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Katherine Elkins, Ph.D

Email: elkinsk@kenyon.edu
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Katherine Elkins has written over a dozen articles on memory, consciousness, and embodied aesthetic experience in a wide range of writers from Plato and Sappho to Wordsworth and Woolf. In Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives (OUP, 2022), she reframed Proust’s exploration of consciousness in light of integrated information theory. In The Shapes of Stories (Cambridge UP, 2022), she used the AI software SentimentArcs to develop the first robust methodology for exploring the emotional arcs of stories. Her audible.com lectures on “The Giants of French Literature” and “The Modern Novel” have won her an international audience.

With a grant from the NEH, she and AI researcher Jon Chun created immensely popular computational courses for humanists, social scientists, and artists in the world’s first human-centered AI curriculum. These courses bring a more diverse set of voices to today’s big questions by building a foundation in the conceptual, ethical, and technical aspects of AI from a multi-disciplinary perspective.

She is also Co-Founder and Co-Director of the KDH lab focused on the latest advances in natural language processing and generation. Over the past six years, she and Chun have been involved in hundreds of innovative projects applying AI to literature, art, political science, economics, and more. Part of their research has included training GPT language models to write in the style of a variety of authors and styles. In honor of Čapek’s 100th anniversary of “Robots,” they debuted AI Divabot in collaboration with Director and Artist-in-Residence at the Wexner Center, Jim Dennen.

AREAS OF EXPERTISE

Professor Elkins’ research interests include literature and philosophy, modernist studies, cognitive studies, artificial intelligence, digital humanities and cultural analytics.

EDUCATION

  • 2002 — Doctor of Philosophy from Univ. of California Berkeley
  • 1990 — Bachelor of Arts from Yale University

RECENT COURSES

Jon Chun

Email: chunj@kenyon.edu
Twitter: @jonchun2000
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Jon Chun has degrees in electrical engineering, computer science and biomedical engineering with a focus on cognitive science from UC Berkeley and UT Austin. As a postgraduate American Heart Research Fellow, he conducted and published research in gene therapy and medical informatics. He has also worked for the Advanced Light Source Group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and the semiconductor research consortium SEMATECH in Austin. His research interests include Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics, Natural Language Processing, Affective AI and Explainable AI.

Professor Chun has co-founded several startups including as CEO and COO of the world’s largest anonymity service backed by large Wall Street hedge funds and the CIA’s venture fund In-Q-Tel. His specialization in cross-cultural experiences of technology stems from working and studying throughout the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America including the US Foreign Service Spanish Exam and the 日本語能力試験 (Japanese). Before arriving in Gambier he was a Director of Development for the world’s largest computer security corporation based in Silicon Valley and Entrepreneur in Residence at UC Berkeley.

Jon is interested in bringing diverse voices to urgent debates surrounding technology’s growing impact on society. In 2017 he co-created the world's first AI curriculum in Computational Digital Humanities to bridge the gap between technology and humanity. He publishes on AI and has mentored hundreds of interdisciplinary projects that synthesize Artificial Intelligence with literature, history, political science, art, dance, music, law, medicine, economics and other subjects.

AREAS OF EXPERTISE

Data Analytics, Machine Learning and AI, NLP, Time Series, Network Security, FinTech, MedTech, XAI/FATE, Chatbots, IoT.

EDUCATION

  • 1996 - American Heart Assoc Research Fellow, University of Iowa Medical School
  • 1995 - Master of Science from University of Texas at Austin
  • 1993 - MIT Japan Program Scholar (sponsored NSF and US Navy)
  • 1989 - Bachelor of Science from Univ. of California Berkeley

RECENT COURSES

IPHS Computational Digital Humanities Research

See previous Research and Student Projects in IPHS at Digital Kenyon - Digital Humanities

Digital Humanities and DHColab

Digital humanities at Kenyon encompasses a dual lens. We empower the next generation of thinkers with the conceptual framework underlying our Age of Information — from dataism and algorithmic thinking to synthetic biology and artificial intelligence. Our unique approach to computational thinking positions students to engage with the many practical, theoretical and ethical issues surrounding technological innovation and social change.

Digital humanities also explores the most recent computational approaches as a way to augment — rather than replace — more traditional humanist inquiry. Students imagine and pursue new avenues of research by identifying unexplored datasets of text, image and sound, while embracing new computational frameworks that are increasingly powerful and easy to use. We focus on finding interdisciplinary solutions to today's challenges.

Students interested in digital humanities are encouraged to start with our introductory course, "Programming Humanity." Advanced courses include "A.I. for the Humanities." All digital humanities courses are project-based, and students will have a portfolio of innovative projects by the end of their course of study.

Learn more at Kenyon Digital Humanities Website