Projects

Our goal is to make a computer program that interacts with human improvising musicians to automatically co-author music in real time using machine learning. This real-time interactive system will contribute to and draw from already existing branches of study in music composition and computer science. From computer science, the system will apply techniques from Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and Machine Learning to analyze and generate musical content. Within the domain of music composition, our piece aims to develop an interactive digital framework for gesture-based music improvisation.

Berkeley Prosopography Services (BPS) provides a new set of tools for prosopography - the identification of individuals and study of their interactions - in support of humanities research. Prosopography is an discipline well-served by digital tools; it is a humanities discipline in which the computational and data-driven methods at home in “Big Data” research can transform scholarly workflows, regardless of the size of the datasets. BPS is based upon re-usable infrastructure, supporting generalized web services for corpus management, social network analysis, and visualization.

This project is as a wiki-based catalogue of the paintings and drawings by Jan Brueghel, his workshop, and his imitators. This includes a corpus of perhaps 500-600 works that are entirely or largely the work of Jan himself, and hundreds more copies and variants. In the wiki, each of these objects has its own page with an image and full cataloging data and bibliography; behind each of these pages, a discussion page allows other facts and opinions to be added.

Originally conceived of as a complex digital object comprising audio clips from field dialect recordings coordinated with text files containing analysis on several levels, the Bulgarian Dialectology as Living Tradition project is now being prepared as an interactive database. The central focus remains the collection of interviews, each of which is available both as an audio file and in text format. The texts are currently being transcribed, translated, annotated, and entered into the database.

Adrian Freed and Lisa Wymore are working together with a small team of creative engineers and artists to make a digital platform that has a low threshold of entry. The system would allow people interested in embodied actions, gesture, sensation, bodily expression, etc. to enter the space and build digital instruments that are activated by a variety of sensor and camera based inputs.

This pedagogy project seeks to integrate approaches to and tools from the Digital Humanities into the Ethnic Studies undergraduate curriculum. In particular, this work will explore incorporating digital approaches into Ethnic Studies 101B: Humanities Methods in Ethnic Studies, a mandatory undergraduate methods course in the Chicano/Latino Studies, Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies, Native American Studies, and Comparative Ethnic Studies majors.

Bamboo DiRT is a registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. Developed by Project Bamboo, Bamboo DiRT makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mindmapping software.

Editors' Notes is an open-source, web-based tool for recording, organizing, preserving, and opening access to research notes, built with the needs of documentary editing projects, archives, and library special collections in mind.

HackTheHeast was an 11-day hackathon for the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, held during September, 2014.  The event was open to the community and invited participants to build apps for researchers, heritage communities, and K-12 education.  

An atlas project of experiential learning, mapping the communities of International Boulevard at a hyper-local scale.

This project examines the social life of the Italian opera in Paris during the 1830s and 1840s. The project focuses on an archival collection of letters written by subscribers to the administration of the Théâtre Italien gives the names, addresses, seat preferences, and social connections of patrons.

“Louisiana Purchases: The Indian Treaty System in the Missouri River Valley,1804-1859” combines traditional archival methods with GIS to examine the settler colonial transformation of the lower Missouri River Valley in the first half of the nineteenth century. The project’s digital components involve designing new visualizations of territorial conquest and demographic change in the trans-Mississippi West.

Milton Revealed is a collaborative project to collect audio-visual materials related to John Milton and his work, to re-examine his relation to theatricality, and to develop teaching approaches to Milton that use performance across a variety of media. Our principal concern is to enhance the appeal of Milton to a broad audience by such dynamic approaches of all kinds.

This course will provide graduate students the critical technical skills necessary to conduct research in computational social science and digital humanities, introducing them to the basic computer literacy, programming skills, and application knowledge that students need to be successful in further methods work.

RES ROMANAE: University of California, Berkeley Roman Material Culture Research Laboratory serves as the portal for reporting the activities and presenting the research results obtained by the members of the Berkeley Roman Material Culture Research Group, an informal grouping of faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students associated with UC Berkeley whose research interests focus on the investigation of the material culture of the Roman world.  RES ROMANAE presents professional profiles of the group members, a description of the UC Berke

"Richard Pryor's Peoria" opens up the genre of biography for the digital age. Traditionally, biographers have done their research—rooted around in archives, conducted their interviews, sleuthed for missing puzzle pieces—and then streamlined that research to write the story of the person in question. Our site is an interactive archive of the first two decades of the life of Richard Pryor in Peoria, Illinois.

Shakespeare's Staging explores the history of Shakespeare performance through images, videos, essays and bibliographies. The site is designed to be a resource for teachers and students of Shakespeare as well as for performers and directors of the plays. The audio-visual collection includes materials spanning from Shakespeare's original stage all the way through contemporary productions, and focuses on the many ways performance spaces can be used to realize Shakespeare's texts.

SyllabiPy was created by Alex Estes and Christopher Hench at the University of California, Berkeley in 2015. Alex and Christopher are graduate students in the German Department interested in linguistic forces operating in literature, and the tools of the Digital Humanities.

Our Text Thresher software will enable digital humanities researchers to enlist the help of crowd workers and volunteers so they can scale-up traditional ‘content analysis’ projects to identify and extract complex information from thousands (or even millions) of documents and/or web pages.

"The Berkeley Revolution" is a digital history website that dramatizes, through curated archives of primary documents from the time, the story of Berkeley's political and cultural transformation in the late-60s and 1970s. It was created primarily by Cal undergraduates, with the supervision of Professor Scott Saul, through an honors seminar in American Studies. Six research projects, with 300 primary source documents attached to them, were launched with the first iteration of the class in 2017; more projects will be launched with future iterations of the class.

During this year (AY 2017-2018), we have continued to build 3D visualizations of ancient Egyptian coffins and to progress in disseminating 3D models of previously unpublished ancient Egyptian coffins kept in the storage rooms of the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology (PAHMA) at UC Berkeley. We are also continuing the textual and iconographic analysis of the 3D models by creating interactive annotations on the models themselves.

The Future of Memory: Jewish Culture in the Digital Age is a new project of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life that includes an installation, exhibition, and digital research lab in which museum professionals, scholars, students, and the public, discuss the meaning of memory and the many facets of digital history.

The Living New Deal is a research project and online public archive documenting the scope and impact of the New Deal on Americans’ lives and landscape. The New Deal was a constellation of economic stimulus policies and social programs enacted to lift America out of the Great Depression, one that touched every state, city, town, and rural area in the country, yet there is no national record of what the New Deal built, only bits and pieces found in local and national archives, published sources, and occasional markers.

This website provides a research hub for those interested in early film theory. It serves as a supplement to the sourcebook The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907-1933, which brings together hundreds of texts by theorists, intellectuals, and filmmakers, documenting the early twentieth century’s efforts to assimilate modernity’s most powerful medium. Users will find a collation of German film-theoretical publications before 1933, links to films as well as suggestions for researching and teaching Weimar cinema.

This project explores the sudden appearance in the 10th c. of a meritocratic culture that transformed Chinese elite society and constituted the ideological foundation of China's famous civil service exams. My earlier work used GIS, social network analysis, and a very large biographical database to explain the physical demise of China’s aristocracy. This project now complements that sociopolitical research with a study that explains the accompanying cultural change as a product of the rampant migration of the era.

TRANSIT Journal is the first refereed, multidisciplinary online journal dedicated to the critical inquiry of travel, migration, and multiculturalism in the German-speaking world. As a web-based, multimedia production, TRANSIT pushes boundaries both of traditional scholarship and of print publication. We publish one issue over the course of a year in several rounds of publication, allowing for new submissions throughout the year. Each issue also contains an open forum for experimental work and review essays on relevant books.

The Vietnamese Intellectual Networks Database provides detailed data regarding key Vietnamese intellectuals, their geographic movement, and their intellectual networks. Based on primary and secondary sources, the database seeks to highlight the historical nuances of each trip by charting modes of transit, activities in situ, and engagements between intellectuals. In this way, this database thus would form a nucleus for ongoing spatial research into Vietnamese intellectual networks.