UCLA Digital Humanities Minors

This project is an investigation into the curriculum and students comprising the Digital Humanities minor, determining the core competencies through textual mining of content from the existing course offerings and extracting narratives from students who are currently completing or have completed the minor. The UCLA Digital Humanities program prepares students to work in the emerging technologies impacting research and pedagogy in the humanities, providing them with knowledge about the tools, methods, and theoretical issues. The project aims to tell a narrative of current and past Digital Humanities minors, investigating what disciplines are drawn to the program as well as what courses fulfill program competencies. This project is in coordination with the Digital Humanities department at UCLA.

The Digital Humanities Minor is increasingly popular among the Humanities minors with 47 being awarded to graduating UCLA student in the 2017/2018 academic year. From 2013 to 2018, 136 Digital Humanities Minors have been awarded to graduating UCLA students.

The following spreadsheet allows for querying courses by topic. Courses were tagged with topics by matching various strings in the course description to various topics. For example, if the course description contained the phrases "computer science", "programming", "scripting", "c++", "java", "java", or "computer engineering", the course received the topic tag "computer science".

To query by topic, open the spreadsheet in a new tab (click the button in the upper right of the embedded sheet). Once in the spreadsheet, click the drop down arrow under Select Topic to select the competency you would like to explore.

The UCLA Digital Humanities Minor is in the process of mapping its course electives to core competencies. This process will involve more textual mining similar to the above exercise in determining topics by course description. It will also involve a larger corpus of course material, in particular course syllabi. This process will help the Digital Humanities understand which of their competencies are covered by existing electives and which are lacking in course offerings.

The DH program is also interested in the narratives of students who are current or past students. What were their majors? What are they doing as alumni of the DH minor program? A survey is currently collecting information on these students and similar analyses will be performed on these data .