Anniversary Edition: metaLAB reflects, celebrates, and looks forward

Two-year Anniversary Gathering from metaLAB(at)Harvard on Vimeo.

Two years ago, the Berkman Center’s John Palfrey moderated a presentation entitled “Digital Humanities 2.0,” in which a slew of leaders and innovators—Peter Lunenfeld, Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Todd Presner and metaLAB’s founding director, Jeffrey Schnapp—joined a conversation about emerging paradigms in the arts and humanities in the information age. The conversation went so well that the group co-authored a book: digital_humanities (MIT Press 2012), which offers a handy and provocative “guide to the perplexed” for the DH-curious. The convocation also offered the world the first glimpse of the metaLAB to come. And so some three years later, we thought it would be worthwhile to convene another gathering to celebrate the publication of digital_humanities, celebrate the milestones we’ve reached (not least of which includes ever-brighter prospects for Zeega, the multimedia collections and authoring tool invented by several metaLAB cofounders), and take a look at research initiatives that point to metaLAB’s bright future. The event was held in the Visual Resources Department in the Loeb Design Library at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design—and as the video above suggests, things are hanging together quite well!