Scholarly Innovation Lab (SIL) at the UCLA
library and the Digital Innovation Lab at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The
innovation concept has begun to be a crucial
category defining the humanities labs and signifying
the new features found within these labs, including
a strong link between the humanities and the
creative industries, providing cutting-edge
equipment for excellent research, and solving hard
problems. As a result of this discourse, the concept
of an innovative university emerged with the desire
to turn the university into a successful and
competitive business or entrepreneurial university
[Thorp et al. 2010].
The innovation approach requires effective creative ideas
and thinking outside the box. Creativity is seen as
a key method with which to improve social and
economic conditions and “devise
potentially better options for the future”
[Moran 2010, 76]. A societal
awareness of the value of creativity is constructed
by establishing creative
spaces that integrate the local community
around the processes of creative endeavours. One
such place is a library creative space that “focuses wholly or in part on content
creation as opposed to content consumption
alone”
[Johnson 2016, 4]. The process of
creation can include drawings and photographs, audio
materials, videos, three-dimensional objects,
computer coding, web-based multimedia, and more.
Hence, library creative spaces play a key role in
expanding the function of the library from providing
information resources and services to integrating
and developing the community through creative
activities. One realization of these creative spaces
is the advent of a laboratory in the common space
that is the library. A laboratory in the library
offers space, equipment, and resources and guides
learning how to use digital tools and create digital
projects [Goodman 2014]
[Hamilton et al. 2015]
[Johnson 2016]
[Kavanagh Webb 2018].
Another type of creative space is the makerspace defined
as a “center or workspace where
like-minded people get together to make
things”
[Hatch 2013, 13]. The concept of
makerspace is particularly related to a creative and
participatory culture. It was conceived of as an
outgrowth of the cultural maker
movement, created as a “return to craft”, in which people can
build things together again [Proske 2013]. Therefore, coming back to
the idea of making things came about as
a response to consumption and corporate culture,
driving interest in hacker and
do-it-yourself cultures. Labcraft,
using Hendrik Tiesinga and Remko Berkhout’s term
[Tiesinga et al. 2014], is thus seen as an
innovative and, above all, community lab, seeking to
connect people, create a space for dialogue, and
transfer ideas to the world. Such labs aim to create
new solutions and develop new ways of seeing the
world. The maker movement has been embodied by the
rise of media labs, established as institutionalized
units (the academic media labs), cultural events
(media lab workshops), and alternative models of
education based on tinkering and hacking.
Eventually, the do-it-yourself approach
made inroads into academic culture through the
launch of makerspaces (e.g., Maker Lab in the
Humanities at the University of Victoria) and
hackerspaces (e.g., Blow Things Up at the University
of Colorado, Boulder) and organizing hackathons
(e.g., in the Computational Humanities Lab at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison).
The last cultural category, which has accompanied the
maker movement, is community. The labcraft,
makerspace, and hackathon movements are all based on
the idea of the community being the main resource
and driving force behind them. The idea of the
community, introduced in the 1990s [Wenger 1998], gained importance again in
the twenty-first century, along with the concepts of
civic engagement, activism, and the public
humanities. Community and public engagement began to
be common categories used to describe media and
humanities labs. For instance, the Scholars’ Lab at
the University of Virginia Library is described as a
community lab with the following motto: “We build up people and practices
more than products.” The lab prioritizes
the process of learning and working together: “‘People over projects’ means
that we care more about such outcomes, than about
whether a formal ‘project’ happens”
[Scholars' Lab n.d.]. The Change Making
Media Lab at the University of Southern California,
in turn, is a good example of public engagement in
that it collaborates with people outside of the
academy and creates products, such as entertaining
dramas, that have real impacts on the local
community.
Cultural trends and a circulation of particular concepts
are reflected in the emergence of different types of
academic institutions, ranging from the
entrepreneurial to the engaged university. To meet
contemporary challenges, the humanities have made an
“infrastructural turn”
[Rockwell 2010] to build a physical
place that, through the architecture itself, brings
new features to the field: innovation,
experimentation, hands-on practices, and
collaboration. Under such circumstances, humanities
labs have been constructed.
A Brief History of the Laboratory in the Humanities
The first laboratories serving other than natural sciences were
computer science labs established in media studies in the
1980s and 1990s; for instance, the Laboratory Paragraphe at
the University of Paris 8 in 1983, Media Lab at MIT in 1985,
and Aalto Media Lab at Aalto University in 1993. Media labs
were launched as production, dynamic, and experimental
research spaces, studios, and ateliers. The goals of the
first laboratories were to foster the creation of new media
projects which explored the impact of technology on society
and the human condition, developed hardware and software
within the context of artistic projects, and tested the
potential of electronic technologies. Concurrently, in the
late 1990s, the word “lab” was applied to humanities
and technology, for example, HUMlab at Umeå University was
founded in 1997 and Stanford Humanities Lab at Stanford
University in 1999. Although the institutional models for
these units were not new, their conceptualization as
“lab” was an original move. Nevertheless, the
end of the twentieth century and beginning of the
twenty-first century remained under the domination of media
labs.
Since 2007, the situation changed significantly through the
dissemination of the concept of a laboratory in the
humanities domain. The laboratory concept has expanded
rapidly across the humanities department (e.g., the Global
History Lab in the Department of History at Princeton
University, 2007; the Media Archaeology Lab in the
Department of English at the University of Colorado,
Boulder, 2009) and libraries (e.g., the Scholars’ Lab
launched in the Alderman Library of the University of
Virginia, 2008). The trend towards building laboratories
continued unabated, reaching the point of the
laboratory boom after 2010 that
converged with the computational turn in the humanities [Berry 2011], the development of the
digital humanities [Gold 2012], and the
emergence of virtual laboratory (Alfalab, a project of the
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, run in
2009-2011). Since 2010, the concept of laboratory has spread
over the university campus, made inroads into city space and
public cultural institutions [Mahey et al. 2019] and
been launched in places that had never been designated for
this purpose.
Along with the humanities labs, with names referring mainly to
disciplines and cultural categories (e.g., the Culture Lab
at Brown University and Participatory Cultures Lab at McGill
University), digital humanities labs have begun to
proliferate right next to existing models of centers (e.g.,
the Digital Humanities Laboratory at Ecole Polytechnique
Fédérale de Lausanne, Digital Humanities Lab at Utrecht
University, and the Franke Family Digital Humanities
Laboratory at Yale University). The proliferation of various
labs in the humanities has led to the broadening of the
concept of laboratory beyond the notion of a physical place.
The term “laboratory” is used to describe the following
places, initiatives, and ideas: an interdisciplinary
department (the Humanities Lab at Lund University), a center
(the HUMlab at Umeå University), a makerspace (the Maker Lab
in the Humanities at the University of Victoria), an
incubator for new ideas (the Humanities Lab at American
University), a research workshop (the Northwestern
University Digital Humanities Laboratory at Northwestern
University), a collaboration of individuals (the Nebraska
Literary Lab at the University of Nebraska), a coalition
(the Humanities Action Lab led from Rutgers
University-Newark), a student-led initiative (the Public
Humanities Lab at the University of Virginia), a
state-of-the-art facility (the Digital Humanities Lab at the
University of Exeter), an innovative course (the Humanities
Labs at Colby College), a study programme (the Humanities
Lab at Leiden University), consortium (the DigHumLab at
Aarhus University), a virtual research environment (the
Digital Humanities Innovation Lab at the National University
of Distance Education), and even a podcast (the Literature
Lab Podcasts at Brandeis University). Consequently, the
notion of laboratory has gone far beyond its traditional
meaning, turning into a project that can be
done or an action that can be taken, then
dispersed all over the world. A good example of this
approach is the Humanities Action Lab led from Rutgers
University-Newark. It is a coalition of universities,
organizations, and public spaces in twenty cities that
collaborate to build community-curated public humanities
projects. The lab can be created everywhere needed to engage
a community around a particular challenge.
Thus, over the last years, we have observed the proliferation of
humanities labs and the growing interest in a laboratory
that implies a new mode of working. It suffices to mention
conferences, panel discussions, and seminars devoted to the
concept and organization of laboratory: “Building the Humanities Lab: Scholarly Practices in
Virtual Research Environments”, the panel
session in the Digital Humanities conference at King’s
College London in 2010; “Theories and
Practices of the Literary Lab” roundtable at
Modern Language Association National Meeting in Boston in
2013; “The Hum Lab: A Consortial
Workshop” at Haverford College in 2014;
“The Humanities Laboratory:
Discussions of New Campus Models”, organized
by Arizona State University’s Institute for Humanities
Research for the National Endowment for the Humanities in
2016; “Reimagining the Humanities
Lab”, a panel discussion at ADHO Digital
Humanities Conference in Mexico City in 2018; “What Is a Feminist Lab?”
symposium at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2019;
“Humanities Laboratories:
Critical Infrastructures and Knowledge
Experiments” workshop at King’s College
London in 2019; “Rebuilding
Laboratories” workshop at the University of
Birmingham in 2019; and “The
Architecture of Science and the Humanities”
workshop at Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in
2019. This list shows that there is an urgent need to
discuss this institutional model for the humanities and
understand its implications for scholarly research and
teaching practices.
Typology of Humanities Labs
To comprehend a laboratory in the humanities and identify its
different realization, I firstly collected the descriptions
of labs ranging from media labs to digital and non-digital
humanities labs [Pawlicka-Deger 2019],
scrutinize the context and meaning of the term
“laboratory”, analyse their mission statements,
and further determine their functions. Before discussing the
typology in detail, however, we can pose a significant
question of what is a humanities lab in itself? To answer
this question, let us look at below statements from three
laboratories:
At Humanities + Design our mission is to produce, through the lens of humanistic inquiry, new modes of thinking in design and computer science to serve data-driven research in the humanities. We believe that humanistic inquiry, grounded in interpretation, has much to contribute to the development of technologies if they are to help us reveal ambiguity and paradox, allowing human-scale exploration of complex systems. In the laboratory environment, theoretical and methodological discussions happen side-by-side with hands-on work with digital materials. Humanities scholars and students, designers, engineers, and computer scientists engage together in ongoing tool design as defined by the specific needs of participating humanities projects. [Humanities + Design n.d.]
The Digital Humanities Laboratory (DHLab), a unit of Yale University Library, offers space, community, and resources for Yale scholars who are using computational methods to pursue research questions in the arts, humanities, and humanistic social sciences. Located inside Sterling Memorial Library, the Franke Family Digital Humanities Laboratory is a hub for consultations, training, and opportunities that support Yale students, faculty, and cultural heritage professionals in their engagement with digital tools and techniques. [Yale DH Lab n.d.]
The Humanities Lab at ASU is designed as an experimental space in which interdisciplinary faculty teams work with students from a variety of academic and cultural backgrounds to investigate grand social challenges, to construct researchable questions that delve deeply into those challenges, and to generate possible approaches to complex, “wicked” issues like immigration, health, and climate change, for which there are no easy answers. [ASU Humanities Lab n.d.]
The first lab, the Humanities + Design is a research lab at the
Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford
University focused on designing and producing tools through
the lens of humanistic inquiry. Critical thinking practiced
by humanities scholars is thus applied to a hands-on work
conducted by designers, engineers, and computer scientists.
The lab team works on building open source tools for digital
research, such as Data Pen, an instrument for creating data
sets that draws from linked data sources, and a
visualization tool Palladio. The second example represents a
lab established as a shared space at the university’s
library. It is a facility that provides equipment and
digital technologies and support in digital humanities
skills acquisition for both research and teaching purposes
through consultations, training, and guest lectures. This
multifunctional lab has been built to offer space,
community, and resources for scholars in the arts,
humanities, and social sciences. The last statement, in
turn, describes the Humanities Lab at Arizona State
University which is a set of lab-based courses. The lab
offers an experimental space where students and faculty work
on a particular problem in intergenerational collaborative
teams for one or two semesters. Each lab is devoted to a
specific socio-cultural challenge that is investigated
through critical thinking, critical engagement, hands-on
practices, and interdisciplinary discussions. Although these
three labs represent different functions and practices, each
is guided by a “laboratory” ethos, defined by the
Stanford Humanities Lab: collaborative, co-creative, and
team-based [Hartwig 2011]. These features are
the core of laboratory where the humanistic inquiry,
knowledge, and practices are applied, produced, tested, and
investigated.
This wide range of uses of the term “laboratory” implies
that labs are varied due to the function and activities.
Based on the collected data, I indicate the following six
functions of laboratories in the humanities:
- Research-focused lab - a place for conducting, coordinating, and promoting cross-disciplinary research, ranging from theoretical, critical, and methodological analysis and interpretations to practices based on learning-by-doing approach, such the application of digital tools, experimentation, and prototyping.
- Design-focused lab - a place for designing and producing technical tools, applications, website, platforms, and creative works which provide new methods, tools, and a subject of critical research.
- Work station-type lab - a place for providing equipment, hardware, software, and resource for facilitating research, teaching, and learning.
- Service-focused lab - a place for meeting the individual needs of users through consulting, technological services (web hosting, maintenance, dissemination and preservation for digital projects), and computer services (support for conducting digital projects).
- Public engagement-focused lab - a place that conducts research and organizes events related to social challenges and community affairs, creates community-curated and participatory projects, develops new ways of collaborations with public audiences, and promotes civic engagement.
- Pedagogical-focused lab - a place for teaching, training, and learning through courses, seminars, lectures, workshops, etc. A laboratory that implies collaborative and experimental practices, entails the dissemination of new forms of teaching and learning in the humanities, including hands-on practices based on the learning-by-doing approach (popularized by creative spaces, makerspaces, and hackerspaces that practice prototyping, tinkering, and hacking; e.g. the Maker Lab in the Humanities at the University of Victoria and the Computational Humanities Lab at the University of Wisconsin–Madison); experiential learning and offsite research, that is to say, learning through direct experience outside a traditional academic setting, for instance, through traveling (The Global Humanities Lab course in the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University offers students the investigation of an international humanities through traveling to cities being the subject of the study) or field trips (e.g. the Encountering Food course of the Humanities and Arts Labs at Albion College where students explore local and global food through a series of projects and field trips and organize a community dinner); problem-based learning meaning that students investigate an open-ended problem through collaborative and interdisciplinary practices (e.g. the Humanities Lab at Arizona State University); and community-curated public humanities projects (e.g. practiced by the Humanities Action Lab, a coalition of universities, organizations, and public spaces in forty cities, led from Rutgers University-Newark).
Since any laboratory is a self-defined entity focused on a
specific function, activity, and practice, it can be
difficult to build a common definition of the laboratory in
the humanities. However, based on the above reflections, I
attempt to create the following working definition of the
humanities lab:
A laboratory in the humanities is a
technical, research, and intellectual infrastructure
for humanistic issues and inquiries which offers
space (physical, virtual or conceptual), community,
and resources to conduct a set of activities
resulting from its specific function (e.g. research,
design, work station, service, pedagogical, and
public engagement). Laboratory initiatives are
guided by the following principles:
interdisciplinarity, collaboration, co-creation,
team-based, and experimentation.
The widespread application of the term “laboratory” has led
to the fact that there is no single model for the humanities
laboratory. Based on more than two hundred laboratories,
established in North America, North-Western Europe, and
Australia, I determine five models for the humanities labs
due to their situatedness (physical or virtual), traditions,
functions, scholarly questions, practices, and activities.
Let us now explore these five models (the center-type lab,
the techno-science lab, the work station-type lab, the
social challenges-centric lab, and virtual lab), investigate
their organization and indicate a discourse from which they
originate.
The center-type labs
To characterize the center model-based laboratories, it
is essential to summarize the infrastructure changes
that occurred in the humanities over the past years.
In the 1990s, as previously stated, the first
laboratories emerged in the humanities (e.g. the
English Media Lab at the Department of English of
the University of Manitoba in 1995 and the HUMlab at
Umeå University in 1997) modelled upon media labs
for providing digital and analog media, facilitating
the use of digital and online resources, and
assisting with the application of digital tools for
the study of literature, language, culture, and
history. Since the 1990s, the digital humanities
have been rapidly developing through establishing
the first humanities computing centers, later
becoming the digital humanities centers, defined by
Zorich as “an entity where new
media and technologies are used for
humanities-based research, teaching, and
intellectual engagement and
experimentation”
[Zorich 2008, 4]. The center
played a crucial role in facilitating and
reinforcing digital humanities research at the
university by providing digital resources, services,
and tools, supporting the teaching of new digital
practices, and hosting symposia and lectures (e.g.,
the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s
College London established in 1991 and Maryland
Institute for Technology in the Humanities in 1999).
Along with the proliferation of the digital
humanities centers, a new institutional unit emerged
in the humanities — a laboratory — modelled on a
center for advancing and fostering the humanities
research on and with digital technologies (e.g., the
Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of
Victoria founded in 2005 and Scholars’ Lab at the
University of Virginia in 2006).
The next changes involve the reorganization of digital
humanities centers into departments (e.g., the
Centre for Computing in the Humanities was renamed
the King’s College Department of Digital Humanities)
and thereby, the institutionalization of the
discipline and the establishment of digital
humanities programmes and degrees. Later, the
infrastructure of the center would be a strategic
choice for the university to further set up the
department of digital humanities (e.g. the
Department of Digital Humanities at the University
of Helsinki grew out of the Helsinki Centre for
Digital Humanities, research network, and
infrastructure established in 2016). Meantime,
laboratories have been launched in the humanities
departments and libraries, emulating the center
model or establishing an entirely new infrastructure
for the humanities research, teaching, and
activities.
Laboratories built upon the center model are a central
institution at the university for conducting,
coordinating, and promoting research, teaching, and
infrastructure for digitization in the humanities
and social science. They play a key role in building
collaboration across departments and providing
support and training to the entire university, as
exemplified by the Price Lab for Digital Humanities
at the University of Pennsylvania: “The Price Lab serves as a central
node of communication and exchange across Penn’s
many departments, centers, and schools with
expertise and interest in the digital
humanities”
[Price Lab for Digital Humanities n.d.]. Instances of laboratories
that were influenced by the center model in other
institutions include: the HUMlab at Umeå University
(1997); the Humanities Lab at Lund University
(2005); Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the
University of Victoria (2005); the Scholars’ Lab at
the University of Virginia (2006); the Digital
Humanities Lab at the University of Basel (2010);
the Carolina Digital Humanities: Digital Innovation
Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill (2011); the UC Arts Digital Lab at the
University of Canterbury (2011); the D-Lab at the
University of California, Berkeley (2013); the NULab
for Texts, Maps, and Networks at Northeastern
University (2013); the Digital Humanities Lab at
Utrecht University (2014); the Digital Humanities
Innovation Lab (LINHD) at the National University of
Distance Education (2014); the Franke Family Digital
Humanities Laboratory at Yale University (2015); and
the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the
University of Pennsylvania (2015),
The center-type lab model is identified by the following
features:
- Physical situatedness – the lab is mainly located in humanities departments or in libraries;
- Manifold functions – the lab carries out various functions from conducting and coordinating cross-disciplinary research to providing space, equipment, and resources to facilitating research, teaching, and learning;
- Facilities and equipment – the lab offers space, resources, and equipment for conducting and facilitating research projects;
- A wide range of research projects – the lab involves research groups and projects devoted to the broad scope of humanities study;
- Academic appointments and staffing – the lab affiliates faculty and researchers as well as its own staff;
- The community – the goal of the lab is to bring together faculty, staff, and students as well as independent scholars and participants from cultural institutions and industry interested in a particular discipline, practices, and methods through series of open lectures, workshops, and seminars;
- Education – the lab offers teaching and training in the form of workshops, courses, academic degree programs, postgraduate and faculty training, fellowships, internships, and summer schools;
- Service – the lab offers a number of services to support faculties, staff, and students: consulting, providing technology solutions, maintaining and preserving digital projects, etc.
While any one of these features might be present in other
models, the center is clearly distinguished by a
large-scale central role in advancing humanities
scholarship as well as supporting the study and the
uses of digital methods and technologies for
research and teaching in the humanities.
The techno-science labs
In the natural sciences a laboratory is an ordinary place
which provides facilities, instruments, and
equipment with which to conduct experiments, test
hypotheses, and investigate samples. Science
laboratories have a long history dating back to the
alchemical laboratory in the sixteenth century;
however, for the purposes of this paper, we will
focus on the techno-science model developed in the
second half of the twentieth century, along with the
acceleration of technological innovation. A crucial
moment in a lab history occurred when the laboratory
was exposed as a space for constructing knowledge
through the use of technology and instruments rather
than a place for revealing reality. Sociology of
scientific knowledge, mentioned in the previous
section, played a key role in this movement.
Techno-science implies that science cannot be
detached from the technological tools that shape our
perceptions and help to produce the knowledge; thus,
our observations are always embodied via the
practical use of instruments.
Techno-science labs associated with the categories of
production, technology, innovation, and
experimentation became an inspirational architecture
for the humanities in need of a new place to explore
the emerging innovative uses of technology in the
study of history, art, and culture. Therefore, the
impulse to establish a laboratory in the humanities
came about in order to replicate the knowledge
production environment associated with science. A
science-based lab is thus seen as a driving force
for cutting-edge projects and a natural space for
developing and applying technologies to humanities
research. The following labs are good
representations of the techno-science lab model in
the humanities: the Stanford Humanities Lab at
Stanford University (1999-2009); the Critical Media
Lab at the University of Waterloo (2008); the
CulturePlex Lab at the University of Western Ontario
(2010); the Digital Humanities and Literary
Cognition Lab at Michigan State University (2012);
the Humanities + Design a Research Lab at Stanford
University (2012); the Maker Lab in the Humanities
at the University of Victoria (2012); the Poetic
Media Lab at Stanford University (2013); and the
King’s Digital Lab at King’s College London (2015).
Based on these examples, laboratories built using the
techno-science model are driven by the following
functions: providing state-of-the-art facilities and
equipment for experimental and innovative research;
promoting new ways of conducting research, teaching,
and learning through the application of digital
technologies; introducing new digital methods and
new modes of knowledge (e.g., data mining, mapping,
data visualization, simulation, 3D digitisation,
tinkering, coding, prototyping, and fabricating);
producing data-driven research in the humanities;
designing applications, tools, and platforms used in
digital humanities research and teaching; and
designing technical infrastructure for the
humanities.
The principles that guide the techno-science-based
laboratory are identified as:
- Physical situatedness – the lab is located in a particular place, in different departments (e.g. the Critical Media Lab is housed in the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures, while the Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab at the Department of English), and shared by people coming from various disciplines who work together on research projects;
- Equipment and technology – the lab is equipped with technological devices and tools that are necessary for conducting experiments and innovative projects; for example, hardware, software, applications, platforms, 3D digital technologies, eye-tracking systems, and so forth;
- Interdisciplinarity – strong post-disciplinary modes of research carrying out by humanities scholars, designers, computer scientists, software analysts, and engineers;
- Experimental research – conducting a technology-based project that attempts to explore new methods of creativity, fill research gaps, and open new scholarly perspectives;
- Manual work – doing hands-on work with the use of material devices, instruments, and technologies;
- Collaboration – projects are done via collaborative actions between faculty, staff, and students, between different disciplines and departments, and between the university, industry and the public sphere;
- Applied research – designing applications, tools, digital methods, and resources to meet the specific needs of humanities projects (e.g., Breve and Palladio, which are open-source tools for research designed by Humanities + Design a Research Lab);
- Products – the lab work is focused on designing measurable, applicable, and practical products, for instance, the Lacuna tool, produced by the Poetic Media Lab at Stanford University, is used in the Rhizomatic Reading project developed at the Center for Digital Humanities in the Princeton University Library to analyse connections across literary texts.
The humanities labs originated from techno-science labs
are focused on production, tools, and research
products. Although they stress the notions of
community and collectivity, these concepts are not
their goals in and of themselves but rather a way to
achieve their objectives. Each lab represents
distinct aspects and missions, but their common and
the most significant feature is technology “being the glue”, to use
Pierre Proske’ description of the Media Lab
Melbourne [Proske 2013]. Digital
technology, tools, and platforms are at once the
methods, the research, and the objects of study
themselves. Drawing on the description of Stanford
Humanities Lab, we can summarize that these labs
involves a “triangulation of
arts practice, commentary/critique, and outreach,
merging research, pedagogy, publication and
practice. They didn’t just comment and discuss,
they built: new media, interactive archives,
predictive models of social change, new courses,
collaborative research workshops, art
exhibitions”
[Hartwig 2011].
The work station-type lab
The next model is called both the work station and
service model [Maron et al. 2014], referring
to the idea of desktop classrooms, a computer lab,
and instructional technology spaces. This type of
laboratory operates as a physical room that
accumulates equipment and devices used to support
faculty and students in their work. It functions as
the work space that supplies facilities, such as
editing software, digital cameras, and audio
recording devices; provides services, such as
printing and studio spaces; and supports the use of
software and devices. Labs based on the work station
model are located mainly in libraries, which play a
key role in facilitating humanities research by
providing resources and equipment. The library is
also seen as a major place for digital humanities
since it typically carries out the following tasks:
digitizing materials, building digital collections
and resources, and supporting research data
management. Examples of the works station-type
laboratories include: the Digital Scholarship Lab at
Brown University (2012); the Digital Humanities Lab
at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (2012);
the Digital Humanities Lab at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2013); the Digital Scholarship
Lab at the University of Oklahoma (2014); Willson
Center Digital Humanities Lab at the University of
Georgia (2015); the Digital Humanities Lab at
Bowling Green State University (2015); the Digital
Humanities Lab at Rutgers University (2015); the
Humanities Research Lab at California State
University, Northridge (2016); the Digital
Humanities Lab at the University of Exeter (2017);
the Digital Humanities Lab in the Centre for Digital
Humanities Research at Australian National
University (2017); and the Digital Scholarship Lab
at Michigan State University (2018).
These labs are guided by the following functions:
supplying facilities, equipment, and devices;
supporting faculty and students in their studies;
providing help in research data management; and
training faculty and students in regard to the
utilization of equipment, digital tools, and
software.
The work station model is distinguished by features
listed below:
- Physical situatedness – the lab is located mainly in libraries but also in the humanities departments;
- Reconfigurable space – the place is made to be adjusted according to needs and conditions; for example, the Digital Scholarship Lab at the Brown University Library can be converted from a lecture hall to a team project room;
- Facilities, equipment, and technological tools – the lab provides different types of facilities (sound recording studio, interview room), equipment (computers, cameras, eye trackers, 3D printers), and software;
- Specific function – the lab defines its purposes clearly, which may range from providing equipment and tools for students, supporting research data management, offering technical assistance, such as metadata encoding and archiving digital projects, and training faculty and students on the use of various media and tools;
- Specific users – the lab targets specific users who have access to the lab and permission to use its facilities; for instance, the Digital Humanities Lab at Rutgers University is available only to members of the Rutgers digital humanities community;
- Terms and conditions – since the lab welcomes everyone from any discipline and level of experience, it provides rules related to the use of the lab’s facilities and equipment.
The humanities lab as a work station aims to provide an
environment, services, and facilities which support
scholarly work rather than innovative research
projects, as in the case of techno-science labs. A
laboratory is thus understood literally as a place —
referring again to Hannaway’s definition — equipped
with specialized instruments and apparatuses that
require hands-on skills and knowledge for their
utilization.
The social challenges-centric lab
The next model of a humanities laboratory grows out of
social labs, community labs, and citizen labs [Hassan 2014]
[Kieboom 2014]
[Tiesinga et al. 2014]
[Ricaurte Quijano 2018] as well as public
humanities initiatives. It comes from seeking “new research methods, new lines of
inquiry, and new ways of engaging with public
audiences”
[FHI-DU Humanities Labs n.d.] for tackling real-world
problems and stimulating social changes. Marlieke
Kieboom claims that one way to address global and
local problems is to establish a new space entailing
new practices, methods, and solutions; a promising
place for undertaking the challenges is a laboratory
seen as a “container for social
experimentation”
[Kieboom 2014, 9]. A lab implies
new practices, such as collaboration, integration,
public action, and dialogue across departments,
institutions, and communities. A laboratory is an
experimental space where the humanities can merge
with other disciplines and take part in the process
of addressing local and global concerns. The great
example of this model is the Humanities Lab at
Arizona State University founded by Sally Kitch in
2017 to enhance problem-based study and
interdisciplinary and intergenerational
collaboration. As Kitch said, “I started the Humanities Lab because
I realized that our students were not benefitting
from the kind of interdisciplinary, exploratory
experiences faculty were getting through the IHR.
(…) So I wanted to see if we could establish a way
for students to get that experience; to recognize
the humanities as important for approaching and
addressing today’s challenges, because the kinds
of questions that really plague us are humanistic
at their core. They’re about values and culture
and understanding the way people form beliefs and
the kinds of attitudes we carry around with us and
the way we all live in our own narratives. And
encountering that is essential for solving these
problems.”
[Greguska 2019] The Humanities
Lab was created as an experimental space for
investigating “wicked” problems, such as
immigration, health, and climate change through the
humanities inquiry approach and intervention: “Most of the really big challenges we
face are not fundamentally about technology,
science, economics, etc. They are human challenges
that have been with us for a very long time and
therefore require human-centred inquiry as part of
the search for a solution. Yet, often the
humanities disciplines are not included in such
discussions. Therefore, the Humanities Lab brings
the humanities to the table by emphasizing the
study of values and the way we understand the
world around us. Merging the humanities with
diverse disciplines helps us to see the grand
social challenges more holistically and therefore
puts us in a better position to conceptualize
solutions.”
[ASU Humanities Lab n.d.]
Unlike the techno-science model, which is centred on
designing and applying technological tools to
research projects, the social challenges-centric
model aims to build a common and interventive space
that in itself is a way to address the most profound
social issues. I indicate three varieties of the
social challenges-centric model for a humanities
lab: coalition-based lab, problem-based lab, and
community engagement lab. This model is thus not a
unified structure, but a dynamic form driven by the
ideas of community, dialogue, and intervention.
The first type of lab arises as an initiative of a
coalition of various institutions that activate a
laboratory as an urgent need to react to pressing
problems in a particular place. The Humanities
Action Lab (HAL) is a coalition of universities,
issue organizations, and public spaces in forty
cities led from Rutgers University-Newark. Students
and stakeholders in each city investigate a
particular problem in a local context, produce
community-curated public humanities projects, and
stimulate public dialogue on the urgent questions.
Laboratories can also work on the same problem
explored then by different communities and from
various perspectives. They develop local
contributions to national project that further
“travel nationally and
internationally to museums, public libraries,
cultural centers, and other spaces in each of the
communities that helped create them”
[HAL n.d.]. The examples of national
projects are “Guantánamo Public
Memory Project” hosted by Columbia
University. This initiative involved over 300
students from 13 universities to research, document,
and interpret the history of the US naval base at
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. “Students
from around the country collaborated with more
than 600 community stakeholders including Haitian
refugees, former service people, and attorneys
representing current detainees, to explore GTMO’s
history from many perspectives, as well as the
questions it raises today. Together they created a
traveling exhibit, web platform, digital and
physical archive, interview collection, and series
of public dialogues. The exhibit has traveled for
more than 3 years to 18 cities and counting, with
public dialogues in each place. More than 500,000
people will have had a face-to-face encounter with
the exhibit, and many more online and through
social media”
[HAL n.d.]. This type of laboratory is a
great example of how the humanities can bring
together people from various institutions around a
particular challenge, participate in public dialogue
and call for action at the local and national
level.
The problem-based lab is in turn set up around a central
theme for a specific purpose. It thus creates an
environment — problem space — around particular
urgent social and cultural issues that need to be
addressed by integrative and interdisciplinary
approach. Good examples are the labs within the
Humanities Laboratories at the Franklin Humanities
Institute of Duke University, where each individual
lab is devoted to a particular problem and launched
for mainly three years. The first lab at the FHI,
Haiti Lab, was established after Haiti’s natural
disaster in 2010 to broaden knowledge about Haitian
culture, history, and language and expand Haitian
studies in the U.S. Other labs at the FHI devoted to
significant social phenomena and challenges are
BorderWork(s) Lab (2011-2014) investigating the acts
of division and demarcation in the world; Health
Humanities Lab (2016- present) undertaking issues of
clinical medicine and public health from the
perspective of the humanities and social science;
and From Slavery to Freedom Lab (2018- present)
examining the life and afterlives of slavery and
emancipation. The similar type of problem-based lab
is also set up within the Humanities Lab at Arizona
State University where each lab works as a one- or
two-semester course bringing together students and
faculty around “wicked” issues. The lab is thus
established for a fixed period of time to
investigate grand social challenges, construct
researchable questions, and generate possible
approaches to complex problems. So far, the
Humanities Lab program has launched the following
courses: Health & Wellbeing Lab, Sexual Violence
Lab, Sustaining Humans Lab, Rebuilding Puerto Rico
Lab, and Facing Immigration Lab. The next great
example, differing from the previous ones, is the
Human Security Collaboratory (HS Collab) launched by
the Global Security Initiative (GSI) at Arizona
State University focused on addressing complex
problems related to digital security and civil
rights through the application of digital humanities
tools and inquiries. The lab’s current projects
include “Border Quants”,
a collective of artists and scholars conducting
research related to digital human rights, personal
data protection, and decolonial approaches to data
use, and “Vibrant Lives”,
an immersive performance installation as a critical
comment on the use and monetization of personal data
production. The important part of the lab’s
activities is a public engagement through events,
such as a series of lunchtime conversations about
digital human security issues.
The third type of lab — the community engagement lab —
aims to promote civic engagement through
participatory approaches to research and social
action. Good examples are the mentioned HS Collab at
Arizona State University and the Engage Media Lab at
The New School. The latter lab is a student group
and research lab that develops workshops,
screenings, and research projects in collaboration
with The New School students and the New York City
community. Other instances include the Public
Humanities Lab at the University of Virginia and the
Participatory Cultures Lab at McGill University. The
last one is particularly focused on participatory
research devoted to issues of social justice,
gender-based violence, food security, and poverty
alleviation. Research projects use various tools
that engage a community: digital storytelling,
photovoice, participatory archiving, and more.
Community engagement projects are conducted through
the collaboration with variety countries including
South Africa, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Vietnam, and
Indonesia.
To summarize, instances of laboratories built upon the
social challenges-centric model include: the
Humanities Laboratories at Duke University (2010);
the Participatory Cultures Lab at McGill University
(2010); the Engage Media Lab at The New School
(2011); the Humanities Action Lab led from Rutgers
University-Newark (2014); the Human Security
Collaboratory (HS Collab) at Arizona State
University (2015); the Humanities Lab at Arizona
State University (2017); and the Public Humanities
Lab at the University of Virginia (2017).
Based on these cases, the social challenges-centric model
of labs can encompass the following functions:
building a community around the lab and challenges;
fostering collaboration and communication across
departments, institutions, and communities; engaging
with the local community beyond the university;
connecting the diverse local perspectives of
communities around the world; producing
community-curated public humanities projects;
propelling positive social, cultural, and
environmental changes; promoting civic engagement;
and initiating new public dialogues.
The model is guided by the following principles:
- Flexible structure – the lab can be situated physically or virtually and formed as a meeting place, research group or course; in this sense, a lab can be created anywhere at the university or beyond;
- Flexible duration – the lab can be set up for a specific period of time and then can be closed down once a project is concluded and goals are achieved;
- The community – people gathered around the lab are the main resources and their dialogue are the driving forces of the lab;
- Collaboration and integration – the lab is an integrative environment for faculty, staff, students, and the local community;
- Specific purpose of the lab – the goals are particularly related to social challenges, global “wicked” problems, and the local community;
- The infrastructure of engagement – the lab works as the infrastructure that provides space and tools for intervening in social issues, translating ideas into action, and enhancing the engaged humanities;
- A wide range of methods – the lab uses various methods for tackling problems, such as public dialogues, interventions, digital methods, interviews, testimonies, prototyping, and participatory-based methods;
- Public actions – public initiatives are a product of the lab, including exhibits, web platforms, digital and physical archives, interview collections, and series of public dialogues.
The social challenges-centric model for the humanities
lab originates from the concepts of social labs,
citizen labs, and public creative spaces. While the
techno-science model is centred on applied research,
technological issues, and innovative approaches, the
social challenges-centric model is created around
people, social issues, and public engagement.
Further, while the techno-science model produces
quantifiable and applied projects, the products of
this model of labs are dynamic, powerful, and
influential. As Zaid Hassan claims, “Complex challenges are therefore
dynamic and can change in unexpected ways over
time, whereas technical challenges are relatively
stable and static in comparison”
[Hassan 2014]. To conclude, the social
challenges-centric model can be created in any
environment where there is a need to initiate
dialogue and collaboration across communities to
solve particular local problems.
The virtual lab
Thus far, the term “laboratory” has been used in the
context of Hannaway’s definition of a place which
accumulates instruments, techniques, and
apparatuses. The techno-science, work station, and
community labs have one major thing in common, which
is physical situatedness [Svensson 2015]. A concrete location with an infrastructure and
facilities determines the knowledge creation
practices, the collaboration methods, and social
interactions. However, in recent years, along with
the development of cyberinfrastructure, we have
witnessed the expansion of a new lab model: the
virtual laboratory.
The advancement of cyberinfrastructure underpinned the
development of the digital humanities field that
applies computational tools and methods to the
humanities. The discipline of digital humanities is
based on the utilization of digital source
materials, digital methods, and new ways of
collaborating in the digital environment. The core
feature of the digital humanities is thus virtual
situatedness, defined as the digital, internet-based
workspace with an infrastructure, connection, and
operation that affect the work and research
communication. Scholars work in the virtual space,
including online platforms and the virtual research
environment, which directs digital humanities
research, supports the use of digital tools, and
enables scholarly collaboration. Digital humanities
scholars are thus examples of researchers who work
in both physical and virtual spaces. Therefore,
their research rooms comprise physical places, such
as a laboratory or center, as well as a virtual
laboratory. Hence, the concept of laboratory goes
beyond the category of physical location towards a
placeless and virtual idea not determined by walls
and physical situatedness. The virtual model of the
humanities lab plays a key role in the
cyberinfrastructure that enhances the web-based
research environment, supports national and
international collaborations, facilitates networks
of scholars, and provides data services, resources,
and tools.
Given the scope of the function and the operation of the
virtual laboratory, the model comprises two types of
labs. The first is formed as a collaborative
platform for enhancing communication and cooperation
and promoting new modes of learning and research
with the use of digital tools and technologies.
HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology
Alliance and Collaboratory) constitutes a good
example of this initiative. It is a community-based
publishing and an academic social networking
platform that enables global communication, sharing,
and collaborations among students and researchers
across the humanities, social sciences, media
studies, the arts, and technology sectors. Alfalab
(2009-2011), in turn, was a collaborative network
and a virtual project of five institutes of the
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences that
aimed to promote, provide, and apply the use of
digital tools and methods in the humanities research
practices and foster a cooperation of humanities
researchers at national and international levels.
The second type, called the virtual research environment,
is a virtual space for facilitating digital research
processes, providing databases, tools, and services,
and promoting collaboration across the university,
academic institutions, and cultural organizations.
It is an innovative, web-based, and
community-oriented digital environment with an
international dimension, defined by Annamaria Carusi
and Torsten Reimer as a “set of
web applications, online tools, systems and
processes interoperating to facilitate or enhance
the research process within and without
institutional boundaries; it enables collaborative
research activities beyond geographical
barriers”
[Carusi et al. 2010, 12]. Examples of
virtual research environments for the humanities are
the TextGrid Laboratory provided by DARIAH-DE;
DHVLab, the Digital Humanities Virtual Laboratory
carried out at the Ludwig Maximilian University of
Munich (it consists of a teaching and research
infrastructure in the applications and methods used
in the digital humanities); HuNI (Humanities
Networked Infrastructure), a virtual laboratory
developed as part of the Australian government’s
NeCTAR (National e-Research Collaboration Tools and
Resources) program (it is a platform that combines
data from many Australian cultural websites into the
humanities and creative arts database); the Digital
Humanities Innovation Lab (LINHD) at the National
University of Distance Education in Spain (a
laboratory that serves as a hub for infrastructures
and tools for digital humanities projects in Spain
and Spanish speaking countries); and the Nordic
Digital Humanities Laboratory (NDHL), the ongoing
initiative that aims to create convergence in Nordic
humanities and arts e-infrastructures through a
participant-driven virtual laboratory for
data-intensive research.
Hence, the structure of the virtual model of the
humanities laboratory can be grasped through:
- Virtual situatedness – research and collaboration processes take place in the digital and shared workspace;
- Technology and software – they are key composers of virtual spaces and the main conditions for sustaining, accessing, and using the virtual laboratory;
- Users-driven – the virtual lab is created for and by the research community; thus, the development of the virtual lab depends on users’ activities, support, and feedback;
- Network approach – the main purpose of the lab is building the interaction and collaboration network between researchers, universities, and organizations;
- Service and resource-based project – the virtual lab provides data services, digital materials, tools, and an environment for research practices and collaboration;
- Terms and conditions – the lab space is determined by the terms and conditions related to access, using, and sharing the data and other resources within the virtual platform.
The advancement of cyberinfrastructure ushered in the era
of virtual laboratories, created in the digital
environment beyond physical, geographical, and
cultural borders. Similar to the center-type lab,
the techno-science and work station-type lab, the
virtual laboratory facilitates scholarly practices
and enables collaborative, innovative, and
technology-based projects. Hence, the virtual lab
represents a laboratory with the aspects
characterized by the rest of the models. The main
difference lies in situatedness; while the previous
labs are all determined by a physical location and
physical infrastructure, digital labs are signified
by virtual milieu and software.
Conclusions
The paper has shown that the laboratory turn has emerged in the
humanities as a part of a wider process of the
laboratorization of social life, which
has been occurring since the 1980s and with a significant
intensification in the last ten years. The emergence of the
laboratory in the humanities is thus the effect of
superimposing three discourses that appeared in different
domains: in the humanities, social sciences, and culture.
Laboratories made inroads into the humanities, introduced
new methods and practices and put the humanities on a par
with applied science. A laboratory, however, is more than a
new infrastructure within the humanities, it is a “meeting place”
[HUMlab n.d.], an “incubator
for new ideas”
[AU Humanities Lab n.d.], and a “conceptual
vehicle”
[Critical Media Lab n.d.]. The lab becomes
conceptualized as a way of thinking entailing new social
practices and new research modes (collaboration,
experimentation, and hands-on practices). Hence, the
laboratory turn has been driven by the movement away from
building physical labs towards creating concept-based
laboratories (lab courses, lab projects). The study has
shown that the year of 2010 became a significant period in
the history of the laboratory in the humanities. The
Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University established
a new model for the humanities labs, which gave rise to
conceptual laboratories seen more as problem-based projects
rather than physical work spaces. This essay has focused on
the application of the term “laboratory” to the
humanities field in the academy. Therefore, the issues of
the implementation of labs beyond this field and the
university’s campus remain still unexplored, including the
emergence of labs in GLAM sector, the formation of cultural
and citizens labs along with makerspaces and hackerspaces in
public domain, and the use of the word “lab” in
different areas of social life. Humanities labs constitute
part of the ongoing move towards turning various social
spaces and initiatives into a laboratory that
is a good lever to intervene in local and global complex
problems, testing and scaling ideas, and designing
prototypes through a collaboration of experts and citizens.
The second major finding was that the implementation of
laboratory emerged as the essential process in the
development of the humanities, one, which required the
reconstruction of infrastructure to support new research
practices and methods related to the utilization of
technology and digital tools. Therefore, the digital
humanities have become the driving force behind building a
laboratory space, which supports situated practices, the
collaborative, and technology-based projects. Furthermore,
the digital humanities have propelled the development of the
virtual laboratory, which involves virtual situatedness, a
collaborative and academic network, and the digital research
environment.
The next significant finding to emerge from this study is that
borrowing the laboratory concept from science does not mean
imitating its form and features. The humanities have
developed unique models of labs differing in the scale of
operation, infrastructure, and functions: the center-type
lab, the techno-science lab, the work station-type lab, the
social challenges-centric lab, and virtual lab. The previous
section has shown that each type produces knowledge
resulting from a lab structure and mission. Humanities labs
do not represent a unified structure; instead, they consist
of a group of various types of labs, which have their own
architectures, goals, and practices. As a result, the
humanities lab does not simply imitate the science lab but
adapts this new infrastructure for its own purposes and
needs. What fascinates me here is also the way how the
humanities reposition themselves in the academy and public
domain by bringing the field into dialogue with the sciences
in interdisciplinary labs, building their own
infrastructure, and designing a lab as a site of
intervention in social challenges.
This study has important implications for understanding the
concept of laboratory in the humanities as well as
developing new models and sites. However, one challenge of
the humanities lab remains to be discussed: its
sustainability. The problem of sustainability concerns any
model of laboratory [Maron et al. 2014]. It is a
question of maintaining the long-term viability of a lab and
sustaining the commitments of time and effort made by the
people who are the core of the laboratory. Through examining
lab projects that completed their activities (e.g., Alfalab,
2009-2011; the Computational Humanities Lab at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2012-2014; the Digital
Cultures Lab at Douglas College, 2014-2018), it becomes
clear that it is a major concern requiring further
investigation. The Digital Matters Lab at the University of
Utah has taken action in that direction and chosen the topic
of “sustainability” for its activities and projects
through 2022. It aims to address the questions of the
accessibility of digital materials and the sustainability of
in-progress artefacts [Digital Matters Lab n.d.]. Thus, the
humanities lab is a fascinating phenomenon in the history of
the humanities and many issues regarding its infrastructure,
action, and impact require further analysis and reflection.
Acknowledgements
The research included in this article was presented during my
lecture, entitled “A Laboratory as
Critical Infrastructure in the Humanities” at
the workshop “Humanities Laboratories:
Critical Infrastructures and Knowledge
Experiments”, hosted by the Department of
Digital Humanities with King’s Digital Lab in conjunction
with the Critical Infrastructure Studies Initiative at
King’s College London on 23 May 2019. I thank the Department
of Digital Humanities at King’s College London for awarding
me the Willard McCarty Fellowship 2018/2019 and giving an
opportunity to share my research. I would like to thank the
participants at the workshop for the feedback I received. I
also thank two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading
and many insightful comments and suggestions.
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URL: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/14/3/000466/000466.html
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Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and The Association for Computers and the Humanities
Affiliated with: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
DHQ has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Copyright © 2005 -
Unless otherwise noted, the DHQ web site and all DHQ published content are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Individual articles may carry a more permissive license, as described in the footer for the individual article, and in the article’s metadata.
Comments: dhqinfo@digitalhumanities.org
Published by: The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and The Association for Computers and the Humanities
Affiliated with: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
DHQ has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Copyright © 2005 -
Unless otherwise noted, the DHQ web site and all DHQ published content are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Individual articles may carry a more permissive license, as described in the footer for the individual article, and in the article’s metadata.
