Cultural Analytics Workshop Week (Spring 2026)

The Cultural Analytics Group presents a week of talks and discussions on multimodal models for the study of culture, as part of its Cultural Analytics Series co-hosted by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, the School of Information, and the Department of Scandinavian. The week features guest speakers from the National University of Singapore, Rutgers, Stanford, UC Irvine, and University of Richmond. Findings from the discussions will be synthesized into a white paper.

Join us for individual sessions or the entire week.

Previous events

Friday, March 20, 2026, 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm

Miguel Escobar Varela studies changes in Southeast Asian cultural heritage, combining fieldwork with computational methods.

Friday, March 20, 2026, 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Miguel Escobar Varela studies changes in Southeast Asian cultural heritage, combining fieldwork with computational methods.

Friday, March 20, 2026, 11:00 am - 11:30 am

David Bamman’s research focuses on natural language processing and cultural analytics, applying NLP and AI to empirical questions in the humanities and social sciences. 

Friday, March 20, 2026, 10:00 am - 10:30 am

Naitian Zhou is a Ph.D. stu­dent whose re­search cen­ters on de­vel­op­ing com­pu­ta­tional meth­ods to un­der­stand mean­ing em­bed­ded in style.

Friday, March 20, 2026, 9:30 am - 10:00 am

Peter Forberg is a Ph.D. student in sociology who studies technology, political movements, governance, and ethnography. 

Thursday, March 19, 2026, 2:30 pm - 3:30 pm

Noah Askin is a computational social scientist and sociologist who studies the creative process, its outcomes, and the forces that influence it.

Thursday, March 19, 2026, 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Noah Askin is a computational social scientist and sociologist who studies the creative process, its outcomes, and the forces that influence it.

Thursday, March 19, 2026, 11:00 am - 11:30 am

Ongoing work on benchmarking vision-language models and using them and object detection for art historical research into canonicity and national romanticism styles in Northern Europe.

Thursday, March 19, 2026, 10:00 am - 10:30 am

Ongoing work on how satire is communicated in both text and images in the satirical journal Corsaren using image and text embeddings.

Thursday, March 19, 2026, 9:30 am - 10:00 am

Svenja Guhr’s research uses computational methods to model suspense in American and British short fiction.

Wednesday, March 18, 2026, 4:30 pm - 5:30 pm
Wednesday, March 18, 2026, 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Wednesday, March 18, 2026, 1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Taylor Arnold uses large-scale computational methods to analyze how television production practices and narrative strategies intersect with industry changes and cultural contexts.

Wednesday, March 18, 2026, 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

Lauren Tilton’s research applies digital and computational methods to the study of 20th and 21st century documentary expression and visual culture.

Wednesday, March 18, 2026, 11:00 am - 11:30 am

While multimodal large language models (LLMs) excel at dialogue, whether they can adequately parse the structure of conversation — conversational roles and threading — remains underexplored.

Wednesday, March 18, 2026, 9:30 am - 11:00 am
Tuesday, March 17, 2026, 2:30 pm - 3:00 pm

Peter Leonard itemizes three barriers that hinder analysis of film and television.

Tuesday, March 17, 2026, 1:15 pm - 2:30 pm

Peter Broadwell explores new opportunities for using deep neural models for computational analyses of theater and other performing arts.

Tuesday, March 17, 2026, 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm

James Abello Monedero & Haoyang Zhang present Graph Cities, a novel visualization for exploring complex large-scale networks.