Katherine Elkins Explained

Katherine Elkins is professor of humanities and Comparative Literature and faculty in Computing at Kenyon College.

Early life

Elkins attended Yale as an undergraduate, then completed a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. She is the niece of Henry Elkins.

Teaching

Elkins is a Professor of Comparative Literature and Humanities in the Integrated Program for Humane Studies (IPHS)[1] and faculty in Computing[2] at Kenyon College. She is a founding co-director of the KDH lab[3] and co-created the first human-centered artificial intelligence[4] curriculum launched in 2016 at Kenyon College[5] as the Director of IPHS. She has mentored and co-authored hundreds of student ML/AI research projects in the humanities, arts and social sciences that have been downloaded almost 60,000 times worldwide as of September 2024.[6] Her recorded lectures with The Modern Scholar on The Modern Novel[7] (2021) and The Giants of French Literature[8] (2020) are tailored to broader public audiences via Amazon's Audible.com.[9]

Research

Elkins is best known for her pioneering work on interdisciplinary Artificial Intelligence in Literature, Narrative, Affective Computing and the Ethics of AI. Her book The Shapes of Stories, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022,[10] provided a comprehensive methodology for using diachronic sentiment analysis to analyze the emotional aspects of plot across dozens of literary classics using SentimentArcs. This method has been used to analyze narrative in diverse forms including literature,[11] translations,[12] TV scripts,[13] end of life medical narratives,[14] and the evolution of social media narratives for elections[15] and economic crisis.[16]

She presented the first transdisciplinary AI research at leading academic conferences including the Modernist Studies Association in October 2019,[17] The International Society for the Study of Narrative in March 2020[18] and the Modern Language Association Conference in January 2021.[19] Elkins was an early advocate for incorporating AI in literary studies with co-authored essays in The Journal of Cultural Analytics in September 2020[20] and Narrative in January 2021.[21] More recently she focused on how AI redefines writing,[22] creativity,[23] authorship,[24] translations of literature,[25] eXplainable AI,[26] and the future of the academic field.[27] Her collaborative position paper addressing the risks and benefits of open-source AI was selected for oral presentation at ICML in July 2024.[28]

Elkins traditional scholarship includes essays on Plato,[29] Virginia Woolf,[30] Franz Kafka,[31] Marcel Proust,[32] and William Wordsworth. In 2001 she won the A. Owen Aldridge Prize[33] in Comparative Literature for an essay on Charles Baudelaire.[33] She edited Philosophical Approaches to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which brings together essays by leading international Proust scholars, with Oxford University Press in 2022.[34]

Speaking

Elkins is one of the leading women speaking widely on interdisciplinary AI. As early as 2019, she publicly advocated integrating AI into traditional humanities curriculum with a keynote address at the Ohio State University.[35] She gave the Meredith-Donovan lecture at Mount Saint Mary’s University in 2023,[36] featured AI Working Group lecture at Wofford College,[37] and presentation at the Stories that Win Symposium at Washington University in 2024.[38] Elkins gives keynotes on the intersection of AI, Digital Humanities, education, and the future of work. Most recently, in the summer-fall of 2024, these included keynotes at Carleton College's Day of Digital Humanities,[39] Lafayette College AI Literacy Across the Curriculum,[40] and Austin College's A.J. Carlson Lecture.[41]

Elkins has been a co-panelist on interdisciplinary AI conversations with thought leaders from diverse fields. She discussed language, epistemology and the ethics of AI with Ned Block, Francesca Rossi, and Dennis Yi Tenen[42] in October 2022.[43] Elkins debated AI generative art with co-panelist Boris Eldagsen (winner[44] of Sony World Photography Award 2023) and Shane Balkowitsch on Al Jazeera in April 2023.[45] She presented her perspectives on emotions at the intersection of AI and literature with experts Rosalind Picard, Joseph LeDoux, and Mabel Berezin.[46] She discussed what gets lost in machine translation on the podcast Merging Minds.[47]

She is the AI industry expert for Bloomberg's new AI Strategy Course[48] launched 2024. She serves as CAIO[49] of HumanCentricLabs[50] emphasizing humane applications of AI in the workplace.

Collaborations

Kenyon College awarded Elkins the senior trustee teaching award In 2014.[51] In March 2024 she was named a Principle Investigator for NIST's US AI Safety Institute[52] representing the Modern Language Association.[53] She was awarded a Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab[54] award in April 2024 to research the ethics and performance of SOTA LLM models to predict criminal recidivism.[55] Elkins has been a member of Meta's Open Innovation AI Research Community[56] since 2023 and will present at the 2024 Conference at Meta's London Office in October.[57]

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Katherine Elkins . 2024-07-13 . Kenyon College . en.
  2. Web site: Computing Faculty . 2024-07-13 . Kenyon College . en.
  3. Web site: DH Colab & Research Fellows . 2024-07-13 . Kenyon College . en.
  4. October 2023 . The Crisis of Artificial Intelligence: A New Digital Humanities Curriculum for Human-Centred AI . 13 July 2023 . International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing. 10.3366/ijhac.2023.0310 . Chun . Jon . Elkins . Katherine . 17 . 2 . 147–167 .
  5. Web site: Jon . Chun . Katherine . Elkins . . 2023-10-16 . The Evolution of AI . 2024-07-11 . euppublishingblog.com . en-GB.
  6. Web site: Digital Humanities projects and coursework at Kenyon College Kenyon College Research Digital Kenyon: Research, Scholarship, and Creative Exchange . 2024-07-13 . digital.kenyon.edu.
  7. Web site: Elkins . Katherine . 2013 . The Modern Scholar: The Modern Novel . 13 July 2024 . Audible.com The Modern Scholar Lectures.
  8. Web site: Elkins . Katherine . 2010 . The Modern Scholar: Giants of French Literature Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, and Camus . 13 July 2024 . Audible.com The Modern Scholar Lectures.
  9. Web site: Audible.com Lectures on Tape . Prof. Katherine Elkins . 12 July 2024 . Audible.com.
  10. Book: Elkins, Katherine . The Shapes of Stories: Sentiment Analysis for Narrative . 2022 . Cambridge University Press . 978-1-009-27039-7 . Elements in Digital Literary Studies . Cambridge.
  11. Perloff . Catherine . 2019-10-01 . Doubles and Reflections: Sentiment Analysis and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire . IPHS 300: Artificial Intelligence for the Humanities: Text, Image, and Sound .
  12. Strain . Flannery . 2022-10-01 . The Trials of Translation: A Cross-Linguistic Survey of Sentiment Analysis on Franz Kafka's Trial . IPHS 200: Programming Humanity.
  13. Gow . Alexander . 2021-10-01 . Blood in the Water: Storytelling and Sentiment Analysis in ABC's Shark Tank . IPHS 484: Senior Seminar.
  14. Song . Hemmi . 2022-10-01 . On Death and Emotion: Evaluating the Five Stages of Grief in End-of-Life Memoirs Using AI Deep Learning Models . IPHS 484: Senior Seminar.
  15. Gimbel . Ben . 2022-10-01 . Quantifying Polarization around Election Denial: Measuring Public Sentiment Changes in the 2022 Midterms . IPHS 200: Programming Humanity.
  16. De Silva . Cherantha . 2022-10-01 . How Did Sri Lankan Protestors End Up in the President's Pool? Understanding the evolution of an occupy-style protest: A story of economic turmoil, declining social sentiment and resulting political change . IPHS 200: Programming Humanity.
  17. Web site: October 2019 . The Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference: Upheaval and Reconstruction . Modernist Studies Association 2019 Conference in Toronto, Canada.
  18. Web site: March 2020 . Narrative 2020 Conference Program, March 5-7, 2020 New Orleans . 12 July 2024 . Narrative 2020 Conference.
  19. Web site: Modern Language Conference Website and Schedule . 12 July 2024 . Modern Language Association Conference 2021.
  20. Elkins . Katherine . Chun . Jon . 2020-09-14 . Can GPT-3 Pass a Writer's Turing Test? . Journal of Cultural Analytics . en . 5 . 2 . 10.22148/001c.17212. free .
  21. Chun . Jon . Elkins . Katherine . 2022 . What the Rise of AI Means for Narrative Studies: A Response to "Why Computers Will Never Read (or Write) Literature" by Angus Fletcher . Narrative . 30 . 1 . 104–113 . 10.1353/nar.2022.0005 . 1538-974X.
  22. Elkins . Katherine . 2024-06-01 . AI Comes for the Author . Poetics Today . en . 45 . 2 . 267–274 . 10.1215/03335372-11092884 . 0333-5372.
  23. Web site: Jan 2024 . Modern Language Association 2024 Conference . 12 July 2024 . Modern Language Association 2024 Conference.
  24. Web site: D’Agostino . Susan . AI Raises Complicated Questions About Authorship . 2024-07-11 . Inside Higher Ed . en.
  25. Elkins . Katherine . 12 August 2024 . In search of a translator: using AI to evaluate what's lost in translation . Frontiers in Computer Science . 6 . 2024. 10.3389/fcomp.2024.1444021 . free .
  26. Ries . Thorsten . van Dalen-Oskam . Karina . Offert . Fabian . 2023-11-01 . Reproducibility and explainability in digital humanities . International Journal of Digital Humanities . en . 5 . 2 . 247–251 . 10.1007/s42803-023-00078-7 . 2524-7840.
  27. Web site: Volume 45 Issue 2 Poetics Today Duke University Press . 2024-07-11 . read.dukeupress.edu . en.
  28. Web site: ICML Poster Position: Near to Mid-term Risks and Opportunities of Open-Source Generative AI . 2024-07-11 . icml.cc.
  29. Elkins . Katherine . 2020 . Naming the Lyric: Literature versus Philosophy in Plato's Symposium . Philosophy and Literature . 44 . 2 . 402–417 . 10.1353/phl.2020.0030 . 1086-329X.
  30. Elkins . Katherine . 2008-12-01 . Memory and Material Significance: Composing Modernist Influence . Modern Language Quarterly . 69 . 4 . 509–531 . 10.1215/00267929-2008-014 . 0026-7929.
  31. Web site: Project MUSE - MLN-Volume 136, Number 3, April 2021 (German Issue) . 2024-07-11 . muse.jhu.edu . en.
  32. Book: Time . Time: A Multidisciplinary Introduction . 2024-07-11 . 2023 . De Gruyter Oldenbourg . 10.1515/9783110690774 . 978-3-11-069077-4 . Kattan Gribetz . Kaye . Sarit . Lynn .
  33. Web site: A. Owen Aldridge Prize . American Comparative Literature Association . 2024-07-13 . www.acla.org.
  34. Web site: Proust's In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives Oxford Academic . 2024-07-11 . academic.oup.com . 2022 . 10.1093/oso/9780190921576.001.0001 . 978-0-19-092157-6 . en . Elkins . Katherine .
  35. Web site: "Programming Humanity" Katherine Elkins (Kenyon College) Department of Comparative Studies . 2024-07-12 . comparativestudies.osu.edu . en.
  36. Web site: Katherine Elkins Encourages Mounties to Have a Voice on AI Mount St. Mary's University Emmitsburg Maryland . 2024-07-11 . news.msmary.edu.
  37. Web site: College . Wofford . AI Working Group Events . 2024-07-12 . www.wofford.edu . en.
  38. Web site: Futures . Incubator for Transdisciplinary . 2023-12-27 . Stories that Win Symposium . 2024-07-12 . Incubator for Transdisciplinary Futures . en.
  39. Web site: Humanities . Digital . Day of DH 2024 - Carleton College . 2024-07-11 . www.carleton.edu . en-US.
  40. Web site: Symposium: AI Literacy Across the Curriculum · CITLS · Lafayette College . 2024-08-19 . citls.lafayette.edu.
  41. Web site: Johnson Center - Austin College . 2024-09-26 . www.austincollege.edu . en-US.
  42. News: Szalai . Jennifer . 2024-02-07 . How Robots Learned to Write So Well . 2024-07-13 . The New York Times . en-US . 0362-4331.
  43. Coding and the New Human Phenotype: Are Natural Language Generators for Real? . 2022-10-16 . helixcenter . 2024-07-12 . YouTube.
  44. News: 2023-04-17 . Sony World Photography Award 2023: Winner refuses award after revealing AI creation . 2024-08-13 . en-GB.
  45. Web site: Is AI better at making art than humans? . 2024-07-11 . Al Jazeera . en.
  46. Emotion . 2023-09-24 . helixcenter . 2024-07-12 . YouTube.
  47. Web site: AI Expert's Adventure with Kate Elkins - Merging Minds . 2024-07-12 . mergingminds.bureauworks.com . en.
  48. Web site: AI Strategy Program Bloomberg Emeritus . 2024-07-13 . bloomberg.emeritus.org . en-US.
  49. Web site: Essential skills and traits of chief AI officers . 2024-07-12 . CIO . en.
  50. Web site: HumanCentric Labs . 2024-07-13 . HumanCentric Labs . en-US.
  51. Web site: Trustee Teaching Excellence Awards . 2024-07-11 . Kenyon College . en.
  52. 2023-10-26 . U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute . NIST . en.
  53. Web site: MLA Will Participate in Department of Commerce Consortium Dedicated to AI Safety . 2024-07-11 . news.mla.hcommons.org.
  54. Web site: Web Marketing Communications - Tech Ethics Lab . 2024-08-26 . University of Notre Dame . en .
  55. Web site: Walton . Laura Moran . 2024-04-22 . Notre Dame–IBM Technology Ethics Lab Awards Nearly $1,000,000 to Build Collaborative Research Projects between Teams of Notre Dame Faculty and International Scholars . 2024-07-11 . Tech Ethics Lab . en.
  56. Web site: 26 August 2024 . Open Innovation AI Research Community . 26 August 2024 . Meta Open Innovation AI Research Community.
  57. Web site: Meta . Annual Research Workshop . 26 August 2024 . Open Innovation AI Research Community .

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Katherine Elkins".

Except where otherwise indicated, Everything.Explained.Today is © Copyright 2009-2025, A B Cryer, All Rights Reserved. Cookie policy.