NESTUD 114 - 001 Digital Ancient Near East

UC Berkeley | DH @ Berkeley | D-Lab

2018 Spring Seminar (flipped)

Instructor: Dr. Adam Anderson

This (flipped) seminar 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 a number of digitized archives (books, journals, and other print resources) in the field of Near Eastern Studies (NES), and they will learn how to create digital archives of their own choosing.

The digital component of the course will include hands-on tutorials and will teach Jupyter notebooks, using Regular Expressions (regex) and Python, in order to provide a basic structure to a vast collection of textual (documents) and visual (images) resources. Over the course of the semester, the students will also be exposed to the wide array of open source computational tools and software, useful for structuring unstructured data, including bibliographic tools like Zotero, Mendeley.

The goal of the course, will be for each student to curate and describe 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, and Jupyter Notebooks, and will largely be determined by their own interests in these computational methods and in the field of NES.

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 practices from antiquity to modern day, and demonstrate the digitization of these archives into 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.

• Grades:
  • Attendance: 50%
    • This includes participation.
  • Assignments: 50%
    • Submit assignment by email to admndrsn@berkeley.edu
    • Each day an assignment is late it drops a half-letter grade.
• Laptop policy: https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2017/11/29/debate-over-banning-laptops-resurfaces-academics-seek-more
• Bonus / Make-up (must show proof of registration and copy of review + 250 words about your application of the tool):
  • http://guides.lib.berkeley.edu/digital-publishing
  • http://dlab.berkeley.edu/calendar-node-field-date

Download & Install:

• Python (3)
• Anaconda
• Zotero
• Gephi

Posters from the student's archive projects: