Series Dates
All events are 6 - 7 PM on Zoom
- May 26 — Tim Tangherlini (UC Berkeley) POSTPONED
- June 12 — Roopika Risam (Dartmouth)
- June 25 — Melanie Walsh (UW)
- July 17 — Amanda Smith (UC Santa Cruz)
- August 13 — Élika Ortega-Guzmán (Colorado Bolder)
About the Series
Data shapes what we know. Power determines who gets to know it. And the ethics of knowledge is not a question the data can answer for itself. We live in a moment when AI is reshaping every field, and the pressure to be proficient has never been greater. But proficiency alone does not tell you what your data means, whose stories it erases, or what you are responsible for when you use it. It is not a gap in technology, but where technology ends, and the thinking begins.
Over six evenings this summer, this series brings together scholars and practitioners chosen for the rigor, depth, and ethical commitment of their multidisciplinary work. The diversity of their backgrounds across academia, industry, public engagement, and across disciplines that rarely share the same room is itself a methodological choice. In the age of AI, the decisions we make about data — how we collect it, interpret it, and act on it, demand collective inquiry and shared accountability.
This series is an initiative of the Digital Humanities Summer Program at UC Berkeley, a space committed to fostering dialogue across disciplines, communities, and ways of knowing. Our goal is not to arrive at answers, but to think together — to ask what responsible data use looks like in practice, what ethical AI means beyond compliance, and how humanistic inquiry can help us navigate the choices that technology alone cannot make for us. We hope every participant leaves not just informed, but challenged and better equipped to act with care and intention in their own fields.
Digital Humanities is not a discipline. It is a practice and a commitment to interpretation, to accountability, to the ethics of knowledge production. What does it mean to build digital archives that don't reproduce the erasures of colonialism? How do computational methods change the stories we can tell and the ones we can no longer ignore? Who gets counted in our datasets, and who disappears? How do we recognize when AI-generated narratives become the infrastructure of misinformation? These are not technical questions. They are ethical ones, and it is precisely the responsibility of Digital Humanities to hold them open, to refuse easy answers, and to ask not just what we can do with data and digital tools, but what we should do, and for whom.
Each event is a free public lecture followed by Q&A, open to the entire Berkeley community. No prior knowledge required. Only curiosity.
Fore more information or for accessibility inquiries, please contact Iliana Morton at ilianamorton@berkeley.edu.
Data, Power and the Ethics of Knowledge: A Digital Humanities Series is presented by the Summer Program in Digital Humanities and co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Library and the UC Berkeley School of Information.
About the Speakers
POSTPONED May 26 — Tim Tangherlini (UC Berkeley)
Timothy R. Tangherlini is the Elizabeth H. and Eugene A. Shurtleff Chair in Undergraduate Education. He is a Professor in the Dept. of Scandinavian and in the School of Information. A folklorist and ethnographer by training, he is the author of Danish Folktales, Legends and Other Stories (2014), Talking Trauma (1999), and Interpreting Legend (1994). He has also published widely in academic journals, including The Journal of American Folklore, Western Folklore, Journal of Folklore Research, Folklore, Scandinavian Studies, Danske Studier, PlosOne, Computer and Communications of the Association for Computing Machines. He was a co-PI on an international team developing ISEBEL: Intelligent Search Engine for Belief Legends, as well as an international lead on the Norwegian SAMLA project, which digitized the historical ethnographic collections of Norway. He is interested in the circulation of stories on and across social networks, and the ways in which stories are used by individuals in their ongoing negotiation of ideology with the groups to which they belong. In general, his work focuses on computational approaches to problems in the study of folklore, literature and culture.
June 12 — Roopika Risam (Dartmouth)
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Roopika Risam is Professor of Digital Humanities and Social Engagement and Chair of Film & Media Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research explores the intersections of data, power, race, colonialism, and digital culture, with a particular focus on the ethical and political stakes of digital technologies and artificial intelligence. She is the author of New Digital Worlds (Northwestern UP, 2019) and the forthcomingData Empire (HaperCollins, July 2026), a global history tracing how systems of data collection have shaped human societies from ancient Mesopotamia to the age of AI. Her edited collections includeThe Digital Black Atlantic (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) andAnti-Racist Community Engagement (Stylus/Campus Compact, 2023). Risam’s work spans digital humanities, postcolonial studies, public humanities, and critical AI studies. She is also the creator of thePan-African Data Project, a digital humanities initiative tracing global networks of Pan-African activism and intellectual exchange, and founding co-editor ofReviews in Digital Humanities, a journal that peer reviews digital projects. Across her scholarship and public humanities work, she asks how humanistic inquiry can help us confront the social and ethical consequences of data-driven systems. Learn more athttps://roopikarisam.com
June 25 — Melanie Walsh (University of Washington)
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Melanie Walsh is an Assistant Professor in the Information School and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Washington. Her research interests include data science, digital humanities, cultural analytics, contemporary literature, media studies, and library and information science. She investigates how data and computational methods shape contemporary culture—such as social media, publishing, and libraries—and how they can be used to understand culture in turn. Her current work includes a book project, When Postwar American Fiction Went Viral, and an open-source textbook, Introduction to Cultural Analytics & Python. With collaborators, she leads the Post45 Data Collective, Responsible Datasets in Context, AI for Humanists, and the What’s Seattle Reading? project. Her work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mozilla Foundation, and Schmidt Sciences.
July 17 — Amanda Smith (UC Santa Cruz)
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Amanda Smith's (Associate Professor, UC Santa Cruz) research explores cultural responses to environmental crises in Latin America, with particular emphasis on Amazonian and Andean contexts. Her book,Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom (Liverpool University Press, 2021), examines how stories told about the Amazon in canonical twentieth-century novels both wrote against and upheld extractivist visions of the region that continue to impact it today. Her next book project, The Nature of Conflict: Rivers, Resilience, and Reconciliation in Colombia, considers a context in which rivers are gaining rights as victims of Colombia's armed conflict and asks how art, literature, and film might exceed, and therefore complement legal language that tries to make sense of nonhuman experiences of war. Other work has appeared in The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies; Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society; Revista de Estudios Hispánicos; The Journal of West Indian Literatures; ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America; A contracorriente; Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures; and Ciberletras. Professor Smith is also a co-editor of The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, former director of a Modern Endangered Archives Program grant to digitize the collections of the Biblioteca Amazónica in Iquitos, Peru, and current director of an Endangered Archives Programme grant from the British Library to continue this work in Iquitos.
August 13 — Élika Ortega-Guzmán (Colorado Bolder)
Élika Ortega's work focuses on the intersection of digital and print publishing, digital literature, cultural hybridity, digital humanities, and multilingualism in academia. Her articles on these topics have been published in venues like ASAP Journal, PMLA, Hispanic Review, Debates in the Digital Humanities, EBR, and others. Élika also created Twitter literary bots dedicated to the work of Mexican writer and artist Ulises Carrión which were included in the Antología LitELat Vol. 1 and have more recently been ported to Bluesky as @BotCarrión. She is currently one of the editors for the Electronic Literature Collection Vol. 5. Ortega’s monograph Binding Media. Hybrid Print-Digital Literature from across the Americas was published by Stanford University Press in March 2025. In it she examines a corpus of about one hundred instances of literary hybrid publishing querying their emergent meaning mechanisms, the publishing landscape that has produced them, the issues of their preservation, and their status as material substrates of processes of cultural hybridization. You can find more about Élika’s work on her website: elikaortega.net
TBD — Erik Hall (Workday)
Workday is the enterprise AI platform for managing people, money, and agents. Workday unifies HR and Finance on one intelligent platform with AI at the core to empower people at every level with the clarity, confidence, and insights they need to adapt quickly, make better decisions, and deliver outcomes that matter. Workday is used by more than 11,500 organizations around the world and across industries – from medium-sized businesses to more than 65% of the Fortune 500. For more information about Workday, visit workday.com