I took Dr. Sanders Garcia’s Introduction to Digital Humanities course in Fall 2020 when it was online. The course consisted of individual learning activities, team assignments, and final projects. We also had a final exam which consisted of short response questions. One takeaway I had from the class was definitely the text on intersectionality. My favorite part of the course was learning how to use Excel and Google Sheets to clean data because of how practical it was. I also left this class with a basic understanding of Tableau but not confident enough to put it on my resume. My least favorite experience in the course was the group project, where we were assigned our group members. In light of the pandemic, I tried very hard to be empathetic to my group members, but they were not very great communicators and some of them contributed nothing to the project. Although some of my group members came through at the end, I spent the first 9 weeks of the quarter anxious about trying to visualize data, edit a website, and develop a narrative mostly by myself. On the contrary, my TA, Ruth Livier Nunez, was really the highlight of the course. She was very supportive, accommodating, and knowledgeable, and I enjoyed meeting with her for office hours. The basic data cleaning and visualization skills I learned in this class also helped me earn a position as a research assistant, and the work I do as a research assistant is actually very similar to the work I did in this class. As for Dr. Sanders Garcia, I felt like it was understandably difficult to connect with her. I did appreciate how she opened herself up for office hours. Overall, this class is definitely more of a self-teach class. Your group can really make or break your experience like it did for me, but the skills you can gain are undoubtedly beneficial and applicable to many professional avenues.

This is an easy A class. The professor does not really teach I think, but the TAs are most likely your teachers. The TAs really care of their students. Some say they learn not much in this course, but I think this is a very practical course depending on your role for the final project. It was really fun to figure out how to manage your dataset to make good visualization. Making a website was also fun. As long as you do all your work, getting a grade below an A is impossible, I think.

I took this during session c 2020 (during covid) and I really felt like I didn't learn much from this class. Part of that is because the class would really work better in a 10-week format since it culminates in a big group project where you make a website with your classmates. All this being said, it felt like the professor was largely absent. The best instruction I got was from my TA Nina (who was amazing), but the materials and lectures provided by the professor simply didn't apply all that much to the project, which took up much more time than work for the class itself. There were a few busywork type assignments thrown in there that were easy but not useful. I think the part where we focused on data viz software was useful, but there wasn't much guidance there besides youtube video tutorials. Overall, it was a lot of work for little knowledge gained.

For context I took this class online during summer session C 2020 (Covid times). I assume the 6 week course is fairly different from the 10 week course so ymmv. The class had a pretty heavy workload in terms of individual and group projects with at least 2 or 3 assignments due each week, but I didn't feel like the assignments were particularly challenging as long as you have a solid group to work with, and they graded very generously.

However, I didn't feel like I learned much in the course and my group members echoed the same sentiment. The asynchronous format sucked, there were only a few lectures and the 50 minute labs once a week were too short to really learn much. Overall it felt like there simply wasn't much content in the course. I enjoyed working on the project and learning about the data visualization techniques and mapping, but I simply don't feel like I gained much from taking this class.

I forgot to do my teacher evaluations and I feel bad so this is the next best thing.

This class is one of the most useful I've taken at UCLA. I love that I get to add new skills to my resume (once I build upon them more, of course) and I got to explore a field I had never encountered before. Professor Sanders and my TA Madison Faulis are both amazing, helpful, knowledgeable people. Assignments never felt pointless, there was always a purpose.

I will say taking this class during summer session made it more difficult than what my friend had described during the school year. It was hard to keep up with everything with other classes too. The professor did remove some of the website requirements that otherwise would've been required during the rest of the school year, so I blame most of this on my own bad time management and group project dynamics.

Even though I tried my best, and I felt like my assignments weren't the strongest still, the TA and Professor always had something nice and constructive to say which made me feel so much better about my work and even myself.

Take this class!

Professor Garcia is legit the BEST, SWEETEST, most CARING professor you will likely ever have-in your life. Not only is she amazing but her and my TA (madison) really do their best to teach you relevant information that will get you a job. This is the most useful class I have ever taken and we get to make a project that will lead to a job, internship, post grad ops. One of the softwares we learn about is Tableau, and when I had an interview for an internship I mentioned that I learned how to use Tableau and that really got their attention...I got the internship a week later.
How the class works-- you basically spend the whole quarter working on a data visualization project (which is not as hard as you would think, its really interesting) with a group that you choose based off of who is in your discussion. You then spend the next few weeks just working on it.

Just. Take it.