UCLA is rolling out something no other university in the country currently offers: a full bachelor’s degree program in digital humanities, launching this fall as its own standalone department. The move formalizes a field the campus has quietly nurtured for more than 20 years, and administrators say it reflects a broader reckoning over how technology and traditional scholarship ought to inform one another.
The major blends hands-on technical skills — coding, statistical analysis, data visualization and 3D mapping — with the kind of inquiry long associated with humanities departments: literature, history and the study of global cultures. School officials describe it as an attempt to meet employers halfway, giving graduates both the analytical depth companies say they want and the technical fluency that’s increasingly non-negotiable in the job market. Group projects are baked into the coursework, too, since collaboration is another skill hiring managers consistently flag as lacking among new graduates.
A central theme running through the curriculum is how emerging technology, particularly generative AI, is reshaping culture and carrying embedded biases along with it. Students will be pushed to think critically about the ethical use of these tools, while also learning firsthand how easily they can be misused to spread misinformation.
Todd Presner, a UCLA professor of European languages and transcultural studies who helped lead the push to establish the new department, said the divide between technical fields and humanities disciplines has grown into something of a liability for both sides.
“It’s actually at our own peril when scientists are not speaking to folks in the humanities with historical knowledge, ethical knowledge, cultural knowledge,” Presner said. “And at the same time, when the humanities are not understanding the technologies in the world today, they also could be seen as irrelevant.”
In one of his courses, Presner has students examine the inner workings of large language models — the systems underpinning AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude. “Students can essentially upload their own training data to some of these smaller models and see how easily they can be manipulated,” he said.
Though the major is new, the subject isn’t. UCLA has offered digital humanities coursework for more than two decades, and it has quietly become the campus’s second-most-popular minor. That popularity was part of what convinced administrators to elevate it to full major status, according to Alexandra Minna Stern, dean of the UCLA College Division of Humanities, which will house the new department. Roughly 750 undergraduates took a digital humanities course last academic year. Stern is hoping for 40 declared majors this fall, with an eventual goal of 50 to 100 students in the program.
The department will begin with 23 faculty members, including lecturers, along with four staff positions. Stern said she’d like to expand the faculty further down the road, though a current hiring freeze at UCLA has put those plans on hold for now. No existing academic department was eliminated to make room for the new major. Because faculty are drawn from a range of humanities disciplines as well as information studies and data science, classes will be spread across multiple buildings on campus.
Stern also said the university is working to secure internship placements for students, including with the Wende Museum in the Los Angeles area, which specializes in preserving and digitizing oral histories and artifacts from refugees and dissident communities — work that aligns closely with the skills taught in the major. She hopes to arrange similar partnerships with other institutions.
Introductory coursework will be organized around two broad tracks: data-focused classes such as statistical reasoning, and culture-focused classes examining topics like the symbolic history of Jerusalem or how antiquity has been portrayed on film. Upper-division offerings will dig into subjects such as the political and social forces shaping modern technology, along with courses on analyzing social media data.
Kedaar Sridhar, 26, graduated from UCLA in 2022 with a degree in computer science and a minor in digital humanities. His favorite class was the one focused on social media analysis. For a class project during the pandemic, he and a group of classmates used Python and sentiment-analysis tools to study how the hashtag “facemask” was being used across different countries, gauging public attitudes toward face coverings based on the tone of the posts.
Looking back, Sridhar said he wishes the full major had existed when he was a student, since it would have let him combine his technical training with the kind of interpretive thinking the humanities emphasize.
“I think computer science is the what, digital humanities is the how and the why, and how do you actually apply it, and why is it important to be applied,” he said.
Sridhar credits his minor with helping him land an internship at Microsoft. While every other applicant also had a computer science background, he said his digital humanities training set him apart. When an interviewer asked what the minor involved, he described it as “human-centered data storytelling, working with groups, working in projects, getting a tangible outcome” — which, he said, was exactly what the interviewer wanted to hear.
Since then, Sridhar has co-founded Grantlytics, an AI-driven platform that helps nonprofits with fundraising by drafting proposals, identifying grant opportunities and flagging potential donors. Now on the hiring side himself, he said he looks for the same blend of skills the new major is designed to produce. Without a dedicated digital humanities background, he said he’d lean toward candidates who combine humanities training with coding or math experience — but the major itself, he said, “automatically is that interdisciplinary nature because it combines those two worlds together.”
That kind of interdisciplinary demand appears to be borne out in national hiring data. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers’ annual survey, employers largely consider recent college graduates employable, but with some notable gaps. While 99% of hiring managers said communication and persuasion skills were important, only 55% felt recent graduates actually excelled in those areas. A similar gap showed up around critical thinking: about 94% of employers rated it as a top priority, yet only about half of graduates were seen as strong at gathering information from varied sources, drawing sound conclusions or performing well under pressure.
Technology skills told a different story. Roughly 75% of employers said adapting to new technology and using it to advance company goals mattered a great deal, and about 65% of recent graduates were rated proficient in that area — a smaller gap than in other categories, but one that still points to room for improvement.
Stern is careful not to suggest that digital humanities alone can reverse the long decline in humanities enrollment nationwide. The share of U.S. college students majoring in fields like literature, history, philosophy and foreign languages has fallen to about 8% of degrees awarded, down from nearly 15% two decades ago — a trend UCLA has mirrored. Still, Stern points to Federal Reserve Bank of New York data suggesting the job market doesn’t always follow conventional wisdom.
“An art history grad is more likely to get a job these days than a computer science grad,” she said, adding that hiring trends shift over time in ways that don’t always match where students think they should aim their studies.
Original source: CalMatters
