Gail De Kosnik Receives Berkeley Collegium Grant
BCNM's Gail De Kosnik has received a Berkeley Collegium grant for her joint graduate/undergraduate class, "Making Sense of Cultural Data." Established by Chancellor Birgeneau in 2012, the Berkeley Collegium is charged with the mission of fostering innovation and excellence in undergraduate teaching at UC Berkeley.
De Kosnik described her goal for the class and how it will push the boundaries of humanities education:
"My goal in “Making Sense of Cultural Data” is to introduce the leading-edge tools with which I have worked (these tools are not publicly available) to a group of students, and to train them in the critical digital humanities methods that they will need to “make sense” of textual, audiovisual, and quantitative data. Students will learn how to craft high-level humanities queries about cultural and social texts, how to design specific and effective queries for large databases of words and images, and how to link those two lines of investigation. Students will collaborate with one another and with tool developers (whom I will invite as guests to the seminar) to conduct their data analyses and produce visualizations. The student teams will then co-author article-length papers that they may submit for conference presentations and/or journal publications. With a Graduate Student Instructor (who will be supported by the Berkeley Center of New Media), I will teach a curriculum that orients students to relevant humanities and data methods generally, and then will closely advise and guide student teams’ research projects, and facilitate their cooperation with tool developers.
Undergraduates who take this course will have the chance, not just to master established research methods, but to pioneer new ones. They will not only read research authored by established scholars, but will conduct and author their own innovative research in a wide range of fields, including film, television, and new media studies, gender studies, and ethnic studies."