DigHum and Archival Design

UC Berkeley | DH @ Berkeley | D-Lab

2018 Summer, Session D : MTuWTh 9:30AM-11:29AM

Room: 182 Dwinelle & D-Lab (Barrows 370)

Instructor: Dr. Adam Anderson

This flipped course will cover digital archival practices by examining archives from the past and present and exploring defining characteristics and their usefulness for scholarship. Students enrolled in the course will have access to the metadata (and sometimes data) for an unlimited number of digitized archives online. By applying the computational tools taught in class, each student will learn how to create a digital archive of their own design.

The digital component of the course will include hands-on tutorials and will teach in Jupyter notebooks, how to use Regular Expressions (regex), NetwokX and other Python applications, in order to provide a basic structure to a vast collection of textual (documents) and visual (images) as online resources in Zotero and Omeka. Over the course of the semester, the students will see a wide array of open source computational tools and software useful for structuring unstructured data, with qualitative analysis in MaxQDA and visualizations in Gephi networks.

No prerequisites, just bring your laptops to class!

No programming languages are required. Intro to Python will be taught early on.

For registration information, contact lead instructor, Adam Anderson: admndrsn@berkeley.edu

Course Description: This class will introduce archival design and cover different methods and practices for archival studies, including the digitization and curation of these archives into online open data sets.

Course Goal: To answer the question, "What are archives?" and "What are they good for?" Where DH meets libraries and archives, we need to articulate the relationship of knowledge classification systems and libraries with the capacity for memorable mental models.

The goal of the course, will be for each student to "curate" and *describe* (in 1 minute) an archive of their own making, which they will use to help answer the question: "What is an Archive?" The results of the students work will range from posters, papers, Movies, and Jupyter Notebooks. The results of each student will be shared openly, and will largely be determined by their own interests and ability in these computational methods as they apply to their major or field of study.

• Grades:
  • Attendance: 50%
    • This includes participation.
  • Assignments: 50%
    • Submit assignments by email to admndrsn@berkeley.edu
    • Each week an assignment is late it drops a letter grade.
• Laptop policy: https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2017/11/29/debate-over-banning-laptops-resurfaces-academics-seek-more
• 5 Easter Eggs / Bonus / Make-up = 5 min video (c. 1500 words) about your application of the following tools:
  • Python Jupyter Notebooks (Data Science or D-Lab)
  • Zotero
  • Gephi
  • MaxQDA
  • Tableau

Past Student Results:

Posters (36x48 (Standard) or 48x64)

• Abigail Hoskins (Berkeley PhD candidate in Near Eastern Studies): From Tablet to Data: Visualizations of Seleucid Ritual Texts
• Allison Zau (Berkeley BA in Art History): Chinese Contemporary Art Community
• Dylan Guerra (Berkeley PhD candidate in Near Eastern Studies): The Eblaite Archive
• Hayley Kellner (Berkeley BA in Anthropology): Historical Archaeology of Dwellings
• Kenny Oh (Berkeley BA in Art History): Brueghel Family Image Archive
• Lindsay Howard (Berkeley BA in Scandinavian Studies): The Icelandic Family Sagas
• Sara Ann Knutson (Berkeley PhD candidate in Scandinavian Studies): Mapping an Ivory Diaspora: The Archaeology of Cultural Movements

Movies (1 to 5 min), examples include:

• Abigail Hoskins (Berkeley PhD candidate in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology): From Tablet to Data: Visualizations of Seleucid Ritual Texts
• Aiko Gonzalez (Berkeley BA in Education): THE EDUCATION SYSTEM: UNDERSTANDING THE MACHINE https://youtu.be/eJgoGxdFr-s
• Byung Kim (Berkeley BA in Art History): Roman Mummy Herakleidis Getty
• Clayton Hale (Berkeley BA in History): Coffee culture as the result of the Pan-American Coffee Bureau's advertisements.
• Sara Ann Knutson (Berkeley PhD candidate in Scandinavian Studies): The Scandinavian Diaspora: The Lewis Chessmen

Syllabus & Assignments: