Cultural Analytics

News Archive

The Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) and the UC Berkeley School of Information co-host cultural analytics events on campus and at AI Futures Lab. The events and invited guest speakers are organized by the Cultural Analytics Group, and below is a collection of blog posts, photos, and recordings from some of those events.

Cultural Analytics Group

The Cultural Analytics Group develops and refines computational methods as its members interrogate cultural production across a wide range of disciplines

Testing the Artistry Limits of AI Through The Kingdom series

July 22, 2026
Mia Salinas

Television series come in all forms and sizes. The Kingdom (1994), directed by Lars von Trier, is an absurdist, supernatural medical drama series that follows a ghost-hunting, medical malpractice, and plague plot in a hospital. Peter Leonard, an academic librarian and founder of the Yale...

Lauren Tilton presents “Multimodal Cinemetrics”

July 10, 2026
Saumya Lohia

With so many movies, TV shows, and content coming out every year, analyzing media can seem daunting. However, with computational methods, new insights can be uncovered, but what exactly to measure is an open question. As a part of Cultural Analytics workshop week, Lauren Tilton, Professor of Liberal Arts and Digital Humanities from the University of Richmond in Virginia, presented her research on the use of computational methods to analyze film and television, a term she...

Peter Broadwell presents: “Gesamtkunstvektoren: Perceptual Embeddings for the Performing Arts”

July 8, 2026
Chenrong Zheng

Our conversations at BIDS around AI often begin not only with what new tools can do, but also how these tools might reshape the questions researchers ask. On March 17th, as part of the Cultural Analytics workshop week, Peter Broadwell, Head of AI Modeling and Inference in Research Data Services at Stanford University Libraries, explored this question in his talk “Gesamtkunstvektoren: Perceptual Embeddings for the...

Workshop on AI and LLMs for the study of folklore highlights collaboration between BIDS and Slovenian Researchers

June 24, 2025
BIDS Staff

AI Methods for Research of Folkloristic Narratives, an international workshop held on June 13 at the University of Ljubljana, brought together researchers from the US, Slovenia and other European countries to explore significant advancements in the application of AI in computational folkloristics.

As part of his keynote speech for the workshop, Tim Tangherlini, BIDS Associate Faculty Director,...

James Abello Monedero and Haoyang Zhang present “Graph Cities and Their Applications”

May 20, 2026
Yeonwoo Lee

March 17, 2026, marked the start of the Cultural Analytics Workshop Week cohosted by the Berkeley Institute of Data Science (BIDS), the School of Information, and the Department of Scandinavian Studies. The week was filled with various presentations and discussions on multimodal models for the study of culture from guest speakers from around the nation and abroad.

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Bob Sturm presents: “I am Troubled”

May 5, 2026
Chenrong Zheng & Saumya Lohia

On March 6, 2026, the Cultural Analytics series welcomed Bob L. T. Sturm from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, for a talk and discussion about his research in AI-generated music. The Cultural Analytics series is a joint initiative between the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) and the School of Information...

Cultural Analytics Talk with Taylor Arnold: Measuring Style and Structure in Television Comedy

May 7, 2026
Mia Salinas & Yeonwoo Lee

From Friends to Modern Family to Saturday Night Live, these are just a few examples of famous and popular TV comedies. Even though they all belong to the comedy genre, these shows differ greatly in structure, including camera techniques, scripting, and overall style. There are different ways to identify what a comedy series is, such as the use of a laugh track or a live audience. However, another way to analyze comedy is through computational methods. A Professor of Data Science at the University of...

Peter Dodds presents "Telegnomics, Ousiometrics, and Archetypometrics"

April 24, 2026
Vincent Gu

Measuring meaning sounds like trying to weigh fog. You can point at it, you can feel it, but the moment you grab it, it slips between your fingers. In this talk from the Cultural Analytics Series, Peter Dodds, a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Vermont, starts with the...

Cultural Analytics inaugural lecture “Universality and Diversity in Story and Song” with Manvir Singh

November 19, 2025
BIDS Staff

The new Cultural Analytics speaker series — a collaboration between the UC Berkeley School of Information and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS) — launched on October 2 with its inaugural speaker, Manvir Singh, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Davis. The series builds on inaugural talks in the past two years by...