05/01/2013
For the title page of William Blake’s Milton, the poet engraved an image of his hero, naked and with his back turned, wiping away the printed letters of his name as he emerges facing a light between dark, swirling clouds: “To step out of heaven is to make oneself vulnerable to revision,” explains Steven Goldsmith in his analysis of the engraving...
04/25/2013
Four years ago the Townsend Humanities Lab launched with just a few pilot projects and user tutorials. Since then, the Lab has grown to encompass some 200 projects and over 2000 users. Today, as simpler and more powerful applications like Google's tool suite or Berkeley’s Research Hub arrive on the scene, it has become clear it is no longer...
04/18/2013
Why write about a social sciences data laboratory on a humanities blog?
Looking at lists of Berkeley departments and programs in the Humanities and in the Social Sciences, we might wonder why history is in the social sciences division, while the history of art is in the humanities; why anthropology is a social science department, while...
04/11/2013
It's commonplace to say that the Internet, with its preference for small, digestible bits of information, is killing age-old, traditional longform journalism. Yet in a recent talk at Berkeley, Robert Darnton, the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor of History and director of the Harvard University Library, argued that news has long been...
03/27/2013
Given poetry's centrality in the Gaelic tradition, argues Eric Falci, it cannot help but make insistent references to history and the history of the Irish lyric. Falci, who is an associate professor of English and the author of Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966-2010, engages in marvelously close readings to understand the importance of...
03/14/2013
After a successful talk by Dan Cohen last month, The Townsend Center is excited to be hosting two further brown bag lunches on digital humanities topics in Spring 2013.
At the next brown bag lunch, on March 18, Marti Hearst, Professor at the School of Information, and Bryan Wagner, Associate Professor of English, will discuss the lessons they...
03/04/2013
For years relegated to the digital broom closet, a reminder of the Internet’s tacky origins, GIFs have made a comeback in a number of milieu. Today, professionals and amateurs alike are creating GIFs that run the gamut from seriously silly to Very Serious. These images, both newly trendy and relics of a bygone era, are part of a movement to...
02/26/2013
“If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without ascending it,” muses Kafka, “it would have been permitted.” Kafka's slippery conditional distills the paradox of the Bible, affirming a divine ideal only to underscore the constraints of reality: transcendence is thinkable, not achievable. It is a vision of the human condition perched on...