Across departments, instructors are experimenting with different ways to incorporate digital humanities methods and critical perspectives into undergraduate and graduate courses. Students are engaging with the digital by exploring computational methods, building models and reconstructions, and developing theoretical critiques and artistic creations. Below, we highlight a few current and upcoming courses taught by DH Fellows and other campus partners.

Fall 2015

The first set of courses featuring new components funded by DH at Berkeley made their debut this fall.

How is the production of art affected by the environment in which it is meant to be presented? DH Intern Ashley Jerbic, a double-major in Art Practice and History of Art, has spent her undergraduate career exploring 3D modeling as a way to approach this question. Through classes and internships with faculty DH Fellows, Jerbic has applied 3D modeling to a variety of disciplines.

On October 23, Dr. Elaine Sullivan, Assistant Professor in the History Department at UC Santa Cruz, visited the Digital Humanities at Berkeley program and the Department of Near Eastern Studies. Her visit was one of several workshops in DH at Berkeley’s series on 3D modeling.

DH Fellow Rita Lucarelli, Assistant Professor of Egyptology in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, researches religion, magic, and funerary culture in ancient Egypt. Her current work engages the Book of the Dead and how it is adapted to various artifacts. Lucarelli’s digital project focuses on creating highly detailed, annotated 3D models of these funerary objects to better understand the materiality of the Book of the Dead texts.

3D modeling offers digital humanists new ways to engage with material culture, restore context to decayed or destroyed spaces, and share resources with both members of the public and researchers around the world. These upcoming workshops will explore two different tools 3D modeling and how they have been applied to digital humanities projects.

Read about how DH Fellows are applying these methods to their research and teaching on the DH blog.

The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology is raising funds through October 15th to bring The Doctor, a gargantuan Egyptian coffin lid, to the public for the Museum’s grand re-opening in 2016. The 2,500 year-old stone coffin lid weighs three tons and is a particularly rare item in the Heart’s collections.

On August 24th, the Visual Resources Center (VRC) hosted a workshop and several presentations on photogrammetric and 3D modeling tools and techniques. DH Fellow Lisa Trever, Assistant Professor in History of Art, presented her ongoing work on excavated murals at Pañamarca, Peru. This summer, she was joined by DH Interns Isabella Warren, a M.Arch student at the College of Environmental Design and Ashley Jerbic, a senior undergraduate in History of Art and Art Practice.

Lynn Cunningham, Principal Digital Curator at the Visual Resources Center, will be attending the NEH Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Summer Institute on Advanced Challenges in Theory and Practice in 3D Modeling of Cultural Heritage Sites, co-hosted by University of Massachusetts Amherst and UCLA.   Participants will engage with issues facing scholars working with 3D content with an emphasis on the end user experience.

The Center for Tebtunis Papyri will be co-hosting a workshop on Digital Humanities and Egyptology with the Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Department of Near Eastern Studies.  Organized by Rita Lucarelli, Assistant Professor of Egyptology in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, the workshop will explore topics of digital collaboration, collections metadata, 3D visualization.  

First session (open to public)