More Humanities Resources

Advancing Human Stories with Technological Tools

Joining Shakespeare on Stage with VR

The Shakespeare-VR Project is an educational initiative from Carnegie Mellon University that uses virtual reality to open up new ways of enjoying Shakespearean drama. Directed by Dr. Stephen Wittek, the project has developed a suite of virtual experiences that allow users to step into a recreated Elizabethan playhouse, perform alongside virtual actors, and explore the theatrical world of early modern England. By combining historical accuracy with emerging technology, the project invites users to engage with Shakespeare’s works through active participation rather than passive observation.

Solving a Mystery: Printers of Foundational Freedom of Speech Documents

Though John Milton’s "Areopagitica" — one of the most significant documents in the history of the freedom of the press — was first published 375 years ago, the printer of the pamphlet has — until now — remained unknown.

Like a fingerprint, damaged pieces of metal type from printing presses create unique stamps. Since typesets belonged to specific printers, impressions of damaged type can help identify a book's printers. A CMU team was able to compare type impressions more efficiently than prior methods have allowed through machine learning and statistical analysis.

Learn more about how the team uncovered the printer of this foundational document.

Identifying New Methods for Genealogical Research (and Winning a Pulitzer Prize)

Edda Fields-Black is a Carnegie Mellon University historian, author, librettist and — now — a Pulitzer Prize winner. Fields-Black received the coveted prize for her book recounting a rebellion led by Harriet Tubman that freed 756 enslaved people.

Tubman was instrumental in the success of the Combahee River Raid, the largest rebellion of enslaved people in U.S. history, which was based on intelligence she gathered as a Civil War spy for the U.S. Army Department of the South. Published in 2024, Fields-Black's book "COMBEE" recounts the story from the perspectives of Tubman and the previously enslaved people who liberated themselves in the raid. Fields-Black herself is a descendant of one of the participants of the raid.

Developing Immersive Technology for Language and Cultures

SONA is a forward-thinking festival that highlights the work of filmmakers, artists and creators in XR, 360° video and interactive media. Hosted by The Kenner Room, a space for immersive interactive projects in the Department of Languages, Cultures, & Applied Linguistics, the festival offers a platform for diverse voices and groundbreaking stories that redefine the boundaries of storytelling and technology.

Learn more about SONA

Writers are Human Beings: The Impacts of Generative AI

This speech was delivered by Christopher Warren, now head of the Department of English, at CMU’s Department of English Diploma Ceremony in May 2023.

The students here might not have focused on it because they’ve been too busy writing and partying, but there's a writers’ strike going on right now. The Writers Guild of America, which represents close to 12,000 Hollywood writers, is in a battle with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers. It isn’t new that these groups are in conflict. Hollywood writers have bargained for decades to secure their working conditions, particularly as studios and the actors who speak their lines garner most of the financial rewards. But when I was reading a New York Times article about the strike, two things caught my eye, and possibly yours too.

The first was an interview with one of Carnegie Mellon English's most distinguished alums. The article quoted former CMU Creative Writing major Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who graduated from CMU and went on to create the TV series “Lost,” among other accomplishments. Javi’s a member of the Writers’ Guild of America and also a generous supporter of our department through the Grillo-Marxuach Family Scholarship in Creative Writing (The winner this year — was Cameron Monteith — congratulations, Cameron!). 

Javier gave the New York Times reporter a pithy definition of artistic creativity, which I think is worth pausing over: “Artists,” he said, “look at everything ever created and find a flash of newness.”

That's pretty good, right? It’s certainly a decent description of the poets and playwrights I find myself teaching most often, folks like John Milton and William Shakespeare, both of whom bathed in their cultural inheritance to produce striking and lasting works of literature. It’s also a good description of a more recent show like HBO’s “Succession,” whose actors include several CMU alums and whose creators have acknowledged they’ve crafted the series as “King Lear for the Media-Industrial Complex.” I like to think CMU English, including some of the folks sitting up here, helped Javier arrive at that wisdom and also gave him the fortitude to literally stand on the picket line to stand up for writing as a profession.

Artists ... look at everything ever created and find a flash of newness.

The second thing that caught my eye — and here I’m getting into the meat of my remarks today — was the perceived threat of artificial intelligence. This was why Javi was musing about artistic creativity in the first place. As part of their negotiations, Hollywood writers want assurance that producers won't turn to bots like ChatGPT to produce the reams of scripts, screenplays and late-night jokes that help enrich our idle hours. The article quoted WGA member Mike Schur, creator of “The Good Place” and co-creator of “Parks and Recreation,” who told the Times, “It is not out of the realm of possibility that before 2026, which is the next time we will negotiate with these companies, they might just go, ‘you know what, we’re good.’”

“We don’t need you,” he imagines hearing from the other side. “We have a bunch of AIs that are creating a bunch of entertainment that people are kind of OK with.”

Shur then said something even more bracing. Shur said the union intends to “draw a line in the sand right now and say, ‘Writers are human beings.’”

Slow: Writers are human beings. What a remarkable thing to say. What a remarkable thing to have to say. Stage voice: We're drawing a line.

AI is everywhere these days, and I’m as ambivalent about it as everyone else, but one thing I know is that this group of graduates here is better equipped than just about anyone else in the world right now to help us think through this moment. I don’t need to tell you that Carnegie Mellon University might as well be called ground-zero for AI automation. That’s actually good news for everyone here. That means both that today’s graduates will be stepping into this new world with a considerable tailwind from CMU’s reputation and that the world will be especially hungry for what you — as Carnegie Mellon graduates — think and know.

Right here among us we have technical writers and humanities analytics minors who understand and can communicate the technology of generative AI. We have rhetoric students who can analyze the Writers Guild’s framing as tactical public discourse. We have creative and professional writers getting their hands dirty, so to speak, testing AI tools in their classes, learning what the tools are good for, and what they’re not. And we have literature, culture, film and gender studies students powerfully attuned to the complex interactions among dominant, residual and emergent cultural practices. They know better than most that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

For my part, I tend to take a historical perspective. For a long time, the phrase “A writer is a person who…” was a kind of phrasal template, the kind of thing linguists call a snowclone. “X is the new Y”; “Keep calm and X on.” “X Lives Matter”; “A writer is a person who X.” In the early 20th century, the novelist Thomas Mann said, “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than for other people,” and I've always liked that. But Mann was hardly the only person trying to define a writer. Around the same time, someone else said that “writers are human beings with more than average sensitivity to the problems of living.” In 1940, Virginia Woolf wrote, “A writer is a person who sits at a desk and keeps his eye fixed, as intently as he can, upon a certain object.” H.D. Thoreau is said to have quipped, “A writer is a person who having nothing to do, finds something to do.” But I think what got me with Shur’s remark was that now, all of a sudden, we don't really care about the rest of it. The snowclone’s melted. If you ask the WGA members on the picket line, all those old-timey writers apparently could have stopped after “A writer is a person.” A writer is a person who has blue hair. A writer is a person who had Cheerios for breakfast. A writer is a person who knows what a restrictive clause is. Whatever. Generative AI has pushed us back to basics. “Writers are human beings.” Full stop.

Well, as long as we’re restating basic, somewhat banal truths, let me just be very clear: every one of these graduates today is a writer. We've made sure of that in our department, trust me. You’ve written poems and polemics, dissertations and documentation. You’ve tweeted, translated and transcribed.

You know what restrictive clauses are. And every one of these graduates is a human being, for all that means. You are passionate, embodied, intelligent, flawed. You have hopes and worries. You know what loneliness feels like, and ecstasy. You crave social justice. You believe in gods and machines. You geek out over the Oscars; you love anime. To quote a sign from the Writers’ Guild picket line, “ChatGPT doesn’t have childhood trauma.”

In all seriousness, you also know what it’s like to be inside the activity of writing, struggling for a word, swimming in the brine of language, resisting the counterfeit comforts of cliche. You know that glorious little tingle you feel when you write something crisp and true. You have families, friends and teachers who love you and want the best for you. You've had experiences, oh boy you've had experiences, not all pleasant.

As a reminder to everyone else, the undergrads and Ph.D. students graduating today completed most of their degrees during the most anxious years in my lifetime, the COVID-19 pandemic. I know we've had many moments to applaud today, but I think that deserves its own round of applause.

Everyone here knows how difficult the past few years have been, and we admire your strength and perseverance.

As graduates from Carnegie Mellon University, you also know damn well why the Writers' Guild wants to insist that writers are human beings. At this point, automation feels like part of the Carnegie Mellon brand. And as graduates of this department, you also know that no statement like “writers are human beings” could be as simple as it seems. Is that how language change works, you just Humpty Dumpty a word like “writer” into a box and make sure it stays there? “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty says in “Alice in Wonderland,” “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” No, not at all. Tell that to the word “text,” which wasn’t always a verb. “Calculators are human beings.” “Computers are human beings.” If you’ve seen the movie “Hidden Figures,” you know that “calculator” and “computer” both used to describe people rather than machines. Two centuries ago, a sentence like “computers are human beings” would have made perfect sense, and, honestly, would have been too obvious to utter. By definition, calculators were people who calculated, computers were people who computed, or counted.

At first glance, these linguistic trends might seem like bad news for the job of writer, and what do I know, maybe it is. But writers have never been only human beings. Writing has always been a collaboration between humans and their tools. Show me a writer who doesn’t already use spellcheck, or Google, or a word processor. Before that: typewriters (interesting word, no human beings there).

Writers have never been only human beings. Writing has always been a collaboration between humans and their tools.

This paper I’m reading from right now is a storage device. World’s cheapest hard drive. Ballpoint pens are tools. Dictionaries and thesauruses are tools. To assist human creativity and aid the transmission of knowledge, we invented things like page numbers, and indices at the back of books. Earlier we heard our graduates’ names in alphabetical order. You’d be surprised how recently we came up with the idea of alphabetical order. It’s a sorting algorithm. The point is, even the most technophobic writer in their cabin with a pencil and bunch of books is kind of a cyborg already. Using ChatGPT or Moonbeam.AI to start a draft might not be as big of a departure as the AI-hypers want us to think.

But even if it is, this is where CMU is your super power. Because the world is going to need writers, thinkers and storytellers who know how to practice their craft in the context of AI automation, and if nothing else, that’s what you’ve been doing here, whether on purpose or not. And you know what else? This university benefits tremendously from you. In your time here, you’ve brought soul to this campus. You’ve taught this university about contemplation, about the common good. Think how impoverished your friends with other majors would be if you weren’t there to teach them about Octavia Butler or Judith Butler. If they didn’t occasionally hear people talking about Aristotle, Habermas or Terrance Hayes. If they didn’t see how tremendously hard you’ve worked as writers and translators, worrying over the slightest nuances but also able to find deep, enduring comfort in language’s folds. I suppose I’ll end with my own sense of what it means to be a writer, or at least a CMU writer. As I see it, to be a CMU writer is to step into the world, attentive to technological change, with something vital — absolutely vital — to say.