Courses

In this connector course, we will explore how historical data becomes historical evidence and how recent technological advances affect long-established practices, such as close attention to historical context and contingency. Will the advent of fast computing and big data make history “count” more or lead to unprecedented insights into the study of change over time? During our weekly discussions, we will apply what we learn in lectures and labs to the analysis of selected historical sources and get an understanding of constructing historical datasets.

How do we “map” culture in motion?

Describing the interaction of places, times, languages, identities, cultural formats, dominant and marginal narratives that characterize cultures in diaspora requires a multidimensionality that traditional maps no longer meet.

In today’s world, we “map” diasporas through digital narratives , and often perform culture as archivists and curators.

This course introduces students to natural language processing and exposes them to the variety of methods available for reasoning about text in computational systems. NLP is deeply interdisciplinary, drawing on both linguistics and computer science, and helps drive much contemporary work in text analysis (as used in computational social science, the digital humanities, and computational journalism).

Explores 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 computerbased 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.

This project-based course is three courses rolled into one, all oriented toward the American Studies-based digital project “The Berkeley Revolution”. (Any interested students should browse the site at revolution.berkeley.edu to get a sense of what a previous set of students accomplished.) 

This course serves as an introduction to the practice of digital humanities in the field of Medieval Studies. The goals of the course are threefold: --to explore the conceptual terrain of digital humanities and to become familiar with debates about digital humanities; --to learn a series of basic skills in digital humanities practice, including tools for digitizing manuscripts (XML and TEI); text analysis and statistics (Voyant, Wordhoard, and others); text analysis in Python; stylometry; topic modeling; network analysis and visualization; 3D modeling; and resources for publishing and presenting research; --to explore the extensive world of digital humanities projects in Medieval Studies, in a range of fields from literature to history to art history to musicology to manuscript studies and more.

This seminar will read theories of old and new media through the lens of two conceptual frameworks environmental criticism and migration studies. Tracing the effects of movement and stillness, interaction and connectivity from early cinema to social media and new forms of data visualizations, participants will develop their own research projects and methodologies by relating questions arising from theory to practice.

This course will investigate 3d images from their development as a popular photographic medium in the nineteenth century to their current digital reemegence. We will closely study the optics that structure transplanar images and learn how to make or own. We will also examine 3D moving images in cinema and video games, the challenges and opportunities facing the current VR/AR market, and new visualization strategies that 3D affords for medicine, psychology, manufacturing, and cultural heritage.

n times of post-truth politics, this course focuses on imposter tales, analyzing performances of social roles and national identities across multiple media and genres. Considering classic tales of “clothes make the man” from H. C. Andersen and F. Kafka, films such as Imitation of Life and Catch Me If You Can, as well as acts of posing and exposing on TV, YouTube, and digital social media platforms, students learn to think critically about rank and power, authenticity and artifice, staging and acting. Theories on the presentation of self and framing social interaction will guide our analyses. Epitomized by the word “selfie,” “selling the self” is an all-encompassing social practice that governs life and politics.