About

metaLAB is a research and teaching unit at Harvard University dedicated to exploring and expanding the frontiers of networked culture in the arts and humanities. Our institutional home is the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Our physical home is the Graduate School of Design: on the top floor of 42 Kirkland Street in Cambridge, to be precise.

But our projects take us all over the world.

metaLAB is founded on the belief that many of the key research challenges and opportunities of our era — fundamental questions regarding experience in a connected world, democracy and social justice, the boundaries between nature and culture— transcend divisions between the arts, humanities and sciences; between the academy, industry, and the public sphere; between theoretical and applied knowledge.

metaLAB’s home on the 4th floor of 42 Kirkland Street at the Graduate School of Design

metaLAB serves as an institutional hub for Harvard’s digital art, design, and humanities communities while actively collaborating with partners both locally and worldwide.

metaLAB:

• is an open space for experimentation, project development and information sharing

• is a community of scholars, artists, designers, journalists, technologists, architects, and students engaged in team-based experiments that merge research, teaching, publication, social action, and the use and development of digital tools

• assumes the form of a portfolio of projects that seek to expand the compass, reach, impact and public presence of the arts and the humanities on campus and in the world

• is a catalyst for innovation and a project incubator, crossing school boundaries, interacting with the Harvard libraries, museums, and archives, as well as with external partners (universities, cultural institutions, foundations, NGOs, corporations, public media, community groups)

• serves as an e-publishing lab dedicated to modeling the print-plus and post-print publishing genres of the new millennium