IPHS asks how people make meaning, exercise judgment, remember the past, and live together. The Odyssey approaches those questions through literature, philosophy, history, political and social thought, religion, science, and the arts.
Today, some of the same questions arise in our encounters with artificial intelligence. What happens when machines interpret language, imitate human voices, offer moral advice, shape political information, or make recommendations that affect people’s lives? What do these systems understand, and what do they miss?
Students need more than one kind of education to answer such questions well. They need technical skill, but they also need to understand the human phenomena represented in their data. In IPHS, computation, the humanities, and the social sciences are not separate pieces brought together at the end. Each shapes the questions students ask, the methods they choose, and the conclusions they can responsibly draw.
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.
Narrative analysis, affective AI, social-network modeling, and multi-agent behavioral simulation. Computational and statistical methods applied to questions about language, culture, politics, medicine, law, and human decision-making.
Schmidt Sciences-funded work rescuing endangered archives. Community-governed data sovereignty. AI for multilingual cultural preservation.
Students undertake original computational projects early in the curriculum, but they do not skip the hard parts. In Programming Humanity, they learn programming, natural-language processing, sentiment analysis, data storytelling, and social-network modeling.
They also learn to prepare and evaluate data, compare methods, interpret results, and ask whether a computational model adequately represents the human phenomenon it claims to measure. The projects are engaging because the technical skills have an intellectual purpose. Students use computation to investigate questions about language, narrative, behavior, culture, politics, and social life—and learn that producing an answer is different from understanding what the answer means.
The Odyssey gives students a historical and intellectual foundation in the questions that have shaped human life.
Programming Humanity introduces programming through natural-language processing, sentiment analysis, data storytelling, and social-network modeling. Students learn these methods alongside the conceptual work required to use them responsibly.
AI for Humanity turns to machine learning, language models, model evaluation, and the consequences of placing intelligent systems in human settings.
Advanced seminars bring students to the moving frontier of AI research. They test new models, build evaluations, investigate agents and multi-agent systems, and pursue original projects grounded in their own disciplinary knowledge.
The senior seminar asks students to bring this work into conversation with their majors and with the larger questions of Humane Studies.
Students may also draw on courses in computing, mathematics, statistics, economics, political science, psychology, and other fields. COMP 118 provides one route into the advanced curriculum, and three IPHS courses are currently recognized as contributory courses in Kenyon’s Computing concentration. Students may pursue either program or combine the two.
Every IPHS student conducts original computational research. Their subjects vary because students bring different interests and disciplinary knowledge to the work. What the projects share is an effort to join technical inquiry with careful thought about the people, cultures, histories, and institutions represented in the data. 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 125,000 times by readers in 198 countries since 2016.