Dr. Adam G. Anderson (admndrsn@berkeley.edu) joined UC Berkeley in 2017 as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Humanities at Berkeley. He is currently a lecturer in Digital Humanities and Data Science. As an academic coordinator for Digital Humanities at Berkeley, Adam is co-author and designer of the Theory and Methods curriculum for the DigHum Minor and Certificate Program. He is a co-coordinator for the Digital Humanities Working Group (DHWG) and Computational Text Analysis Working Group (CTAWG), as well as the topic area lead in Network Analysis and Text Analysis at the D-Lab. His work brings together the fields of computational linguistics, archaeology and Assyriology / Sumerology to quantify the social and economic landscapes emerging during the Bronze Age in the ancient Near East. His research interests include network analysis, archival studies, geospatial mapping and language modeling (NLP). He applies these mixed methods to large datasets of ancient texts and archaeological records, in order to better understand the lives of individuals and groups within ancient societies, and to relate these findings within the context of our lives today. Education:
- PhD, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University (2018)
- MA (zwischenprüfung), Assyriology, Ludwig-Maximilians University (2008)
- BA, Linguistics, Brigham Young University (2006)
White papers:
- Inferring Social Rank in an Old Assyrian Trade Network
- The Old Assyrian Social Network: an analysis of the texts from Kültepe-Kanesh (1950-1750 B.C.E.)
- Computational Cuneiform at UC Berkeley
Courses:
- Data 88: Language Modeling and Text Analysis (Data Science Connector Course 88, Spring 2020)
- Theory & Methods in the Digital Humanities (Digital Humanities 100, Summer 2019)
- Digital Archival Practices (Digital Humanities 150A, Summer 2018)
- Digital Ancient Near East (Near Eastern Studies 114, Spring 2018)
- Intro to Digital Humanities (Near Eastern Studies 190, Spring 2017)
Lecture links:
- 1 minute dissertation description
- 5 minute talk on the impact of network analysis
- 30 minute lecture on ancient narratives from network analysis
- 60 minute lecture on archaeological network analysis: contextualizing neighborhood archives
- 60 minute lecture on three centuries of comparative demographic analysis of ancient social networks