The Hebrew Bible is a composite text written by many authors and compiled over hundreds of years. With much of the academic analysis of the Bible dedicated towards discerning nested authorship, scholars closely examine word choice and style to infer distinct components. Despite centuries of advancement in understanding authorial layers within the Bible, attribution for many verses is still heavily debated. The principal aim of our research project is to develop a set of machine learning algorithms to contribute to the analysis of biblical authorship.

A multidisciplinary conference was organized at Berkeley in April of 2017, and introduced the goal of building a socio-economic network from the 15,000 Neo-Sumerian texts from Drehem, Iraq, ancient Puzriš-Dagan (2100-2000 B.C.E.). The project brought together archaeologists, cuneiform specialists, experts in text analysis and natural language processing from around the world, country and campus. The workshop delineated a workflow for building a social network database from the digitized text archives, hosted and curated by Dr.

The project set out to collect a large and diverse set of texts related to magical ritual, in particular Greek and Latin incantations used in healing and protective magic as well as aggressive magic. The work proceeded in tandem with my Ph.D. dissertation; no corpus of such documents covering the period in question, from the Classical world through modern Greece, had previously existed. It was hoped that the digital database would facilitate the querying and display of the texts beyond what was possible in previous word-processor- based workflows.

In the prehispanic Andes artifacts were moved over great distances and the chemical analysis of these artifacts has shed a light on this important process at a regional scale.

As our ‘Early Modern Scholar-Printers Online’ digital humanities project approaches the end of our current round of funding, we are pleased to report on the progress we have made and the goals we have achieved.  During the past spring semester and start of the summer, we have had a team of undergraduate student-assistants (five in total, who come from backgrounds in Classics, History and Comparative Literature) that have dedicated time to transcribing various texts at the Bancroft library.

This project outlines ongoing efforts to “digitize” archaeological ceramic analysis methods used by the Taraco Archaeological Project in Chiripa, Bolivia. Chiripa is located on the southern shoreline of Lake Titicaca, home to a vibrant indigenous community, and the site of some of the oldest ceremonial and agricultural settlements in the southern Andes.

Combining the cultural embeddedness of anthropologists and the design innovation of the Berkeley Center of New Media (BCNM), this project builds a global online archive of conversations recorded by ethnographers in field sites worldwide. Our scalable global archive addresses two concerns in contemporary anthropology: 1) renewed interest in collaboration as both ethnographic object and method, and 2) the paucity of interactive, design-focused ethnographic archives.

On the eve of its 150th anniversary, the University of California (UC) is one of the world’s premier academic institutions. This project will take a Big Data approach to exploring the history and role of the UC campuses in the state of California. The project will produce an unprecedented large-scale empirical examination of the university’s funding, students, professors, institutional structure, and the university’s impact on socioeconomic mobility and economic development. Data will include digitization of previously published financial and administrative statistics, student records, cour

In spring 2016, the Dutch Studies Program at the German Department and the Bancroft Library partnered in a collaborative research grant through Digital Humanities to prepare a digital research collection from selected primary source materials in the Engel Sluiter Historical Documents Collection at The Bancroft Library. This collection consists predominantly of copies and transcriptions of primary source materials on the seventeenth-century Atlantic.

The staggering disparity between what cultural heritage collections hold in their storage facilities and what they are able to publicly display (typically 5% or less of their total holdings) is a well-known fact. For example, the Victoria and Albert Museum shares the following information on its website: