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.

Teddy Roland has joined the Digital Humanities at Berkeley staff as a consultant. He is a 20th century Americanist, studying poetry and poetics. He holds a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, where he worked on circuits of capital in Modernism as they relate to the rise of free verse.

As of Fall 2015, we are pleased to introduce the Literature and Digital Humanities working group, which we warmly invite you all to join. The group assumes absolutely no prior knowledge of, or experience with, the digital humanities, and is aimed at an introductory level — we will be offering a combination of faculty project presentations and hands-on DH trainings.

This summer, Kyle Booten, Ph.D. candidate in Education with a designated emphasis in New Media, explored the fundamentals of Python programming through digital poetry with his undergraduate students. Meeting for six short weeks at the Berkeley Center for New Media, “Poetry and Technology: A Digital Verse Lab” students worked together in groups to produce works of digital poetry.

Marti Hearst, Professor of Information and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, recently presented a keynote titled, “Can Natural Language Processing Become Natural Language Coaching?” at the annual meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics. Hosted in Beijing, this year’s conference attracted 950 attendees.

This Fall, Political Science Ph.D. Candidate Rochelle Terman wants to expose other graduate students to a broad palette of useful digital humanities tools in the hopes that they will be encouraged to make use of new methods in their own research.

The Humanities Intensive Teaching and Learning (HILT) Institute will be held July 27-31, 2015 on the campus of the Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Course offerings include:

Spring training is getting underway at D-Lab next week.  Take advantage of beginner-friendly intensives or explore a variety of data analysis packages in R.  Subscribe to the digital humanities mailing list for a weekly reminder of upcoming training.  

Intensives

Text analysis is just one of a variety of methods at the disposal of digital humanists. With the application of computational methods, scholars can perform "distant reading" (Franco Moretti) or "macroanalysis" (Matthew Jockers) of large collections of text, such as a corpus of 2,958 19th century British novels. Robert K.

Join us next week for the "Computing and Practice of History" event with Dr. Robert Nelson (Digital Scholarship Lab) as he presents his talk, "Topic Modeling and Textual Analysis of the Civil War." 

When: February 27, 4pm - 6pm

Where: Maude Fife (315 Wheeler Hall), Reception to follow at D-Lab (356 Barrows Hall)