2015 has been a busy year for DH Fellow Elizabeth Honig, Associate Professor in History of Art, and her team of research assistants and URAP apprentices. Over several years, the team has developed janbrueghel.net, an extensive, open source catalogue raisonné of Flemish painter, Jan Brueghel the Younger (1601 - 1678 AD). The enormous output of the Brueghel family’s workshop and their use of various templating technologies for duplicating painting elements (e.g. a windmill, background figures) poses interesting challenges for attribution.

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.

What does the advent of big data have to offer art historians? What do art historians, well versed in the study of images, have to offer researchers in computational methods? What approaches are available to scholars studying large collections of images, and what types of research questions do these engender? How can we connect large image collections with rich metadata? Elizabeth Honig, DH Fellow and Associate Professor in History of Art, and Melissa Geisler Trafton, Senior Researcher, Fitz H.

We invite members of the DH community to join us at the following event. DH Fellow Elizabeth Honig will discuss her ongoing work with the Jan Brughel project and the Open Catalogue Raisonne platform. Read more on Honig's project:

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.

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.

Kathryn Stine is Senior Digital Curator the History of Art Department’s Visual Resources Center. In this guest post, she describes the VRC’s current collaboration with DH Fellow and Associate Professor or Art History, Elizabeth Honig.

Eric E. Monson is a Research Scientist at Duke University’s Visualization & Interactive Systems Group. Elizabeth Honig is an Associate Professor in UC Berkeley’s History of Art Department. Her project, janbrueghel.net, serves a test corpus for NSF-funded research in computer vision and machine learning.

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.