At the end of April 2015, Camille Villa will be departing Research IT and the Digital Humanities at Berkeley program to pursue new directions in her career.
Camille got involved with digital humanities as an undergraduate. One of her first major contributions to Berkeley’s digital humanities program was suggesting the Free Speech Movement as the topic for a spring 2014 hackathon. The resulting #HackFSM event is still talked about today.
Camille has been the voice of digital humanities through her authorship of nearly all the digital humanities blog posts, resource guides, and “Week in DH” announcements over the last 18 months. Some of these blog posts have been picked up by DH news aggregators, where they have reached a national and international audience. In addition to creating numerous digital humanities event posters that have appeared around campus, Camille also managed the Berkeley DH Twitter account, an important communication channel that helped raise the profile of Berkeley’s digital humanities program.
None of the major events that the digital humanities program has put together in the last two years would have been possible without Camille’s support. As one of the co-coordinators of the Digital Humanities Working Group, she helped organize DH Faires for the last two years, as well as a Bay Area DH meeting at the Magnes in 2014. She did a tremendous amount of behind-the-scenes work last summer to make the first Digital Humanities at Berkeley Summer Institute (DHBSI) a success, with a 100% satisfaction rate from participants. We will be relying heavily on her documentation of that event to host the second iteration this summer, and we hope to do Camille proud.
As her next step, Camille will be enrolling in a coding bootcamp to pursue opportunities in web development.
Please join us at the D-Lab (350 Barrows) on Friday, April 29th at 3 PM for a small celebration in honor of Camille, to wish her all the best in her future endeavors.
(Photo: Cindy Nguyen and Camille Villa at DH Faire 2016. Credit: Julie Wolf, Art History VRC.)