Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    An AI-Driven Work Force
    AI and Microcredentials
Sign In
First Person

Designing a Lab in the Humanities

By Fritz Breithaupt February 6, 2017
0611-5912-Comfort-2
Randy Lyhus for The Chronicle

The humanities suffer from a structural crisis. We have little to offer young undergraduates to do, explore, and contribute on their own to our fields. Likewise, we send our graduate students to the library with good advice: “Come back in 10 years. Then we’ll talk.”

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

0611-5912-Comfort-2
Randy Lyhus for The Chronicle

The humanities suffer from a structural crisis. We have little to offer young undergraduates to do, explore, and contribute on their own to our fields. Likewise, we send our graduate students to the library with good advice: “Come back in 10 years. Then we’ll talk.”

That is what happened to me. I went to the dungeons when I was 20 and do not regret the years in the dust. A decade later, when I came back out of the library, the world seemed so bright and remarkable. It has ever since, and would not have without the years in the cave. But I regress.

Today’s undergraduates are different. They long for something they can do, experience, and accomplish now — in their freshman year. And I do not blame them. Our world seems to be ticking fast. The questions for me are: How can the humanities — and critical thinking in general — fit into this new world? What challenges do we have that will get the attention of a first-year student?

By accident, I stumbled into a possible answer. Like many good things, it started with a highly motivated student who ended up in my office more by mistake than planning. He had not gotten into the science lab he wanted and was looking for an alternative. We tried to figure out common ground. Our mental Venn diagram exercise revealed that we both like working with morality. I was already interested in the empirical context of narratives, so the student and I decided to spend a semester asking people to retell short moral stories to us. We wanted to look at which narrative factors would influence their implicit moral judgment.

Over the course of the semester, we realized that although the specific project was interesting, the alluring aspect was more that we both had something to play with intellectually: story retellings. My office became the sandbox. OK, we did not have sand, but papers, and lots of them. We gathered thousands of retold stories and used whatever was available to us as tools, ranging from hermeneutics to quantified linguistic analysis.

The goal is not to imitate the sciences, but to reclaim what the humanities have always done: Ask questions, observe, question our world, and, yes, experiment and gather data.

Soon, other students and colleagues became interested in what we were doing, and some joined in. Suddenly, there were five, then up to 10 people. Little by little, we figured out the methodologies and jargon and found studies that had used similar approaches of massive story retelling, which we then knew to call “serial reproduction.” We found that few if any groups in the world had collected and generated as many short narratives as we had. There was and is terra incognita.

After a while, I noticed that the students called our weekly gatherings “lab meetings.” Sure, we had done several joint presentations and written some small articles, with more pending. But was this a lab?

My training in the humanities, and some in law, did not teach me what a lab is or how to run it. Labs have rats, coats, and big money, I thought. What we were doing here seemed less like a lab and more like a playground. As always, I learned most from the students, some of whom happened to be in “real” labs. If they called our humanities work a lab, it was a lab.

The goal of our Experimental Humanities Lab is not to imitate the sciences, but to reclaim what the humanities have always done: Ask questions, observe, question our world, and, yes, experiment and gather data. If that is what happens in a lab, then surely we might have a lab. Why should labs be reserved for the sciences?

As a lab director, I suffer from many weaknesses. The worst is that I waited too long to ask for advice, and so continued in the playful mode as an autodidact for many years. This fit the students’ and my curiosity but may not have been so smart when presenting our work to the world or gathering skills such as working with statistics. For me, statistics had been a thing I did in school, pulling red and blue marbles from a bag. Or was that probability? Not sure, but I needed to learn.

ADVERTISEMENT

Another learning curve has been grant applications. Science labs have big money (did I already mention that?). So I met with one of our very able grant officers at the university. She understood my humanities background all too well and explained to me what it means to get big grants. “Are you ready to take a grant from the military to study terrorist narratives?,” she asked. For humanities scholars of my generation who grew up with notions like the “military-industrial complex” before it became the “surveillance-industrial complex,” that seemed like a simple No.

Internal grants seemed more safe and clean. It may be no surprise that the first grant I got for the lab came from the science division of my own university.

To be clear, my strategy is not to abandon ship to swim over to another vessel called science. Rather, I think it is time that we humanists try pirating some other ships to notice that they were once our ships, too. Empirical psychology, for example, started when a German literary writer and critic, Karl Philipp Moritz, collected and edited life stories. The humanities have more freedom than other fields, and we need to use this freedom to excite people, beginning with our students.

This excitement has been a gift. Many students in the lab have become the driving force behind projects and ideas. They come from different backgrounds and want to study different ideas: interactions between medical doctors and patients, legal affairs, empathy, and also what it means to fall in love.

ADVERTISEMENT

Each of those projects has a narrative component that we can study. And yes, there have been a lot of typical humanities and literary questions as well. Not all projects have led to something stellar or publishable, but the difference is that these challenges were fully self-imposed. Instead of filling niches of research, we can create the components of what we want to study. When I get asked why I do it, I can simply state, “it is fun.”

Through the lens of this new playground/lab, I have come to re-evaluate my beliefs about humanities education. There is something missing. Call it the fun factor. It is the excitement that students have when leaving a meeting or class eager to try things out and do something.

In the humanities, when else do students return for the next meeting excited to tell us what they have found out? It does happen, but not often enough.

Whether students head to the library or set up an experiment is secondary for me. The traditional classroom certainly has its limitations and we should evaluate it from the overall purpose of education. I will not go there now, but I would like to remind us that we do need to inspire undergraduates and give them meaningful challenges. The overall goal is to catch the fancy of our students again by giving them a playground of discovery and exploration.

ADVERTISEMENT

When I do exit interviews with students or meet alums, I always ask them what was most exciting to them and most shaped who they are. Often, they tell me about a big experience — something they faced alone, like a study-abroad trip, or a real-world challenge, such as being part of a play or an opera in which a large group of people had to rely on everyone’s absolute commitment.

My hope is that, soon, I will hear that what most shaped a student was a challenge in the art of critical thinking in the humanities.

Fritz Breithaupt is professor of Germanic studies and an affiliated professor of cognitive science at Indiana University in Bloomington. His website for these projects is Experimentalhumanities.com.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Photo illustration showing Santa Ono seated, places small in the corner of a dark space
'Unrelentingly Sad'
Santa Ono Wanted a Presidency. He Became a Pariah.
Illustration of a rushing crowd carrying HSI letters
Seeking precedent
Funding for Hispanic-Serving Institutions Is Discriminatory and Unconstitutional, Lawsuit Argues
Photo-based illustration of scissors cutting through paper that is a photo of an idyllic liberal arts college campus on one side and money on the other
Finance
Small Colleges Are Banding Together Against a Higher Endowment Tax. This Is Why.
Pano Kanelos, founding president of the U. of Austin.
Q&A
One Year In, What Has ‘the Anti-Harvard’ University Accomplished?

From The Review

Photo- and type-based illustration depicting the acronym AAUP with the second A as the arrow of a compass and facing not north but southeast.
The Review | Essay
The Unraveling of the AAUP
By Matthew W. Finkin
Photo-based illustration of the Capitol building dome propped on a stick attached to a string, like a trap.
The Review | Opinion
Colleges Can’t Trust the Federal Government. What Now?
By Brian Rosenberg
Illustration of an unequal sign in black on a white background
The Review | Essay
What Is Replacing DEI? Racism.
By Richard Amesbury

Upcoming Events

Plain_Acuity_DurableSkills_VF.png
Why Employers Value ‘Durable’ Skills
Warwick_Leadership_Javi.png
University Transformation: a Global Leadership Perspective
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin