Research

This project proposes to expand on Eduardo Escobar’s (PhD Candidate, NES) “Cuneiform De-Coded” software, which analyzes base values and hidden meanings within ancient texts that utilize the cuneiform script—the world’s first writing system. Like Chinese, and other script-based languages, the cuneiform script concealed multiple meanings within a single sign; for example, the sign “A,” in addition to its phonetic value /a/ can mean “water” and “son”; “A” was also an element in dozens of compound sign combinations.

The rise of large-scale digitized book collections—such as those provided by Google Books, the HathiTrust and the Internet Archive—is enabling a fundamentally new kind of text analysis that exploits the scale of collections to ask questions not possible with smaller corpora.

The rise of large-scale digitized book collections—such as those provided by Google Books, the HathiTrust and the
Internet Archive—is enabling a fundamentally new kind of text analysis that exploits the scale of collections to ask
questions not possible with smaller corpora. Many of these research questions are driven by historically deep textual
collections—corpora that span several decades or centuries in their publication. Moretti (2007) analyzes the changing

We are a collaborative and multidisciplinary research project dedicated to preserving, digitizing, transcribing, translating, analyzing, and publishing manuscripts related to two slave conspiracies that occurred at the Pointe Coupee Post in 1791 and 1795. We have digitized more than 1800 folio pages in French and Spanish related to these two conspiracies and crowdsourced their transcription and translation. From these sources, we have processed geospatial, demographic, and forensic information relevant to persons, places, and events involved in the conspiracies.

“The Digital Life Project” aims to reframe how we define digital humanities at UC Berkeley by enabling the investigation of source materials primarily focused on racism and racial violence and subsequently replicating this framework for other activist efforts.  “The Digital Life Project” is a model that emerged out of faculty collaborative research and digital humanities pedagogy that is supported by the D-Lab, an organization that works closely with the Digital Humanities at Berkeley Initiative as a partner.