Dr. Adam G. Anderson (admndrsn@berkeley.edu) joined UC Berkeley in 2017 as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Humanities at Berkeley. Since then he has worked as a post-doc lecturer in Digital Humanities and in Data Science. As an academic coordinator for Digital Humanities at Berkeley, Adam is co-author and designer of the Theory and Methods and Archives curriculum for the DigHum Minor and Certificate Program. He served as a co-coordinator for the Digital Humanities Working Group (DHWG) and Computational Text Analysis Working Group (CTAWG), as well as the topic area lead in Network Analysis and Text Analysis at the D-Lab. His work brings together the fields of computational linguistics, archaeology and Assyriology / Sumerology to quantify the socio-economic landscapes emerging during the Bronze Age in the ancient Near East. His research interests include the Old Assyrian archives, the Sumerian Ur III archives, prosopographical and geospatial mapping. He applies computational Language modeling (NLP) to large datasets of ancient texts and archaeological records, in order to better understand the lives of individuals and groups within ancient societies, and to relate these findings within the context of our lives today. Education:
- PhD, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University (2018)
- MA (zwischenprüfung), Assyriology, Ludwig-Maximilians University (2008)
- BA, Linguistics, Brigham Young University (2006)
White papers:
- Inferring Social Rank in an Old Assyrian Trade Network
- The Old Assyrian Social Network: an analysis of the texts from Kültepe-Kanesh (1950-1750 B.C.E.)
- Computational Cuneiform at UC Berkeley
Courses:
- Data 88: Writing Data Stories (Data Science Connector Course & Art of Writing, Spring 2021)
- Data 88: Language Modeling and Text Analysis (Data Science Connector Course 88, Spring 2020)
- Theory & Methods in the Digital Humanities (Digital Humanities 100, Summer 2017-2021)
- Digital Archival Practices (Digital Humanities 150A, Summer 2017-2021)
- Digital Ancient Near East (Near Eastern Studies 114, Spring 2018)
- Intro to Digital Humanities (Near Eastern Studies 190, Spring 2017)
Lecture links:
- 1 minute dissertation description
- 5 minute talk on the impact of network analysis
- 30 minute lecture at HSM (2015): The Tale of Šišaḫšušar (ancient narratives from network analysis)
- 60 minute lecture at ARF (2018): Archaeological Network Analysis: contextualizing neighborhood archives
- 30 minute lecture at BIDS ImageXD (2019): How 3D Imaging Can Lead to OCR for Cuneiform
- 60 minute lecture at Demography Brown Bag (2020): Three Centuries of Comparative Demographic Analysis of Ancient Social Networks