Digital technologies permeate our culture today, leaving virtually no area of meaning-making untouched. Vast social media platforms struggle to cope with the political consequences of their own scale, economics increasingly acknowledges a new type of capital in digital data, and artificial intelligence has gained an infrastructural role in our societies through the help of planetary-scale computing.
The Digital Theory H-Lab seeks to develop and maintain the broad-based, interdisciplinary conceptual framework necessary for understanding and transforming the way we live in and with the digital.
Employing a workshop-based, collaborative learning approach to the history and theory of the digital, the Lab fosters projects and writing that contribute to a theoretical framework for understanding the nature of the digital. We have a particular focus on machine learning and the new AI, including neural nets and large language models. Some results have been published in Critical Inquiry, and the Lab maintains a regular local meeting schedule as well as a talk and works-in-progress series in hybrid format with our international affiliates.
Lab Team
Leif Weatherby, Director, Department of German
David Bering-Porter, New School
Zachary Coble, Head, Digital Scholarship Services, NYU Bobst Library
Lisa Gitelman, Professor, Media and English, Steinhardt
Ryan Healy, PhD candidate, Department of English
Samuel Kellogg, PhD Candidate, Media Culture and Communications, Steinhardt
Joseph Lemelin, Philosophy, University of Stony Brook
emma rae bruml norton, PhD Student, Media Culture and Communications, Steinhardt
Joshua Scannell, New School
Cliff Siskin, Professor, English and American Literature
Claire Y. Song, PhD candidate, Comparative Literature