The affiliated faculty come from more than ten departments, representing nearly every discipline in the humanities. By bringing together expertise and experience from their respective disciplines, all of the faculty are interested in the question of what it means to pursue humanistic inquiry and humanistic scholarship in the digital age.  What are the challenges, possibilities, and risks for knowledge production, disciplinary structures, methodological/ theoretical commitments, and evaluative mechanisms?  In what ways are the various disciplines of the humanities being reconstituted and reconfigured in light of new technologies for producing and disseminating knowledge?

Plans for Development:

UCLA has one of the most vibrant and diverse intellectual communities undertaking innovative research and teaching in the fields of digital humanities and media studies. With the support of the Mellon foundation, UCLA has launched a new initiative to transform and ensure the humanities in the 21st century. In a Mellon sponsored seminar, "Media, Technology, and Culture" (2007-08), the affiliated faculty, fellows, and guest scholars will meet to discuss the challenges and possibilities faced by the humanities. Members of the faculty will also begin working to establish an interdepartmental program in digital humanities and media studies, with the eventual goal of offering BA and MA degrees. Our first faculty and postdoctoral searches will take place this year. Stay tuned for more updates throughout the year!


Intellectual Rationale:

We believe that the Humanities—given its extensive and varied tools of analysis and interpretation, given its methodologies for investigating historical, social, and cultural change, given its multilingual, transnational scope—is uniquely situated to react to, contextualize, understand, and critique the changes effected by new (and old) technologies. We also believe that the Humanities are uniquely positioned to be agents of change in a world permeated and constituted by these same media technologies. Because UCLA sits squarely in what many rightfully dub "the media capital of the world," we believe that the best place for this transformation is right here.

In the fields of literary and language studies, visual culture, film, art history, and history, media-specific analysis has become the order of the day. Technologies of inscription, transmission, storage, and dissemination are not neutral or irrelevant. Given the proliferation of digital and web-based information archives, media forms, electronic textualities, gaming environments, digital storage and retrieval devices, location-aware technologies, multimedia databases, systems of coding, graphical interfaces, and various virtual reality and visualization tools, it is impossible to avoid media-specific analysis. Web-based applications such as Google, Wikipedia, MySpace, and Facebook are second nature to our students, yet we have just begun to understand their significance, possibilities, and limitations. Of course, this attention to media and technology is not only tied to ostensibly "new media"; it is also part of understanding the historical and cultural specificity of "old media," including the evolution of the medium of print.

With the sea changes brought about by new media, it has become evident that academic disciplines cannot be separated from the media and material technologies in which their objects are variously constituted. History and literary studies are intimately connected—in terms of disciplinary constitution, methodology, and practice—to the material history of the book, to technologies of print and "systems of writing down," to use the concept of one of the twentieth century’s greatest media theorists, Friedrich Kittler. Its traditional objects of study are intelligible precisely because they are produced in and amenable to analysis through the medium of print. What does it mean that print is not the primary medium in which our students communicate, apprehend the world, and create knowledge?

Because of these profound changes in the manner in which cultural artifacts are produced and circulate, we must ask: How will discursive practices change as researchers think about ways to use multimedia creatively as resources for their scholarship and teaching? Cultural, literary, and artistic artifacts are now produced, critiqued, and disseminated in entirely new ways such that understanding technologies of inscription and communication has become the a priori for understanding the processes and consequences of globalization. In disciplines such as history and literary studies that use narrative extensively, the movement into new media has challenged us to rethink how narrative can be effectively used in a digital environment, one that moves from the static page to the interactive screen. In literary studies, these questions have resulted in a change from the study of "national" literatures and conventional genres (the drama or the novel) to media-specific analysis in a global setting. In archaeology, research publications are changing from narratives, based on a selection of data, to projects using an array of digital assets, enabling dynamic analyses and a broad presentation of visual materials to a world-wide audience. What happens to these disciplines, knowledge, and research itself when the text is no longer a stable object of production or inquiry, when authorship becomes fluid and collaborative, or when there is no text in the sense of a written and published document?