The third annual Digital Humanities at Berkeley Summer Institute (DHBSI), August 14-18, 2017, offered 4 courses to 65 participants. Participants, consisting of graduate students, undergraduate students, postdocs, faculty, and staff, chose from one of four courses: Structuring and Annotating Data Archives for Analysis, Data workflows and Network Analysis, Maps for Humanists, and Computational Text Analysis. Supplementing the week-long courses were daily lectures and talks open to the broader campus community.
In addition to individual courses, DHBSI included daily events, open to the campus community. On Monday, Chris Hoffman and Quinn Dombrowski presented on how Research IT’s Berkeley Research Computing and Research Data Management services have contributed to digital humanities projects at Berkeley. That evening featured a keynote by noted digital humanities scholar Richard So (University of Chicago) titled “Race and Distant Reading: Towards a New History of the Post-was US Novel.” Professor So’s talk highlighted the importance of utilizing critical theory and applying a racialized critique of methods within DH research.
On Tuesday afternoon, participants attended a talk from our partners at the Berkeley Libraries. Stacey Reardon and Cody Hennesy presented, “Finding the Haystack: Corpora for Large-Scale Analysis,” which guided participants on where and how researchers access large collections of text for computational analysis. Cody Hennesy followed this talk with a discussion on conducting text analysis of digital library books using the HathiTrust Research Center. In Wednesday’s afternoon keynote, micha cárdenas (University of Washington, Bothell) with respondent Abigail De Kosnik (Professor in Theater, Dance & Performance Studies) placed concepts and tools of digital humanities in conversation with queer of color scholarship in her talk titled, “The Android Goddess Manifesto.” On Thursday, Hubert Mara joined us from Heidelberg University (Heidelberg University) to discuss recent advances in 3D modeling of handwriting and archaeological objects.
On Friday, after the conclusion of the individual courses, participants met for a series of lightning talks, which provided briefs on what each of the courses covered throughout the week. Following the lightning talks, participants attended a culminating keynote address titled: “AI Go Rithm: On Algorithmic Being,” by Professor David Goldberg (University of California Humanities Research Institute) with respondent Professor Judith Butler (UC Berkeley).
The participants’ responses to the post-institute survey were overwhelmingly positive. Digital Humanities is excited to be launching the DH Summer Minor at Berkeley in Summer 2018.