Please click here to apply for the Digital Humanities graduate certificate. We read applications twice a year: once in the fall and once in the spring. The deadlines are November 1 and May 1.

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Program Overview

Over the past decade, the landscape of humanistic research and teaching has changed as digital technologies enabled new modes of scholarly inquiry, research environments, publication platforms, and pedagogical practices. The digital age—characterized by, among other things, web-based media forms, massive data archiving, social networking, mapping technologies, advanced visualization, and cloud computing—ushers in a transformational moment offering nearly limitless possibilities for creating, scaling, and disseminating knowledge.  While the digital age is certainly enabled by technological advances, it is less a collection of technologies than a whole new scholarly environment—one that easily encompasses traditional scholarship, but offers new, multimodal, multimedia, and multi-disciplinary possibilities for the ways in which the scholarly endeavor is practiced.

The graduate certificate in Digital Humanities prepares students to work in this new environment by providing them with knowledge about the tools, methods, and theoretical issues central to the emerging field and enabling them to ask specific research questions that harness new technologies. These include text analysis, data mining, visualization, modeling and simulation, geo-spatial and mapping, multi-media storytelling, information design, network analysis, interface design, mark-up, among others. Levels of skill and depth of knowledge about particular tools and platforms will vary depending on students’ own interest and relevance to their field and/or projects, but will directly reflect the ways in which the methods and tools of the Digital Humanities are extending their own discipline (e.g. how does “distant reading” or the mechanized processing of textual material in large corpora offer insight into problems of literary analysis, or how can geospatial platforms be used to interrogate cross-cultural perceptions of “contact narratives"). Students will be exposed to a combination of theoretical explorations, critical methods, and hands-on production so that they can do humanistic work in a digital environment (authoring, analyzing, curating, publishing) and also produce scholarship that examines the underpinnings and assumptions of digital techniques. The certificate emphasizes principles and concepts that will transfer across programs and platforms, rather than stressing specific in-depth training in particular software programs, with the conviction that digital technologies will continue to emerge, but that certain intellectual, technical, and research design principles will remain central to this rapidly changing field.

Admission
Applications are submitted online and reviewed twice a year. All applicants must already be enrolled in a masters or doctoral program at UCLA. No work completed for any previously awarded degree or credential may be applied toward the certificate. Before applying, we suggest that you read A Short Guide to Digital Humanities.

Requirements

• DH 201 Core Seminar in Digital Humanities (5 units + DH tool workshops and/or lab)
• DH 299 Graduate Capstone Seminar (2 units)
• Three upper-division electives taught by affiliated faculty (which may also satisfy departmental requirements)
• Creation and juried review of a Digital Research Portfolio

After entering the program, students are asked to select a primary adviser who will help determine an appropriate course of study and particular focus within the Digital Humanities program. Credits take for completion of the DH Certificate may be used to satisfy elective credit for the degree in the student's home discipline, but students should check with their departmental advisor to be sure of policies within their home unit. In many cases, the required classes for DH will not be allowed to count or substitute for fulfillment of required classes in another degree program. Again, these policies are determined on a departmental basis.

Throughout the program students will create and maintain an e-portfolio of their digital research, which will include the digital components of their projects from each of the 200-level courses with accompanying critical appraisals and essays that evaluate their work.  After completing the required seminar and at least two of their electives, candidates will enroll in a graduate capstone course (2 units), directed by one of the affiliated faculty. The class may be taken as an independent study with an affiliated faculty member or as a small capstone seminar. In either case, candidates are expected to work closely with faculty and/or other students in their cohort to complete and publish a culminating digital project, which may eventually serve as the basis for a "digital companion" to a dissertation or a separate digital publication.  The e-portfolio and digital project will become part of the students' professional portfolio when they enter the job market.

Faculty

Representing more than 20 departments across the university, the 36 affiliated faculty come from a wide-range of fields, including literature, information studies, architecture and urban design, history, cultural studies, design | media arts, and others.  The full roster can be found online.

The faculty steering committee is:

Jon Christensen, History and Environmental Studies

Johanna Drucker, Information Studies

Diane Favro, Architecture and Urban Design

Christopher Johanson, Classics

Peter Lunenfeld, Design | Media Arts

Stephen Mamber, Theater, Film, and Television

Miriam Posner, Digital Humanities

Todd Presner, Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature, Chair

Janice Reiff, History and Statistics

Annelie Rugg, Center for Digital Humanities, Director

Willeke Wendrich, Near Eastern Languages and Culture

Maite Zubiaurre, Spanish and Portuguese

Read more about our faculty