The humanities are part of humane studies. They are not the whole of it.
The inquiry is older than any department, and the methods we use are whatever the work requires.
For half a century, IPHS has been Kenyon's home for that conviction.
Engaged in NIST's federal AI-standards consortium (CAISI) through the Modern Language Association. LLM evaluation, red-teaming, ethical auditing, and comparative global AI regulation.
Multi-agent behavioral simulation, affective AI, and narrative analysis. Empirical methods applied to judicial, medical, and social decision-making.
Schmidt Sciences-funded work rescuing endangered archives. Community-governed data sovereignty. AI for multilingual cultural preservation.
Every IPHS student conducts original computational research, and the range of it is the point. Students have built sentiment architectures for novels and fan fiction, profiled 17,000 ChatGPT conversations for decision-making bias, traced surveillance capitalism through social media terms of service, run natural language processing on the Septuagint, modeled the opioid epidemic in Ohio, and designed retrieval-augmented film recommenders. Recent cohorts evaluate LLM decision-making for federal AI-safety standards and build tools to rescue endangered archives in New Orleans. All of it lives at Digital Kenyon, where alumni will find their own projects still being read.
Program alumni have carried this training into AI-safety research roles, product leadership at companies like eBay, and AI initiatives at institutions like the National Gallery of Art. In 2025, students trained in the Frontiers in Generative AI course won the Most Original Project award at HackOHI/O, Ohio's largest hackathon, and were invited to Y Combinator.
In 2016, IPHS launched the AI CoLab, the first interdisciplinary, humanities-led AI program, built in deep collaboration with partners across academia, industry, government, and the nonprofit world. Students bring the integrated tradition to AI from inside, not as an afterthought. It anchors the world's first human-centered AI curriculum. Their work lives at Digital Kenyon, where, by the repository's own counts, it has been downloaded more than 100,000 times by readers in 198 countries since 2016.