Price Lab for Digital Humanities

Registration for Dream Lab 2026 is OPEN!

This annual week-long training opportunity is designed to help humanists—especially grad students and early-stage scholars—become more confident and thoughtful users, creators, and critics of digital technology.

Former Price Lab faculty director Professor Jim English + Associate Director of Digital Research in the Humanities J.D. Porter are in the Journal of Cultural Analytics on “eclectic” reading practices as documented by Goodreads users.

Price Lab executive committee member & Associate Professor of History Brent Cebul is in the Journal of American History with co-author Mike Glass on FHA housing and segregation. Their project draws from a Department of Housing and Urban Development database—which (with a team of undergraduate student collaborators), they’ve enhanced & mapped with GIS.

This summer, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow & Ph.D. student Jordan D. Ross sifted through fraternity archives, oral histories, student publications, local Black newspapers, alumni bulletins, and commencement programs. On the hunt for the origins of his own fraternity’s University of Pennsylvania chapter, he discovered much more. Jordan has gathered photographs, documents, timelines, and biographies into a searchable platform that explores how Black students at Penn in the early 20th century navigated the racial dynamics of predominantly white institutions.

Jordan says this is just the beginning: “There are more stories to tell—about the students who came after 1930, the influence of the Civil Rights Movement on Black student organizing at Penn, and the broader networks of African American student life at other predominantly white universities.”