What is CultureLab?

Aims

In recent years, the field of computational methods in the humanities and social sciences has been rapidly growing and gaining recognition. In this respect, the aim of the CultureLab program is to create a reference hub within PSL in the field of computational science of cultures and societies, with a broad thematic, geographic and chronological scope, favouring large-scale or long-term analyses. This will be achieved by leveraging the considerable but dispersed forces that already exist within PSL in digital humanities, natural language processing, computer vision, and cultural evolution.

In addition to reinforcing the already existing strong presence at PSL of computational approaches to historical materials and humanities questions (literature, linguistics, history), this program will also allow the extension towards computational social sciences, more contemporary questions and natively digital material from today’s media, such as social networks and online communities. In terms of methods, CultureLab intends to go well beyond traditional “digital approaches” to the sciences of society and culture and to integrate deep learning and computational methods to significantly advance the state of the art in these fields.

In this respect, collaborations have already been developed with several cultural institutions to enrich their collections and to produce research outcomes which will have a borader societal impact. Futhermore, to maximise the scientific coherence and impact of this project, part of the CultureLab funding is allotted to two chaires d'excellence. These early career researchers, who are committed full time to CultureLab, are guided by an executive committee which role is to foster the emergence of shared cross-lab projects through PhD, graduate and undergraduate grants, joint workshops, summer schools, and by setting up a technical-administrative interface to be shared between CultureLab members.