Tom van Nuenen

I develop and teach courses and workshops in Digital Humanities and computational social science, making data science accessible to researchers from non-technical backgrounds. I’ve taught across three continents: at UC Berkeley (USA), King’s College London (UK), Tilburg University (NL), and universities in China, Denmark, and Australia.

Courses

UC Berkeley

• Advanced Computing (COMPSS 211) — Master of Computational Social Science 2025–present
• Computational Social Sciences (SOC 5) — Department of Sociology 2022–2023
• Digital Hermeneutics (DIGHUM 160) — Arts & Humanities 2018–present
• Python Programming for Digital Humanities — Arts & Humanities

King’s College London 2018–2022

• Theorising Big Data — Department of Digital Humanities
• Big Data in Practice — Department of Digital Humanities
• Crowds and Clouds — Department of Digital Humanities

International

• Digital Hermeneutics — Shandong University, China
• Hermeneutics in the Information Age — Shanghai International Studies
• Knowledge Culture — University of Copenhagen
• Reading & Writing in Online Culture – Tilburg University

D-Lab Workshops

At D-Lab, I lead the curriculum of 40+ open-source workshops, training graduate students and researchers across the social sciences in computational methods. All materials freely available at github.com/dlab-berkeley.

AI & Machine Learning

• LLMs for Exploratory Research
• Python GPT Fundamentals
• Python NLP Fundamentals

Python

• Python Fundamentals
• Python Data Wrangling
• Python Data Visualization

Geospatial

• Python Geospatial Fundamentals
• R Geospatial Fundamentals

R & Tools

• R Fundamentals
• SQL Fundamentals
• Bash & Git

Interactive Demos

Browser-based tools I built to teach technical concepts to researchers without a computing background. Freely available at compss211.github.io/demos.

• Transformer Attention — Query, Key, and Value, visualized
• Word Embeddings — how computers learn meaning
• Web Scraping — data extraction with Python
• Web APIs — REST and authentication
• Git & GitHub — version control workflows

Invited Talks

• The Cost of Fluency: Generative AI, Advice, and Everyday Judgment — Faculty of Arts, Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2026
• Demystifying AI – Goldman School, UC Berkeley, 2026
• Prompt Engineering for Legal Issues — Global Rights Innovation Lab Clinic, UC Berkeley, 2025
• Digital Hermeneutics — Keynote, Tsinghua University, 2020
• Teaching Bias through Word Embeddings — D-Lab, UC Berkeley, 2022
• Genders: Calling Out AI — Science Gallery London