Digital Humanities Summer Institute
Digital Humanities at Berkeley will be running a summer institute of intensive workshops led by UC Berkeley DH experts over the course of a week in August. With topics on computational text analysis, data workflows and network analysis, geospatial analysis, database development using Drupal, and digital humanities pedagogy, the Institute aims to build a digital humanities foundation for ongoing research projects.
Several of these great presentations are open to the public, so mark your calendars and don't miss out!
For more information, visit http://digitalhumanities.berkeley.edu/
Public Presentations
Data, Corpora, and Stewardship
August 17, 2015
4 PM - 6 PM
Maude Fife Room (315 Wheeler Hall)
Open to the public
Alan Liu and Clifford Lynch
Clifford Lynch will discuss "Humanities Scholarship in an increasingly digital world: evidence, analysis, dissemination": As we consider the work of the humanistic (and indeed other) disciplines in an increasingly digital world, there are three inter-related issues that I believe are emerging as central concerns. The first is the curation and stewardship of the vast range of evidence that supports scholarly inquiry, including when and how to develop digital representations of pre-digital age materials, and how to deal with born-digital materials that comprise a growing part of this base of evidence. Here scholars, librarians, curators, archivists, editors, and others must come together, and we need a new discussion about which activities in this area genuinely rise to the highest levels of scholarship, and which are essential but perhaps more peripheral to the core scholarship. The second area I will consider is the traditional analytic work of scholarship and how that may be enhanced by both by new digital evidence bases and digital tools. Finally, I will consider the some issues in the publication and dissemination of scholarship in the digital world, and particularly the essential importance of ensuring scholars that their work will endure over the long term and not become digital ephemera.
Alan Liu will discuss "N + 1: A Plea for Cross-Domain Data in the Digital Humanities": In experimenting with text analysis, machine learning, visualization, and other methods, digital humanists often study materials collected from specific segments of the human documentary record--for example: a study corpus consisting just of one of the following at a time: novels, poems, letters, newspapers, historical maps, crime records, political speeches, etc. Such corpora also tend to be tuned to the specific domain of a scholar's expertise (e.g., novels of a particular century and nation). In this short, speculative talk, Liu asks: what could be gained methodologically and theoretically by deliberately hybridizing domains--for example, pairing any two or three kinds, periods, or nationalities of materials in a controlled way? What would be involved, in other words, in giving digital humanities corpora some of the mixed quality of their uncanny doubles (alike yet dissimilar): "archives" in the strict sense and "corpora" in the corpus linguistics sense? The talk concludes with a presentation of aspects of the 4Humanities.org "WhatEvery1Says" research project (topic modeling public discourse about the humanities) that bear on the theme of cross-domain knowledge.
Critical Approaches in the Digital Humanities
August 19, 2015
10 AM - 1:30 PM
250 Sutardja Dai Hall
Open to the public
Amy Earhart, Michael Dumas, Abigail De Kosnik
What are the organizing principles in the way that we construct methods, tools, and projects within digital humanities? In what ways do we consider race, gender, sexuality, and ability in the code-based projects we engage in? How do we construct communities of practice that are inclusive and thoughtful? These are some of the questions our presenters will engage with in individual lectures and a panel discussion, on critical approaches towards (digital) humanities. Lunch will be served.
David Bamman, "NLP for the Long Tail"
August 21, 2015
Reception at 4PM | Presentation begins at 5PM
Social Science Matrix, Barrows Hall, 8th Floor
Open to the public
Presented by Digital Humanities at Berkeley, a project of the Division of Arts & Humanities
David Bamman photoNatural language processing is a research area whose focus is the development of automatic methods that can reason about the internal structure of language, including part-of-speech tagging, syntactic parsing and named entity recognition--identifying the people and places in text and discovering the structure of who does what to whom. Over the past few years, NLP has become an increasingly important element in computational research in the humanities and social sciences, enabling sophisticated analyses that can go far beyond simple word counting. At the same time, however, there is a substantial gap between the quality of the NLP used by researchers in the humanities and the state of the art, since NLP research has overwhelmingly focused not only on one language (English) but also one domain (newswire)---leaving many other languages, dialects and domains (such as literary text) underserved.
Digital Humanities Pedagogy
Open to the public
How do we assess student engagement in the digital humanities and find new strategies for captivating students in the classroom? In what ways can we creatively utilize pedagogical tools in the digital classroom? What resources are available to digital humanist teachers at the UC Berkeley campus? And how can we foster communities for sharing new digital humanities innovations and best practices? These are some of the questions that our pedagogy panel leaders will engage with in their presentations and discussions.
QUANTIFYING DISCOURSE
Greg Niemeyer + MacKenzie Alessi, Art Practice/Berkeley Center for New Media
Monday, August 17 | 11 AM - 12 PM | 254 Sutardja Dai Hall
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THE SCIENCE OF LEARNING
Richard Freishtat, Center for Teaching & Learning
Tuesday, August 18 | 11 AM - 12 PM | 254 Sutardja Dai Hall
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HUMANIZING THE DIGITAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENT
Rita-Marie Conrad, Center for Teaching & Learning
Friday, August 21 | 11 AM - 12 PM | 254 Sutardja Dai Hall
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TECHNOLOGY SERVICES TO SUPPORT TEACHING & LEARNING
Noah Wittman, Educational Technology Services
Thursday, August 20 | 11 AM - 12 PM | 254 Sutardja Dai Hall
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About the Institute
Digital Humanities at Berkeley is a partnership between the Office of the Dean of Arts and Humanities and Research IT in the Office of the CIO. It is supported by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with additional support from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research. The Summer Institute is co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media.