Members of the UC Berkeley digital humanities community gathered together with patrons of the Magnes Collection to celebrate the opening of a new exhibit, "The Future of Memory: Jewish Culture in the Digital Age”, as well as the kick-off of the Digital Humanities at Berkeley program on February 18th, 2015.
As part of a series of prepared remarks, Dean of Arts and Humanities Tony Cascardi challenged the idea that there should be anything unusual about the humanities’ embrace of technology, noting that technology has played an essential role in the development of humanistic scholarship, including the adoption of the printing press and even the early technology of writing itself. He framed the Digital Humanities at Berkeley initiative as the culmination of many years of work. He noted that the Mellon-funded cyberinfrastructure initiative Project Bamboo that UC Berkeley led from 2008-2012 built a foundation for Digital Humanities at Berkeley and strengthened important relationships between the division of Arts and Humanities and groups such as Research IT, despite Bamboo’s failure to achieve its stated goals.
To read more, visit the Digital Humanities at Berkeley blog.