Arts & Humanities
Workshop: “Can I Mine That? Should I Mine That?”: A Clinic for Copyright, Ethics & More in TDM Research
“Can I Mine That? Should I Mine That?”: A Clinic for Copyright, Ethics & More in TDM Research
Wednesday, March 8th, 11:10am-12:30pm
Online: Register to receive the Zoom link
Tim Vollmer and Stacy Reardon
If you are working on a computational text analysis project and have wondered how to legally acquire, use, and publish text and data, this workshop is for you! We will teach you 5 legal literacies (copyright, contracts, privacy, ethics, and special use cases) that will empower you to make well-informed decisions about compiling, using, and sharing your corpus. By the end of this workshop, and with a useful checklist in hand, you will be able to confidently design lawful text analysis projects or be well-positioned to help others design such projects. Consider taking alongside Copyright and Fair Use for Digital Projects. Register here.
Upcoming Workshops in this Series – Spring 2022:
- By Design: Graphics & Images Basics
- HTML/CSS Toolkit for Digital Projects
Please see bit.ly/dp-berk for details.
New Publication By Art History Faculty Aglaya Glebova
Aleksandr Rodchenko: Photography in the Time of Stalin
by Associate Professor Aglaya Glebova for European Modern Art.
From Yale University Press:
“Through the lens of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s photography, a new and provocative understanding emerges of the troubled relationship between technology, modernism, and state power in Stalin’s Soviet Union
Tracing the shifting meanings of photography in the early Soviet Union, Aglaya K. Glebova reconsiders the relationship between art and politics during what is usually considered the end of the critical avant-garde. Aleksandr Rodchenko (1891–1956), a versatile Russian artist and one of Constructivism’s founders, embraced photography as a medium of revolutionary modernity. Yet his photographic work between the late 1920s and the end of the 1930s exhibits an expansive search for a different pictorial language.
In the context of the extreme transformations carried out under the first Five-Year Plans, Rodchenko’s photography questioned his own modernist commitments. At the heart of this book is Rodchenko’s infamous 1933 photo-essay on the White Sea–Baltic Canal, site of one of the first gulags. Glebova’s careful reading of Rodchenko’s photography reveals a surprisingly heterodox practice and brings to light experiments in adjacent media, including the collaborative design work he undertook with Varvara Stepanova, Rodchenko’s partner in art and life.”
In Memoriam of Professor Andy Stewart
UC Berkeley mourns the passing of Professor Andrew Stewart. You can read the Art Department’s full obituary here.
Professor Andy Stewart was hired as an Assistant Professor in 1979, rising to Full Professor in 1986, to a joint appointment with the Classics Department in 1997, and then to the distinguished Nicholas Petris Chair of Greek Studies in 2007, which he held until his retirement in 2019. He was recently awarded the 2023 Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement – the highest award the Archaeological Institute of America bestows.
Celebrating Black History Month- New E-Resources in Art History
Check out these materials, all available on-line. Click on the titles to access them through UC Library Search.
Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing
The Color Pynk: Black Femme Art for Survival
Death’s futurity : the visual life of Black power
Feelin : creative practice, pleasure, and Black feminist thought
Gullah spirit the art of Jonathan Green
Negotiating Race and Rights in the Museum
Speaking Out of Turn: Lorraine O’Grady and the Art of Language
The Black experience in design : identity, expression & reflection
Through the Lens: The Pandemic and Black Lives Matter
Exhibit: Letters | الحروف How Artists Reimagined Language in the Age of Decolonization
Letters | الحروف How Artists Reimagined Language in the Age of Decolonization
Left to right: art by Mohammed Khadda, Ibrahim El-Salahi, and Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu (details)
Letters | الحروف How Artists Reimagined Language in the Age of Decolonization is on exhibit in Doe Library’s Bernice Layne Brown Gallery from March 13 until Aug. 31, 2023. How have modern artists in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia made use of their inheritance of a visual cache of Arabic signs and letter-forms, and with what meanings? This exhibition, curated by students in the seminar History of Art 192Cu, “Exhibiting Calligraphic Modernism,” in collaboration with the Library, explores work by dozens of artists in multiple media, from poster design to painting, mosaic, poetry, and animation. A shared backdrop to the artwork on display are the decolonization processes and liberation struggles taking place across Asia, Africa, and Latin America in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, which sparked desires to create cultural futures in resistance to dominant imperial values and official language policies.
Exhibit Curators: Drew Atkins, Riana Azevedo, Lynn Cunningham, Sharan Dulai, Eva Elfishawy, Mohamed Hamed, Teddi Haynes, Murtaza Hiraj, Viv Kammerer, Shanti Knutzen, Marissa Lee, Anneka Lenssen, Val Machado, Jasmine Nadal-Chung, Reyansh Sathishkumar, A. Wara, Alice Xie, Jinyu Xu, Suri Zheng, and Hayley Zupancic
Exhibit dates: March 13 to Aug. 31, 2023
Location: Bernice Layne Brown Gallery, Doe Library
Opening reception
Wednesday, March 15, 2023, 5-6:30 p.m.
Morrison Library
The reception will feature brief remarks by members of the curatorial team. Tours of the exhibition will be led by student-curators beginning at 5:45 p.m. Food and drinks will be served.
A pre-reception event will take place from 2:30-4:30 p.m. in 308A Doe Library, and will include a presentation and Arabic calligraphy workshop by the Bay Area-based calligrapher Zubair Simab. Participants will have an opportunity to try writing Arabic letters with a prepared pen and ink. There are 40 slots available for the workshop. Please register here: http://ucblib.link/calligraphyRSVP.
Both of these events are open to the public.
Details:
Wednesday, March 15, 2023
Pre-reception calligraphy workshop
2:30-4:30 p.m.
308A Doe Library
Register: http://ucblib.link/calligraphyRSVP
Exhibit reception and tours
5-6:30 p.m.
Morrison Library (101 Doe Library)
If you require an accommodation to fully participate in this event, please contact Amber Lawrence at libraryevents@berkeley.edu or 510-459-9108 at least 7-10 days in advance of the program.
Sponsors/contributors: Center for Middle East Studies, Department of History of Art, and UC Berkeley Library
Text Analysis with Archival Materials: Gale Digital Scholar Lab
Text Analysis with Archival Materials: Gale Digital Scholar Lab
Thursday, February 16th, 2:00-3:00pm
Online: Register to receive the Zoom link
The Gale Digital Scholar Lab is a platform that allows researchers to do text data mining on archival collections available through Gale (see list below). During this session we’ll cover the workflow for using the Lab, focusing on the Build, Clean, and Analyze steps. We’ll review curating and creating a content set, developing clean configurations, applying text data mining analysis tools, and exporting your Lab results. We’ll also review new Lab updates and explore the Lab Learning Center.
Primary source collections available in Gale include: American Fiction, 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection, American Civil Liberties Union Papers, 1912-1990, American Fiction, Archives Unbound, Archives of Sexuality & Gender, British Library Newspapers, The Economist Historical Archive, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Indigenous Peoples: North America, The Making of Modern Law, The Making of the Modern World, Nineteenth Century Collections Online, Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers, Sabin Americana, 1500-1926, The Times Digital Archive, The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive, U.S. Declassified Documents Online
This event is part of the UC-wide “Love Data Week” series of talks, presentations, and workshops to be held February 13-17, 2023. All events are free to attend and open to any member of the UC community. To see a full list of UC Love Data Week 2023 events, please visit: https://bit.ly/UC-LDW
Related LibGuide: Text Mining & Computational Text Analysis by Stacy Reardon
Black History Month 2023
February is Black History Month! Check out these great books from Black authors and browse our collection to find even more recommendations.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez
Suzette Mayr
Talia Hibbert
Tara M. Stringfellow
Sidik Fofana
Daniel Black
David Wright Falade
Jayne Allen
Nikki May
Are we missing your favorites? Share your recs with us on Twitter or Instagram!
Workshop: Publish Digital Books & Open Educational Resources with Pressbooks
Publish Digital Books & Open Educational Resources with Pressbooks
Wednesday, February 8th, 11:10am-12:30pm
Online: Register to receive the Zoom link
Tim Vollmer
If you’re looking to self-publish work of any length and want an easy-to-use tool that offers a high degree of customization, allows flexibility with publishing formats (EPUB, PDF), and provides web-hosting options, Pressbooks may be great for you. Pressbooks is often the tool of choice for academics creating digital books, open textbooks, and open educational resources, since you can license your materials for reuse however you desire. Learn why and how to use Pressbooks for publishing your original books or course materials. You’ll leave the workshop with a project already under way! Register here.
Upcoming Workshops in this Series – Spring 2022:
- Can I Mine That? Should I Mine That?: A Clinic for Copyright, Ethics & More in TDM Research
- By Design: Graphics & Images Basics
- HTML/CSS Toolkit for Digital Projects
Please see bit.ly/dp-berk for details.
New Book by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby
![Creole: Portraits of France’s Foreign Relations During the Long Nineteenth Century [book cover]](https://update.lib.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/CREOLE.jpg)
This book addresses the unique and profound indeterminacy of “Creole,” a label applied to white, black, and mixed-race persons born in French colonies during the nineteenth century.
“Creole” implies that the geography of one’s birth determines identity in ways that supersede race, language, nation, and social status. Paradoxically, the very capaciousness of the term engendered a perpetual search for visual signs of racial difference as well as a pretense to blindness about the intermingling of races in Creole society. Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby reconstructs the search for visual signs of racial difference among people whose genealogies were often repressed. She explores French representations of Creole subjects and representations by Creole artists in France, the Caribbean, and the Americas. To do justice to the complexity of Creole identity, Grigsby interrogates the myriad ways in which people defined themselves in relation to others. With close attention to the differences between Afro-Creole and Euro-Creole cultures and persons, Grigsby examines figures such as Théodore Chassériau, Guillaume Guillon-Lethière, Alexandre Dumas père, Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, the models Joseph and Laure, Josephine Bonaparte, Jeanne Duval, and Adah Isaacs Menken.
Based on extensive archival research, Creole is an original and important examination of colonial identity. This essential study will be welcomed by specialists in nineteenth-century art history, French cultural history, the history of race, and transatlantic history more generally.
[from publisher’s site]
Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby is Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Arts and Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Enduring Truths: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance; Colossal: Engineering the Suez Canal, Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, and Panama Canal; and Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France.
Creole : Portraits of France’s Foreign Relations During the Long Nineteenth Century.
University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022.
Come Help Us Create Wikipedia and Create Change, Edit by Edit, on February 15, 2023!
Wikipedia has become so central to our lives that we count on it to represent reality, and solid fact. When we encounter a new phenomenon, we check out our trusty online friend for more information. So, it was fascinating to me recently to see the lines blur between fiction and reality, when Wikipedia was used as a visual and social cue in the movie Tár, starring Cate Blanchett, about a famed female conductor. In the movie, one of the clues to the coming turbulence in Lydia Tár’s life is a screen capture of a mystery editor changing items on the conductor’s Wikipedia entry. It looked and felt so real, the filming and Blanchett’s performance so rivetingly vivid, that many people believed the film was a biopic of a real person. As Brooke LaMantia wrote in her article, No, Lydia Tar is Not Real,
“When I left the theater after watching Tár for two hours and 38 minutes, I immediately fumbled for my phone. I couldn’t wait to see actual footage of the story I had just seen and was so ready for my Wikipedia deep dive to sate me during my ride home. But when I frantically typed “Lydia Tar?” into Google as I waited for my train, I was greeted with a confusing and upsetting realization: Lydia Tár is not real…the film’s description on Letterboxd — “set in the international world of classical music, centers on Lydia Tár, widely considered one of the greatest living composer/conductors and first-ever female chief conductor of a major German orchestra” — is enough to make you believe Tár is based on a true story. The description was later added to a Wikipedia page dedicated to “Lydia Tár,” but ahead of the film’s October 28 wide release, that page has now been placed under a broader page for the movie as a whole. Was this some sort of marketing sleight of hand or just a mistake I stumbled upon? Am I the only one who noticed this? I couldn’t be, right? I thought other people had to be stuck in that same cycle of questioning: Wait, this has to be real. Or is it? She’s not a real person?
Wikipedia is central to LaMantia’s questioning! While it’s easy to understand people’s confusion in general, the Tár Wikipedia page, created by editors like you and like me, is very clear that this is a film, at least as of today’s access date, January 20, 2023… On the other hand, did you know you can click on the “View History” link on the page, and see every edit that has been made to it, since it was created, and who made that edit? If you look at the page resulting from one of the edits from October 27, 2022, you can see that it does look like Tár is a real person, and in fact, a person who later went on to edit this entry to make it clearer wrote, “Reading as it was, it is not clear if Lydia actually exists.” Maybe I should write to LaMantia and let her know.
I tell this story to show that clearly, Wikipedia is a phenomenon, and a globally central one, which makes it all the more amazing that it is created continuously, edit by edit, editor by editor. There are many ways in which our own and your own edits can create change, lead to social justice, correct misinformation and more. While it’s easy to get lost in the weeds of minute changes to esoteric entries, it’s also possible to improve pages on important figures in real-life history and bring them into our modern narrative and consciousness. And it’s easy to do!
If you are interested in learning more, and being part of this central resource, we warmly welcome you and invite you to join us on Wednesday, February 15, from 1-2:30 for our 2023 Wikipedia Editathon, part of the University of Calif0rnia-wide 2023 Love Data Week. No experience is required—we will teach you all you need to know about editing! (but, if you want to edit with us in real time, please create a Wikipedia account before the workshop). The link to register is here, and you can contact any of the workshop leaders (listed on the registration page) with questions. We look forward to editing with you!