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.

 

Fall 2021

  • DH 199/299: Architectural Reconstructions on Broadway

    Instructor: Anthony Caldwell

    Schedule: Tuesdays 2:00-4:00p
    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: Wednesday afternoons, time TBD based on students’ schedules
    Location: Zoom

    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. A number of scholars have written cogently and movingly about power and archival silences, and a growing number of tutorials provide pragmatic guidance on the use of computational techniques, but few studies exemplify how digital research methods may be used to address archival voids, nor do they model a complete research life cycle from sources to data to quantitative, qualitative, and visual analyses. Feminist literary theory, postcolonial studies, and critical information studies provide theoretical frameworks with which to “listen to the silences,” and read archives “against the grain”. Now, 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 Algerian society and politics, but the approaches presented in this study have applications far beyond English, French and Arabic language sources and the history of the Middle East and North Africa. 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.

  • English 257 “Digital/Medieval: Resistant Archives”

    Instructor: Matthew Fisher

    Meeting Time: Monday @ 3:00pm-5:50pm PST
    Location: 306 Royce Hall

    The class will focus on the theoretical and practical complexities of contemporary archives, digitization and archival preservation practice, and medieval documents and books.

    Working hands-on with UCLA’s collections of medieval manuscripts and early printed books, and also hands-on with some of the interoperable data available from various digital projects from around the world (including but not limited to IIIF, the Digital Mappa project, the Mapping Manuscript Migration project, and others), the seminar will offer students an opportunity to both encounter the practical difficulties of archival and digital work on medieval and renaissance books/texts, and also to situate those difficulties in theoretical discussions about archives, manuscripts, and book history more generally.