About

Jeffrey Schnapp is a scholar whose work encompasses cultural history, exhibition curation, and multimedia projects. His recent publication is a revised and updated Italian version of his cultural history of coffee consumption, focusing on interwar stovetop coffee makers such as the Bialetti Moka Express. This book, published by LUISS University Press in Rome, includes a new afterword that critically reflects on the economic viability of the "made in Italy" model, while the core of the book provides an account of the autarchic cult of national identity through coffee culture. In addition to his scholarly writing, Schnapp has been involved in curatorial projects, notably the "Interconnecting Rings" exhibition trilogy developed for the Gallerie di Piedicastello (Trento Tunnels). This trilogy supports the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics and is produced in collaboration with the Fondazione Museo Storico del Trentino and the Olympic Museum of Lausanne. The trilogy includes exhibitions titled Records (2024), Performance (2025), and Competition (2026), with the latter focusing on data storytelling, emotion and sport, and museum innovation. Schnapp's work reflects a multidisciplinary approach that bridges cultural history, design, and museum studies, with a particular interest in how objects and exhibitions can narrate broader social and economic themes.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Humanities
• Multimedia
• Human–computer interaction
• Philosophy
• Visual arts
• Programming language
• Operating system
• Computer graphics (images)
• Art

Selected publications

• Orchestrating Cultural Heritage

  2023-09-04 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This preliminary study introduces an innovative approach to the analysis and organization of cultural heritage materials, focusing on the archive of Charles S. Peirce. Given the diverse range of artifacts, objects, and documents comprising cultural heritage, it is essential to efficiently organize and provide access to these materials for the wider public. However, Peirce's manuscripts pose a particular challenge due to their extensive quantity, which makes comprehensive organization through manual classification practically impossible. In response to this challenge, our paper proposes a methodology for the automated analysis and organization of Peirce's manuscripts. We have specifically tested this approach on the renowned 115-page manuscript known as PAP. This study represents a significant step forward in establishing a research direction for the development of a larger project. By incorporating novel computational methods, this larger project has the potential to greatly enhance the field of cultural heritage organization.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Modernitalia

  Peter Lang Verlag eBooks · 2023-04-24

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Modernitalia provides a map of the Italian twentieth century in the form of twelve essays by the celebrated cultural historian Jeffrey T. Schnapp. Shuttling back and forth between literature, architecture, design, and the visual arts, the volume explores the metaphysics of speed, futurist and dada typography, real and imaginary forms of architecture, shifting regimes of mass spectacle, the iconography of labour, exhibitions as modes of public mobilization and persuasion, and the emergence of industrial models of literary culture and communication. The figures featured in the book include Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Mario Morasso, Julius Evola, Piero Portaluppi, Giuseppe Terragni, Alessandro Blasetti, Massimo Bontempelli, Giorgio de Chirico, Bruno Munari, Curzio Malaparte, and Henry Furst. Alongside these human protagonists appear granite blocks that drive the design of modern monuments, military searchlights that animate civilian shows, worker armies viewed as machines, sunglasses that tiptoe along the boundary of the private and public, newsreels as twentieth-century interpretations of Trajan’s column, and book covers and bindings that act as authorial self-portraits. The volume captures the Italian path to cultural modernity in all of its brilliance and multiplicity.

  PublisherDOI

• Books Transformed

  2023-03-23

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter is concerned with the long transition from page to screen (and then back again, from screen to page) and its impact on the notion of the book and expressions of bookishness in twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture. It argues that the dream of bridging the gap between print artefacts and electronic books is not a creation of the television or the Internet eras. Rather, its lineage extends back to the aspirationally electrified avant-garde experimental books of the 1920s, forward through the electric information age paperbacks of the 1960s, as well as experiments with new CRT page architectures carried out by the Architecture Machine Group and the Visual Language Workshop, and forward again into today’s proliferation of reading devices and Web-inspired forms and formats. The chapter argues that at each of the stages of this century-long evolution there are significant shifts in the ways that books are understood, read, performed, produced, experienced, shared, and disseminated.

  PublisherDOI

• Designing a Choreographic Interface During COVID-19

  2022 · 3 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Human–computer interaction

  In 2019, metaLAB (at) Harvard began work on Curatorial A(i)gents, a digital exhibition that was slated to premiere at the Harvard Art Museums’ Lightbox Gallery in 2020. Half of the projects would be interactive, using mouse and keyboard conventions. With the advent of Covid-19 and the postponement of the show, the authors set out to develop an interface solution that would enable visitors to interact with the works without having to touch any public devices like a tablet. Toward this end, we prototyped a “choreographic interface” that uses machine vision and machine learning to interpret a full-torso gestural vocabulary, which is then translated into interactions. To make the choreographic interface, we relied on open-source solutions, which have all come with equal limitations and opportunities. In 2022, Curatorial A(i)gents was presented in the Lightbox Gallery, where we had the opportunity to test and demonstrate the interface. This paper discusses our design journey in making a choreographic interface using open-source technologies during Covid-19.

  PublisherDOI

• At the Edge (Always): An Interview with Jeffrey Schnapp

  Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures · 2022-12-28

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In this interview, Jeffrey Schnapp conceptualizes Digital Humanities, Knowledge Design and Experimental Humanities, seen as innovative frameworks, aimed at propitiating a radically new understanding of the current challenges of the contemporary world. The overwhelming presence of digital media and artificial intelligence is scrutinized by Schnapp in order to produce theory literally at the edge.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Surprise machines

  Information Design Journal · 2022-11-10 · 7 citations

  articleOpen access

  Abstract Surprise Machines is a project of experimental museology that sets out to visualize the entire image collection of the Harvard Art Museums, with a view to opening up unexpected vistas on more than 200,000 objects usually inaccessible to visitors. The project is part of the exhibition organized by metaLAB (at) Harvard entitled Curatorial A(i)gents and explores the limits of artificial intelligence to display a large set of images and create surprise among visitors. To achieve this feeling of surprise, a choreographic interface was designed to connect the audience’s movement with several unique views of the collection.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Education, Technology, and Humans: An Interview with Jeffrey Schnapp

  Humanist Studies & the Digital Age · 2022-05-19 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The interview reconstructs Jeffrey Schnapp's brilliant career from his origins as a scholar of Dante and the Middle Ages to his current multiple interdisciplinary interests. Among other things, Schnapp deals with knowledge design, media history and theory, history of the book, the future of archives, museums, and libraries. The main themes of the interview concern the relationships between technology and pedagogy, the future of reading, and artificial intelligence.

  PublisherDOI

• È giunta l'ora di ripensare l'agenda delle istituzioni culturali?

  DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2022-10-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  La conversazione si incentra sul ruolo delle istituzioni culturali in questa fase di profonda trasformazione tecnologica e sociale, una trasformazione che la pandemia ha catalizzato sia nei termini di uno sviluppo di soluzioni sempre più innovative sia, soprattutto, nel senso di un'utilizzazione sempre più massiva dei servizi digitali, con tutte le conseguenze che ne derivano sul piano dell'identificazione delle caratteristiche della propria utenza.

  Publisher

• Two Projects from the metaLAB (at) Harvard

  Humanist Studies & the Digital Age · 2022-05-19

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The presentation of these two projects the metaLAB (at) Harvard complements Jeffrey Schnapp's interview published in the section Perspectives of this issue of Humanist Studies and the Digital Age. The first project, A Flitting Atlas of the Human Gaze, performs an art historical experiment. The second project, Their Names, is an online Denkmal or monument that visualizes the names of 28,000+ fatal encounters with American police dating from the year 2000 up until the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Gorilla Art. Intorno a una lettera inedita di Karl Vossler a Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

  L uomo nero Materiali per una storia delle arti della modernità · 2022-12-13

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Nella primavera nel 1914, probabilmente durante una delle sue tournées tedesche, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti venne a sapere che, nel proporre a un pubblico più ampio la sua già nota Italienische Literaturgeschichte (1900; 2° ed. 1908), Karl Vossler aveva tenuto una serie di conferenze al Freies Deutsches Hochstift di Francoforte, concluse da una breve analisi dell'impatto del Futurismo sulla scena letteraria italiana.Marinetti si mobilitò alla sua solita maniera, affrettandosi a scrivere una lettera corredata di allegati futuristi. L'articolata risposta di Vossler, datata 28 luglio 1914, il fatidico giorno della dichiarazione di guerra dell'Austria-Ungheria contro la Serbia, è l'oggetto di questo contributo.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Daniele Ledda

  Advisory Board Company (United States)

  37 shared

• Bethany Nowviskie

  James Madison University

  36 shared

• Jo Guldi

  Southern Methodist University

  36 shared

• Michael Hays

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  36 shared

• Andrew Piper

  36 shared

• Ian Bogost

  36 shared

• Mark Taylor

  36 shared

• Rachel Jacoff

  10 shared

Labs

• metaLAB (at) Harvard, Berlin & BaselPI

  We are a global knowledge-design lab engaged in critical and creative practice across the disciplinary grid.

Education

• PhD, Comparative Literature

  Stanford University

  1983

Awards & honors

• Premio di saggistica “Città delle rose” (2025)