If a person dies of dehydration, that’s it. They are gone. We would never think that pouring any amount of water onto a human corpse would somehow cause it to spring back to life. But that is not the case for all living things, as Carl Zimmer told a captivated Zoom audience on March 30 during his talk, “Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive.”

Feet planted in the middle of the road, a young Black woman in a sundress stands alone against a phalanx of police in Baton Rouge. This moment, captured by photographer Jonathan Bachman in July 2016 freezes a singular moment of confrontation during the nationwide protests following the police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile.

What new ways of thinking emerge when we turn novels into bags of words—when we count rather than close-read elements of a text? What kinds of knowledge can we produce when we convert pictures into pixels and make robots read covers of Vogue?

Founded in 1981, the Whitney Humanities Center has long been represented by a single image that graced the second-floor lecture room at 53 Wall Street: a carving of a ship above the mantle. But that ship sailed when the Whitney moved out of 53 Wall Street and into HQ at 320 York Street, from the outskirts of campus to the center of humanities conversations and initiatives.

Here at the Whitney Humanities Center, we are very excited to be part of the new Humanities Quadrangle. But, although recently reimagined and renovated to function as a humanities hub, 320 York Street has a long history of housing humanities departments.