The second annual Digital Humanities at Berkeley Summer Institute (DHBSI), August 15-19, 2016, grew to offer 6 courses to 100 participants. Geospatial Analysis, Data Workflows and Network Analysis, Database Development Using Drupal, and Computational Text Analysis were offered again, while Intro to Digital Humanities and Qualitative Data Analysis were offered for the first time.

In addition to individual courses, DHBSI included daily events, open to the campus community. On Monday, Eleanor Dickson and Peter Organisciak from the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) presented on computational text analysis and methods for accessing the data in the HTRC collections. That evening featured a keynote by noted digital humanities and new media scholar Tara McPherson (USC), entitled “DH by Design: Alternative Origin Stories for the Digital Humanities.” McPherson’s talk highlighted the importance of keeping theory and methods together in DH.

Interested in DH but not sure where to start? Want to learn some basic skills but not sure how to get going? The Digital Humanities at Berkeley Summer Institute has a new course for you. Introduction to Digital Humanities lives up to its name: an accessible “sampler” of several DH methods and tools relevant across humanistic disciplines.

DH Fellow Eduardo Escobar, a PhD candidate in Near Eastern Studies, has turned to network analysis to study semantic and social networks in the history of science. In network analysis, a graph’s nodes (e.g. people, places, words) and their connecting edges (kinship, trade routes, synonyms) are visualized, with the goal of providing scholars with new insights.