We are pleased to announce the Digital Humanities at Berkeley funded grants. There was an overwhelming response to the call, particularly in the area of collaborative research. Research IT looks forward to continuing to support both funded and unfunded projects with consulting and technical assistance. All collaboration greatly benefits the Digital Humanities at Berkeley program as outlined by the Andrew W. Mellon grant: Capacity Building and Integration in the Digital Humanities.
Funded Grants: Collaborative Research Grants – Faculty, Curators, and Librarians
Elizabeth Alice Honig (History of Art): Developing a Drupal-based platform for scholars to build digital catalogue raisonné, based on a reformulation of the Jan Brueghel wiki.
Honig will be collaborating with Visual Resources Center staff to develop an open-source platform for catalogue raisonné. The tool will be built using Drupal, and will build on work conducted for the Jan Brughel wiki.
Francesco Spagnolo (Magnes Collection): An Audiovisual Preservation Project
The Magnes will engage in digitization and documentation thus augmenting the long-term capacity building processes of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life. The primary focus of digitization and documentation will be of artifacts from The Future of Memory: Jewish Culture in the Digital Age.
Niek Veldhuis and Laurie Pearce (Near Eastern Studies): Berkeley Prosopography Services
Veldhuis and Pearce will be working to make Berkeley Prosopography Services, a tool for historical social network analysis, compatible with data encoded using Epidoc, which is used by the Center for Tebtunis Papyri and numerous other classical projects.
Lisa Wymore (Theater, Dance, & Performance Studies) - Digital Intermedia Collaborative Platform
Wymore will be collaborating with Adrian Freed, Research Director at the Center for New Music and Technology (CNMAT) to develop a digital platform to investigate human/computational interactivity and establish the Z-Lab, an on-campus space for this work. The project incorporates a variety of cameras, sensors and software to capture and study three-dimensional visual data of the body.
Funded Grants: Collaborative Research - Students
Nick Adams (Sociology) – Text Thresher Enabling Content Analysis by Crowds
Adams will be collaborating with AMPlab to develop a graphical user interface for Text Thresher, a tool that facilitates crowd annotation and analysis of texts. The interface will make the tool accessible to a variety of scholars who are not proficient programmers.
Scott Paul McGinnis (History) – An Experimental digital edition of an important early Chinese historical text using XML
McGinnis will be working with an undergraduate team to develop an experimental digital edition of the History of the [Western] Han (Han shu 漢書) that will incorporate analytical tools. McGinnis will draw on the expertise of Sharon Goetz and Mandy Gagel of the Mark Twain Project, which has published digital editions of Twain’s works and letters since 2007.
Cindy Nguyen and Matthew Berry (History) – The Vietnamese Intellectual Networks Database (VIND)
Nguyen and Berry will extend an existing project to gather, organize, and analyze biographical information about colonial-era Vietnamese intellectuals and create a database. The database serves as a robust digital platform for charting the movements, interconnections, and political and literary activities of significant figures in Vietnamese society during a period of rapid change and fraught political tensions. The team will be consulting with Harrison Dekker, Data Librarian to design the architecture of the database and ensure its technical sustainability.
Funded Grants: New Course Components
Edmund Campion – Music 158A – Musical Applications of Computers to Create Music
Music 158 is the first course in a developing music technology curriculum. The course will create new teaching modules built on ODOT, a software system developed at CNMAT. ODOT operates within widely adopted platforms (Max/MSP, PD, Node.js, Python) and is used to both model structural change for art production and to enable analysis, recording, and data mining. The course is tailored to provide good practice software programming skills to humanities-oriented students.
Keith P. Feldman - Ethnic Studies 101B: Humanities Methods in Ethnic Studies
Ethnic Studies 101B: Humanities Methods in Ethnic Studies is a mandatory undergraduate methods course in the Chicano/Latino Studies, Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, Native American Studies, and Comparative Ethnic Studies majors. This course will bring students into contact with a variety of digital tools for gathering and analyzing keywords data as they acquire the foundations of interdisciplinary research methods.
Laura Stoker and Rochelle Terman - Political Science 239T - An Introduction to Computational Tools and Techniques
This project will expand an existing course to provide graduate students the critical technical skills necessary to conduct research in computational digital humanities and social science. The class will serve as a springboard introducing students to the basic computer literacy, programming skills, and application knowledge they need to be successful in further methods work, whether through campus workshops (e.g. D-Lab trainings), online courses, traditional classrooms, or independent learning.
Lisa Trever - History of Art 192L – Digital Technologies for Spatial Documentation and Interpretation of Mural Paintings and the Ancient Americas
History of Art 192L - “Mural Painting and the Ancient Americas” will introduce students to methods of digital recording and modeling to study visual forms and spatial contexts. Archaeological Research Facility staff will provide lab facilities, equipment and training in photogrammetric modeling. Visual Resources Center Staff will provide training in photography techniques and equipment, image post-processing, metadata creation, and online publishing.
Funded Grants: New Courses
Edmund Campion – Digital Humanities Methods: Music 158B – Digital Instrument Design for Musical Expression
Music 158B, “Digital Instrument Design for Musical Expression,” is a partnership between the Music Department and CNMAT. This course responds to the growing demand for music and technology courses with a hands-on engagement and with a community of practicing musicians, scholars and technologists. As part of a series, Music 158B will build on skills learned in 158A.
Francesco Spagnolo - Digital Humanities Special Topics Seminar: Mapping Diasporas
How do we “map” cultures in diaspora? The advent of the digital humanities provides an opportunity to rethink culture in diaspora by looking at data, social media, and the web as interconnected platforms that may carry this metaphor to an entirely new level. This course explores digital humanities approaches to diasporic culture by presenting students with hands-on research focusing on cultural heritage objects held in The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley.