We are pleased to announce the first set of courses supported by Digital Humanities at Berkeley New Course Component grants. These classes showcase the innovative ways that instructors have embedded digital humanities skills into disciplinary practices and offer students the opportunity to work with a variety of digital tools and methods. Instructors will be collaborating with campus partners, such as the Archaeological Resource Facility (ARF), the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), and the Visual Resources Center (VRC). All courses are currently open for Fall 2015 enrollment.
Rochelle Terman & Laura Stoker, Political Science 239T: Introduction To Computational Tools And Techniques For Social Research
Tuesday 4-6 PM
CCN: 72290
4 Units
Limit: 15 Students
This course will provide graduate students the critical technical skills necessary to conduct research in computational social science and digital humanities, introducing them to the basic computer literacy, programming skills, and application knowledge that students need to be successful in further methods work. The course is divided into three main sections: skills, applications, and community engagement. The “skills” portion will introduce students to basic computer literacy, terminologies, and programming languages - i.e. Unix Shell, R, Python, and Git. The second part of the course provides students the opportunity to use the skills they learned in part 1 towards practical applications such as automated text analysis, geospatial analysis, data collection via APIs, and data visualization. The third section on community engagement will introduce topics such as ethics and privacy, best practices of reproducible research, scholarly communication and collaboration, and how to further one’s research using UC Berkeley campus resources.
Lisa Trever, History of Art 192L: Mural Painting and the Ancient Americas
Tuesday 10 AM - 1 PM
CCN: 05112
4 Units
Limit: 15 Students
In this seminar we will study the wall paintings of palaces, temples, and tombs from pre-Hispanic Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru with an emphasis on the early periods prior to the Aztec and Inca empires. Secondarily, we will examine colonial, modern, and contemporary legacies of indigenous painting in Latin America and the United States. Readings will come from art historical and archaeological literature, as well as critical sources on space and proxemics, the built environment, and embodiment and subjectivity. Discussion topics will include: artistic techniques and materials, iconography, text and image, narrative and ornament, style and ethnicity, courtly culture and religious practice. We will also discuss the pragmatics of conservation and illustration and the politics and ethics of the discovery, collection, and exportation of cultural patrimony. This seminar is supported by the Digital Humanities at Berkeley program, which will allow us to experiment with new technologies for imaging murals within their ancient contexts and to digitally record our seminar’s site visits to murals in the Bay Area. We will make visits as a class to see the Teotihuacan mural fragments at the de Young Museum, Diego Rivera’s 1940 Pan-American Unity mural at City College of San Francisco, and the small Rivera mural in Stern Hall on this campus.
Edmund Campion, MUSIC 158A: Sound and Music Computing with CNMAT Technologies
Monday and Thursday 9:30 AM - 11 AM
CCN: 60599
4 Units
Limit: 30 Students
Monday and Thursday 11 AM - 12:30 PM
CCN: 61005
4 Units
Limit: 30 Students (*currently full)
Explore the intersection of music and computers using a combination of scientific, technological, and artistic methodologies. Musical concerns within a computational frame are addressed through the acquisition of basic programming skills for the creation and control of digital sound. Will learn core concepts and techniques of computer-based music composition using the Cycling74/MaxMSP programming environment in combination with associated software tools and programming approaches created by the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies. Included will be exposure to the essentials of digital audio signal processing, musical acoustics and psychoacoustics, sound analysis and synthesis. The course is hands-on and taught from the computer lab.