For years, the humanities and data science have been entirely separate disciplines, but the University of California-Los Angeles has created a new major — digital humanities — convinced graduates with a command of both will thrive in modern society.
The new major and accompanying department are the first of their kind in the U.S.
Todd Presner, professor of European Languages and Transcultural Studies and cofounder of the new department, said with the growth of artificial intelligence, people have to consider if AI should be allowed to make hugely consequential judgments and decisions.
“It’s never just the technology. It’s the technology in a context. It’s the technology as it’s deployed, as it’s lived. Humanities is all about ethics, values, culture, society, the human,” Presner explained.
Digital humanities combines traditional courses on history, language and culture with classes on digital technologies like Claude, ChatGPT and other AI tools, plus 3D mapping and statistical analysis. Students will learn to question the way data becomes power.
Presner added digital technologies benefit society by making vast troves of knowledge more accessible.
“There have been some really exciting ways that museums and libraries and cultural institutions have leveraged new technologies to create large-scale archives that have now become digitized and available,” Presner pointed out.
The University of Southern California Shoah Foundation, for example, has a program called Dimensions in Testimony, where the foundation has created virtual Holocaust survivors. Students can now have conversations with digital avatars of people who lived through Nazi atrocities in World War II.
