About Humanities Seed Bank

Humanities Seed Bank borrows its name and mission from the literal seed banks (like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault) that preserve and store historical, cultural, and biological value in the face of indifference or ruin. Those projects store seeds. This project—produced by Carla Nappi and Eric Hayot, and indirectly by Penn State’s Center for Humanities and Information—stores ideas.

Humanities Seed Bank is a series of short video interviews (5-7 minutes each) with scholars from across humanistic fields. Each video asks the scholar one of two simple prompts: “Discuss a good idea—a method, a practice, a piece of research, a way of thinking, a collocation of meaningful facts—that you would like to preserve against forgetfulness”; or, “Discuss a bad idea—something that sends people down the wrong rabbit hole, that leads to facile but incorrect conclusions, that derails the work of thinking—that you would like to see forgotten or abandoned.”

These videos—collected under the categories of “Good Seeds” and “Bad Seeds,” respectively, appear on this website. Videos are also characterized by tags that connect them to disciplines, concepts, fields, and institutions.

Our goal is to collect hundreds of these videos over the next few years. If you would like to participate in the project, or help it grow, write us.

Tech support by Joshua Tee.