Romance studies professor bridges humanities and AI

Being a philologist-turned-experimental-humanist is central to professor Lucia Binotti’s work. Philologists — from the Greek, “love of words” or “love of learning” — are scholars of ancient languages and texts. But they are also innovative thinkers.

“Early modern philologists were building an entirely new way of understanding the world around them as they embraced the invention of this amazingly transformative new technology called the printing press,” said Binotti, who joined the Carolina faculty in 1990.

When Carolina’s philology doctoral program was discontinued in the early 2000s, Binotti shifted her scholarship to material and cultural history, adopting digital tools — including artificial intelligence — along the way. Now she is a professor of Spanish and digital humanities in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences’ Romance studies department.

Leading an Honors Carolina study abroad program on the cultural history of the Renaissance in Rome planted the seeds of this new phase.

“I began to realize you could experience the modern-day city in the place where, in fact, Machiavelli had walked or where Petrarch wrote a sonnet,” Binotti said. “So we developed a digital platform, DHPressRome, for use with this study abroad experience.”

She relished conversations with computer scientists and explored how technological shifts reshape knowledge and culture.

“Digital humanities is a way of looking at things from a different perspective, with a unique lens,” she said. “It is about collaboration, project-based learning and opening up silos. It’s transdisciplinary.”

Since 2020, Binotti has taught Introduction to Digital Humanities for Romance Languages, Cultures and Heritage. She’s also received grants from the Center for Faculty Excellence, Lenovo, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and others for her digital humanities initiatives.

In 2022, she incorporated ChatGPT into her courses and encouraged students to do the same. Together, they created a “sociolinguistics bot” to examine relationships between language and society and a “decolonial bot” to analyze colonial bias in texts.

The rapid evolution of AI introduced new possibilities — and new responsibilities. As large language models became more powerful, Binotti began shifting from isolated experiments toward a more structured methodology. Rather than simply asking what AI could produce, she and her students began asking how AI should be guided, contextualized and critiqued.

Out of that evolution emerged ConteXRt, Binotti’s dynamic framework for integrating AI into humanistic inquiry and one that is increasingly shaping conversations about AI teaching in the humanities. The method guides students to contextualize, experiment, articulate, reimagine and transform cultural knowledge using digital and AI tools. At its core is the conviction that AI must be shaped by historical, linguistic and cultural context — particularly in non-English language traditions often flattened by global data systems.

Binotti is currently leading workshops with the University of Seville to demystify AI for humanists, reduce fear and help colleagues integrate AI ethically into teaching and research. She plans similar workshops at East Carolina University.

She stressed the importance of interdisciplinary collaborations that have fueled her work in digital humanities, virtual reality, augmented reality and AI. Over the years, Binotti has partnered with health sciences librarians, Honors Carolina and the Study Abroad Office, the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, Innovate Carolina, the exercise and sport science department and more.

Binotti believes that humanists can play a critical role in bringing context to AI.

“What has become important to me in the classroom and in my research is the ability to articulate for students the ecosystem or the cartography of AI,” she said. “Humanists can be particularly well-suited to build that bridge — and to design the frameworks that make AI accountable to culture, language and history.”