Mission

Babble Lab is a center for digital humanities pedagogy and research at Pace University.

Our mission is to reimagine humanities instruction to prepare students with the knowledge, skills, and creativity necessary for active democratic participation in our digital age. The traditional humanities disciplines have given us vitals tools for critical thinking, creative expression, and cultural analysis. The digital humanities offer opportunities to build on those strengths: by adapting methods from STEM-related fields to advance humanistic inquiry, by reimagining learning as making, and by leveraging our learning and teaching to spark participation not only within but beyond the university walls.

With a unique interest in both higher education and K-12 instruction, Babble Lab is dedicated to increasing support for both university and K-12 educators in using digital humanities-based methods in their classrooms. We define the digital humanities broadly as a field that engages computational methods, digital tools, and increased emphasis on media history to:

• enhance methods of humanistic inquiry,

• encourage greater reflection on the assumptions and omissions that inform our understanding of the past and the present, and

• empower learners to grapple with the political, ethical, and economic challenges of the twenty-first century.

We envision a world where humanities education at the K-12 and higher educational levels plays a vital role in giving everyone a place in the world as makers of democracy.