Camille Villa

  

I'm an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, specializing in history of the American West. I am passionate about information access and information literacy. I teach a class that introduces undergraduates to the craft of historical research and the wealth of Berkeley's library, online, and archival resources. My interest in the digital humanities and digital librarianship brought me to this THATcamp.

Much of the discourse I've heard on alt-ac is targeted at recent PhDs or grad students in the last phases of their dissertation. Shifting the academy towards providing resources, training, and support for careers outside the ever-shrinking pool of tenure-track jobs will require a more proactive discussion of alt-ac careers, earlier in students' academic careers (i.e. early graduate school, or even undergrad). What resources are needed? Ideas would be: - a push for a technical skills classes targeted at work in the humanities, instead of computer science classes that are targeted at aspiring software engineers

I'm also working on my senior thesis, researching press coverage of a bloody citrus picker strike that happened in Orange County in 1936. I'm hoping to combine my interests in the humanities and technology and use text-mining as a tool for my thesis.