Graduate Courses

How to find electives:

1. Review the master list of approved electives. Note: “Grad” denotes graduate courses, “LD” denotes lower division, and “UD” denotes upper division courses.
2. Identify courses you’re interested in.
3. Check the course schedule to see if the courses of interest are offered in the next quarter.
4. Register!

Please fill out this form if you’d like to petition for an elective. Include all the information you can, including a syllabus, if available. Petitions will be reviewed at least once a quarter. Please email Kerry Allen if you have additional questions.

How to register for a capstone:

1. Identify a capstone course (see below for upcoming courses).
2. Contact the professor who is offering the course to express your interest and ask if they have room. If not, repeat step 1. If they do:
3. Contact our SAO, Kerry Allen, at allen@humnet.ucla.edu  to create a DH 299 registration link for you.
4. Enroll through MyUCLA!

Upcoming Courses

Please note that even though some these courses may be offered as undergraduate classes, graduate students are encouraged and welcome to register for them. We have also updated the course codes for a number of our frequently offered classes. Any of the following classes, except DH 101, may be taken to fulfill the DH 250 requirement, and any non-DH classes advertised here will fulfill elective requirements.

 

Winter 2022

• DH 199/299: Architectural Reconstructions on Broadway

  Instructor: Anthony Caldwell

  Schedule: Wednesdays 10am-12pm
  Location: TBD
  Co-Instructor: Joy Guey

  The historic theaters in Downtown Los Angeles are part of a rich cultural legacy that provides insight into the architectural practices of the early 20th century. This project investigates how these monuments were constructed, decorated, and used through in-depth archival research, photogrammetric modeling, and a variety of interactive visualizations including virtual and augmented reality platforms. Students will identify a topic of interest and work in groups to produce an experience and documentation detailing their research, procedures, and process.

  Required Skills: None, but interest in 3D modeling, VR/AR, GIS, and data visualizations

  Project Website

• DH 199/299: DH Holocaust Research Lab

  Instructor: Todd S. Presner

  Required Skills: Data viz (Tableau & R), Javascript code libraries (D3), or front-end web development, or Python, or Javascript, and/or HTML5 and CSS.

  Recommended Skills: Experience with NLP or sound/voice analysis is a plus.

• DH 199/299: Exploring the Socio-Political World of the Ottoman Empire through Data Analysis

  Instructor: Ashley Sanders

  Schedule: Tuesdays 4-5:30pm PDT
  Location: Scholarly Innovation Lab, (1st floor behind collaborative workspace in YRL).

  This course explores how scholars may use digital research methods to study archival specters – people who lived, breathed, and made their mark on history, but whose presence in the archives and extant documents remains limited, at best, if not altogether lost. Developments in topic modeling, text mining, data visualization, as well as statistical and social network analysis offer practical methods to investigate latent patterns in our available source materials. Therefore, this course combines a methodological guide with an extended case study to show how digital research methods may be used to explore the ways in which ethnicity, gender, and kinship shaped early modern Ottoman society and politics, but the approaches presented in this study have applications far beyond this specific application. More broadly, these methods will be of use to scholars interested in identifying and studying relational data, demographics, politics, discourse, authorial bias, and social networks of both known, as well as unnamed, actors. Digital tools cannot metaphorically resurrect the dead nor fill archival gaps, but they can help us excavate the people-shaped outlines of those who might have filled these spaces.

  This independent study is 4 credits.

  Required knowledge: Statistics (DH 125 or DH 150 Sect. 4 in Winter 2021, or introductory statistics class), R or Python, and data visualization from DH 101, computer science, DESMA, statistics, or mathematics. Alternatively, if you have skills in either digital or analogue creative/artistic production and would like to apply these skills to communicate computational research results, please contact Dr. Sanders, as you would be welcome in this research group!

• DH 199/299: Ritual Histories of Ghana’s Slave Forts and Castles

  Instructor: Francesca Albrezzi

  Co-Instructor: Andrew Apter
  Schedule: Weekly; day and time TBD
  Location: Zoom

  Using Omeka and StoryMaps, this class will organize digitized data on the rituals, shrines and spirit worlds associated with Ghana’s historic slave forts and castles into a virtual exhibit with an open access front end for teaching and a restricted back end for more specialized research.

  Recommended Skills: Experience with StoryMaps, Omeka, data cleaning/management, and/or project management skills preferred

• DH 250: Pirates of the Mediterranean: Investigating Perceptions Past & Present through Computational Text Analysis

  Instructor: Ashley Sanders

  Schedule: Wednesdays 2:00-4:50pm PDT
  Location: Will be announced to those who enroll

  Piracy and pirates, particularly those in the distant past, intrigue and excite, even as, and perhaps because, they frighten us. This course examines a less-familiar history of pirates and corsairs in the Mediterranean Sea (known as the “Barbary Pirates”) between the seventeenth-century and the present using computational text analysis methods. We will examine how these simultaneously romanticized and villainized characters played (and play) important roles in international politics, diplomacy, commerce, even the development of the United States’ navy and American responses to the September 11 attacks in 2001. Through historical and contemporary research on Mediterranean pirates, you will learn how to structure data to prepare it for computational analysis using a variety of methods including word frequency, word distinctiveness, collocations, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis. In addition, you will learn how to ask computationally tractable questions, detect bias, craft evidence-based arguments, and determine the limits of digital research methods. The skills you learn in this class will also prepare you for social media analysis, data journalism, marketing analysis, qualitative business analytics, and more.

  Draft Syllabus