The Golden Matrix Group has recently participated in the Cultural Analytics Workshop Week at the University of California, Berkeley, hosted by Tim Tangherlini and co-hosted by the Berkeley Institute for Data Science, the School of Information, and the Department of Scandinavian.

Day 1: Arrival and first encounters with multimodal research
After arriving in California, the group spent its first day at the AI Futures Lab in downtown Berkeley. The setting made the scale of current AI research immediately clear, with views over the Bay Area framing the start of a full and focused week.

The academic programme began in Dwinelle Hall with presentations by James Abello Monedero and Haoyang Zhang, Peter Broadwell, and Peter Leonard. The talks moved across multimodal models and their use in cultural analysis, especially how computational approaches can be used to read and interpret complex cultural material.

In the afternoon, sessions continued in South Hall with an open seminar on what cultural analytics can and cannot do. Much of the discussion circled around the balance between methodological experimentation and interpretative restraint when applying models to cultural data.

The day ended with a clear sense of direction and momentum. Participants from institutions including the National University of Singapore, Rutgers, Stanford, UC Irvine, and the University of Richmond came together with the shared aim of developing a joint white paper on multimodality in AI and cultural research over the course of the week.

Day 2: Contributions from the Golden Matrix Group

Day 2 continued with new contributions to multimodal research. Lauren Tilton presented work on Multimodal Cinemetrics, followed by Taylor Arnold, who spoke about computational approaches to pacing and style in television comedy. Both talks fed into broader discussions on how multimodal methods can be used to identify patterns in visual and temporal cultural forms.

A central moment of the week came on thursday with the Golden Matrix Group’s presentations. The group shared two projects.

The first, Corsaren: Multimodal Storytelling in Nineteenth Century Danish Satire, presented by Alie, Mika, and Rie, examined how computational analysis of text and images can shed light on one of Denmark’s most influential satirical journals.

The second, Leveraging Multimodal Image Embeddings for Danish Golden Age Painting, presented by Mika, Rie, and Yuri, showed how image embeddings can be used to develop new perspectives on Danish Golden Age art.

The day also included a lunch talk by Noah Askin on the social foundations of creative influence, which tied into ongoing conversations about how cultural ideas circulate and change across contexts.

Across the week, the workshop has brought out both the technical progress and the conceptual questions that shape cultural analytics. For the Golden Matrix Group, the visit has worked as both an academic exchange and the continuation of a developing international collaboration.