Over the course of the last twenty years, research and cultural heritage institutions have engaged in a massive effort to digitize the world’s knowledge. Digital collections have expanded from the projects of individual scholars or libraries; materials are now linked together in increasingly large and complex digital repositories, such as the California Digital Library and the Digital Public Library of America.
The Digital Humanities Fellows Lecture Series begins on Friday, March 18th. The DH Fellows Lecture Series brings together the campus DH community for the scholarly presentation and informal discussion of specific aspects of digital humanities practice. Each meeting a different Fellow presents their ongoing work before the conversation is opened to hands-on experimentation in addition to questions, and comments. Intended to further the critical understanding and practice of the digital humanities at Berkeley, these lectures are intended for both existing and prospective DH practitioners.
DH Fellow Michael Zellmann-Rohrer, PhD candidate in Classics and Medieval Studies, is building a new database of Greek and Latin incantations to support his dissertation. The Digital Corpus of Texts for the Study of Magical Ritual gathers together 2,000 texts, including Greek sources from the fifth century B.C. through modern Greece, as well as Latin sources from Roman antiquity through the Middle Ages. Among the texts are spells for protection, healing, curses, and erotic power.
March marks the beginning of an exciting program in electronic literature, organized by DH Fellow Alex Saum-Pascual, Assistant Professor in Spanish and Portuguese. Electronic literature (or e-lit), as defined by the Electronic Literature Organization, refers to “works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer” and encompasses a broad set of forms and practices.
Computers are basically magic. We turn them on and (mostly!) they do the things we tell them: open a new text document and record my grand ruminations as I type; open a web browser and help me navigate an unprecedented volume of information. Even though we tend to take them for granted, programs like Word or Firefox are extremely sophisticated in their design and implementation.
To support humanities researchers who wish to take advantage of the cloud computing resources provided by the Berkeley Research Computing (BRC) program, two members of the Berkeley digital humanities community will be attending a summer workshop at the University of Victoria.