W.M. Keck Undergraduate Curriculum in Digital Cultural Mapping

Over the past decade, digital humanities at UCLA has distinguished itself by developing cutting-edge research in geo-temporal mapping using a wide-range of digital information archives, web-based media forms, virtual reality systems, and multimedia databases. The undergraduate curriculum in digital cultural mapping represents the next phase of development for digital humanities at UCLA, a field that has pioneered creative ways of weaving together the tradition of a critical, broad-based liberal arts education with the challenges and possibilities presented by new technologies. By bringing the analytic tools of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and other map-based digital applications together with traditional methods of humanistic inquiry, Digital Cultural Mapping teaches students to use new technologies to investigate and map a wide-range of cultural, historical, and social dynamics. We aim to design a new series of courses in digital cultural mapping in which students learn to assemble and dissect complex datasets, to create new ways of visualizing and analyzing data, to develop reasoned arguments that resonate across disciplines, and finally to produce compelling arguments that have impact beyond the academy. It is imperative for us that our students present their results with the media tools and technologies that make their arguments and data available and visible for discussion and collaboration with their peers as well as the general public.

The curriculum builds upon projects that have already been tested in the classrooms and labs at UCLA, including the Digital Roman Forum, the digital Encyclopedia of Egyptology, Hypermedia Berlin, and HyperCities. With the growing interest at UCLA in developing new pedagogical models and innovative curricula using the technology tools of the 21st century, the program in digital cultural mapping is perfectly timed. The first year will provide the necessary course relief for the key faculty to lay the foundation by designing new courses and re-tooling existing ones through a series of workshops and trainings. Drawing upon content and perspectives from their own disciplines, this collaborative approach will purposefully integrate technologies into a comprehensive interdisciplinary program. Meanwhile, staff will outfit a specially designed classroom lab with the technical tools that will support students and faculty engaged in these endeavors. To generate sustained interest, a couple of introductory courses will be taught in Year One of the funding, while the first core courses in Digital Cultural Mapping will be offered in Fall 2009. Additionally, special subject courses within the various disciplines will be taught in Years Two and Three. Working in the new lab, students will be able to design, develop and implement collaborative research projects working alongside their peers in teams that include faculty and staff as well. These research projects will lead to an undergraduate research workshop, offered in Summer 2010. By Year Three, given feedback from students, staff and faculty, the full palette of courses will be offered.

There are several unique aspects to this program

1. The innovative use of emergent geo-technologies to transform humanities pedagogy and prepare students to enter the world of the 21st century;
2. The interdisciplinary collaboration between faculty and students in seven disciplines to develop a new curriculum;
3. The cooperation of three major centers at UCLA: Academic Technology Services, the Center for Digital Humanities, and the Experiential Technologies Center. These centers have already forged significant partnerships in supporting faculty projects at UCLA, combining technical expertise in informatics, spatial modeling, and time-space mapping with pedagogical experience and research results.

The project director is Willeke Wendrich (Associate Professor of Egyptian Archaeology, Director of the UCLA Encyclopedia of Egypt and Faculty Director of UCLA’s Digital Humanities Incubator Group) and co-PI Todd Presner (Associate Professor of Germanic Languages, Chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Center for Digital Humanities, and Director of the HyperCities project). Wendrich and Presner have been at the forefront of digital innovations in the humanities at UCLA and have won numerous research and teaching awards for their digital mapping projects. They will organize the faculty workshops/trainings and work closely with the core faculty to develop the new courses. Associated faculty include: Diane Favro (Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Director of the Experiential Technologies Center, and Director of the Digital Roman Forum project), Jan Reiff (Professor of History and Statistics, co-PI of the HyperCities project), Chris Johanson (Assistant Professor Classics), David Halle (Associate Professor of Sociology), and Leo Estrada (Associate Professor of Urban Planning). They are assisted by Yoh Kawano, Campus GIS Coordinator, and a Postdoc Fellow.