UCLA Is Turning the Humanities Into a Degree for the AI Age

What happens when a history or literature student is also expected to understand code, data and artificial intelligence?

UCLA is about to test that idea.

The University of California, Los Angeles is launching a new digital humanities department and bachelor’s degree this fall. The programme brings subjects such as history, literature and culture together with tools including coding, statistical analysis, 3D mapping and data visualisation.

The point is not to turn humanities students into computer scientists. It is to give them enough technical knowledge to understand how technology is changing the world they already study.

A different kind of humanities degree

For years, the humanities and computing have largely lived in separate academic worlds. UCLA professor Todd Presner, who helped lead the push for the new department, thinks that separation is becoming harder to justify.

A historian who does not understand the technology shaping how information is collected and presented can miss part of the story. At the same time, someone building new technology can make decisions without fully understanding the history, culture or ethical questions surrounding it.

That gap is becoming particularly obvious with generative AI.

Students in the programme will study how technologies such as large language models work, but they will also look at the biases built into them and the ways AI can produce misleading information.

Presner has already used some of these ideas in his classes. Students have examined how large language models are trained and experimented with smaller models using their own datasets. The exercises show just how much the information fed into an AI system can affect what comes out of it.

That combination is really what UCLA is trying to build into the degree: technical skills without losing the human side of the subject.

Students were already interested

The degree itself is new, but digital humanities is not new at UCLA.

Professors have been teaching courses in the field for more than 20 years, and the digital humanities minor has become one of the university's most popular. About 750 undergraduates took digital humanities courses during the last academic year.

That existing interest helped convince the university that there was room for a full undergraduate major.

Alexandra Minna Stern, dean of UCLA's College Division of Humanities, expects between 50 and 100 students eventually to declare the major, with about 40 students expected to sign up in its first year.

The new department will begin with 23 faculty members, including lecturers, and four staff members. The university hopes to expand the faculty after its hiring freeze ends.

What will students actually study?

The course list is deliberately broad.

Early classes will cover things such as statistical reasoning and data networks alongside cultural subjects. Students might study the history and symbolism of Jerusalem in one course and then analyse data in another.

Later in the programme, they can look at how politics and culture influence technology or use social media data to study public behaviour.

There is also a practical side.

UCLA plans to create internship opportunities with museums and other cultural institutions. The Wende Museum in Los Angeles, for example, has been involved in digitising objects and preserving oral histories from refugees and dissidents.

So students are not expected to spend four years simply talking about technology. They will have opportunities to use it on actual cultural and historical material.

The AI question is bigger than coding

One of the strongest arguments for the programme comes from students who have already taken the digital humanities minor.

Kedaar Sridhar, a UCLA alumnus who studied computer science and digital humanities, remembers working on a project examining the #facemask hashtag during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Using Python and sentiment analysis, he compared public reactions across different countries.

It was not simply a coding exercise. The technology gave him a way to investigate a human question: how people in different places were responding to the same global crisis.

That is the space UCLA's new major is trying to occupy.

The university is betting that students will need more than traditional humanities training in a world where AI can search, generate text, analyse information and increasingly shape what people see.

But it is also betting that technical skills alone are not enough.

Someone still has to ask who built the technology, what assumptions went into it, whose data was used and what happens when the system gets something wrong.

That is where UCLA thinks the humanities still have a job to do.