To support humanities researchers who wish to take advantage of the cloud computing resources provided by the Berkeley Research Computing (BRC) program, two members of the Berkeley digital humanities community will be attending a summer workshop at the University of Victoria. Cody Hennesy, the campus E-Learning Librarian, and Brendan Mackie, a PhD student in the History department, have received tuition scholarships from the Digital Humanities at Berkeley program to attend “CloudPowering DH Research” at the annual Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), which brings together scholars from around the world for a week of intensive training.
From the course description:
[C]loud computing remains more of a concept than a tangible actuality for most Humanities researchers and questions such as, “What is a cloud exactly ?”, “What can really be done in the cloud?”, and “How could I really run a cloud?”, linger, sapping momentum from what would otherwise be valuable research projects.
This course is intended for those involved in research who are looking for a flexible platform that can perform a variety of research tasks with beyond desktop performance. Emphasis will be divided between designing cloud based environments for a representative of sample of projects, multi virtual machine systems to power websites, run scraping projects, and support instances of generic web based tools and actually deploying these environments within the Compute Canada Cloud.
While the workshop itself will focus on using the Compute Canada Cloud for deploying environments, Hennesy and Mackie will develop the vocabulary and familiarity with cloud computing to serve as “domain consultants”, partnering with technical staff to help humanities researchers take advantage of cloud computing resources supported by BRC. Hennesy and Mackie will be available as BRC domain consultants starting in Fall 2016. Humanities researchers seeking consultation about cloud computing are welcome to e-mail dh-consult@berkeley.edu anytime.