The Stanford Humanities Lab (SHL) is a loosely structured, self-supporting research collaboratory built around the work of its faculty leaders. It serves as a platform for transdiciplinary/post-disciplinary study dedicated to exploring innovative scenarios for the future of knowledge production and reproduction in the arts and humanities.

We believe that some crucial questions — about what it is to be human, about experience in a connected world, about the boundaries of culture and nature — transcend old divisions between the arts, sciences, and humanities; between the academy, industry, and the public sphere. We engage in large-scale experimental projects with a "laboratory" ethos — collaborative, co-creative, team-based — involving a triangulation of arts practice, commentary/critique, and outreach, merging research, pedagogy, publication and practice. Beyond commentary and discussion, we build: new media, interactive archives, predictive models of social change, participatory research models, collaborative research workshops, art exhibitions, public art works.

We are committed to a Big Humanities / Big Arts approach to humanistic inquiry and artistic practice, modeled along the lines of Big Science: large-scale, long-term, team-based projects that build big pictures out of the tesserae of expert knowledge.

The SHL agenda encompasses:

• animating archives - regenerating, bringing to life, and fostering new modes of interaction with the storehouses of human, cultural, artistic, scientific achievement - our focus is on the question of the relationship of the human past to efforts at conservation and preservation
• building bigger pictures - putting specialized in-depth research into the context of big human questions; questions, for example, of rapid social change and innovation, the ethical implications of information technology, the character of distributed digital communities, the politics of digital citizenship, the past, present, and future of intellectual property
• enabling co-creative collaboration - developing successful models of teamwork, learner-centered models of training (thinking through doing), and collaborative authoring tools and processes
• building bridges - establishing innovative partnerships between industry, museums, foundations, and high-level university-based research
• multiple outputs, multiple audiences (the multipurposing of scholarship, hybrid physical/digital exhibition projects; interactive timelines; interactivity architectures)
• curating physical space, experience enhancement, extension, and design in and out of museums, museums without walls
• producing (not just reproducing) knowledge through object and project-based learning (thinking through making or doing)
• mixed reality approaches to scholarship, knowledge production, and cultural programming
• soft/hard technology development inside content-rich or content-driven environments