Blog

Computer reading can feel like a Faustian bargain. Sure, we can learn about linguistic patterns in literary texts, but it comes at the expense of their richness. At bottom, the computer simply doesn't know what or how words mean. Instead, it merely recognizes strings of characters and tallies them. Statistical models then try to identify relationships among the tallies. How could this begin to capture anything like irony or affect or subjectivity that we take as our entry point to interpretive study?

One of the hardest questions we can pose to a computer is asking what a human-language text is about. Given an article, what are its keywords or subjects? What are some other texts on the same subjects? For us as human readers, these kinds of tasks may seem inseparable from the very act of reading: we direct our attention over a sequence of words in order to connect them to one another syntactically and interpret their semantic meanings. Reading a text, for us, is a process of unfolding its subject matter.

Rita Lucarelli creates 3D images of ancient Egyptian coffins. Using Agisoft Photoscan, the Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies and her team transform 2D photographs into 3D models before annotating the virtual figures with transliterations, translations, and other relevant data. Since Egyptian hieroglyphics adorning funerary materials were copied and read from different directions, 3D interaction with digitized images provides better access to the texts of such objects than traditional 2D representations.

DH at Berkeley has been well-represented at DHSI 2016. Our own Quinn Dombrowski led a well-attended Drupal course while Executive Director Claudia Von Vacano offered a well-received presentation on data science and the humanities at Berkeley.

Digital Humanities at Berkeley recently awarded more than $200,000 in grants to UCB community members. The grants will promote collaborative research and the development of new DH courses.

COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH GRANTS

14 research teams will be funded for projects that range from database development to algorithmic analytical tools.

Interested in DH but not sure where to start? Want to learn some basic skills but not sure how to get going? The Digital Humanities at Berkeley Summer Institute has a new course for you. Introduction to Digital Humanities lives up to its name: an accessible “sampler” of several DH methods and tools relevant across humanistic disciplines.