Dr. Claudia von Vacano is the Executive Director of the D-Lab and the Digital Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley, and is on the board of the Social Science Matrix. She received a Master’s degree from Stanford University in Learning, Design, and Technology. Her doctorate is in Policy, Organizations, Measurement, and Evaluation from UC Berkeley. The Phi Beta Kappa Society, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, and the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, among others, have recognized her scholarly work and service contributions.

Christopher is the Program Development Lead for the D-Lab and Digital Humanities at the University of California, Berkeley. He teaches Python, Bash, and Git workshops and consults on text analysis and web scraping. He is a PhD Candidate in German Literature and Medieval Studies at UC Berkeley and a Data Science Fellow at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS). Christopher is interested in computational approaches to formal analyses of lyric and epic poetry. His research has been supported by the Fulbright Program and the DAAD.

Geoff Bacon is a PhD student in the Language and Cognition Lab and Graduate Student Researchers at D-Lab at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on two questions: why languages look the way they do and how people learn to express temporal semantics. To study these, Geoff uses probabilistic models of language, including Bayesian and neural network models, which he programs in Python. At undergrad Geoff studied linguistics, classics and Arabic.