ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on and conceives digital humanities labs as a unique opportunity to rethink humanities and connect them radically with society as a whole through certain principles and values typical of digital cultures such as openness, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, creativity, prototyping, and transmediality. To illustrate this, the chapter will discuss projects developed by the Medialab of the University of Granada (UGR-Medialab). Medialab is a physical and virtual space where digital humanities are combined with other disciplines with the aim of revitalising the links between academic activity and society to contribute to social transformation. Two relevant cases are Facultad Cero, which focuses on redesigning higher education in the wake of Covid-19 using a digital and prototyping approach, and the Knowmetrics Network, a social network for digital humanities and social sciences, focusing mainly on Ibero-America and more recently Francophone academic literature as a means of counterbalancing the Anglo-American hegemony in this field. Both these projects, together with those of other labs, show how digital humanities can enrich and contribute to citizen science and citizen labs, public engagement, social innovation and participation, as well as help to elaborate a new concept of knowledge as a commons.
