Dr. Sanders and my TA Elizabeth were awesome. Both were super supportive and receptive to feedback. Their feedback on assignments and their help with the project was great, and I think they both did an excellent job with the hybrid quarter.

As other reviewers mentioned, the course introduces you to a lot of different digital humanities tools. However, there is no incentive to learn these tools outside of the ones required for the project, and even then the work's divided among your group so you may not ever end up using some of the tools regardless. If you invest time and follow all of their tutorials, you'll get a lot of experience from this class. However, you can skip 60-80% of the content in this class and still receive an A.

The group project is a large chunk of your grade, and your experience with that is dependent on your groupmates.

Professor Sanders and also my TA Elizabeth were amazing. They were super understanding the entire quarter because of covid, and were always very generous with deadlines and office hours. The content of this course wasn't too bad.

But I really didn't enjoy the course overall. At first I thought it would be a fun redemption chance because I did pretty much the same class in college, but alone. When I found out it was basically the same thing, create a whole data project, but with a team, I thought, yes! I can redo it and create something bigger than I can do by myself by working with others.

Reframe that as a giant quarter-long group project and if you don't rng motivated teammates you're having a bad time. It's just a little too much with too much freedom and too few templates to do in one quarter. We learned about all these tools and there was so much support for us to learn how to use different applications that could help us with our project. But it was more of a like, if you want to spend the time going through this tutorial yourself, you can learn this tool. And here is the tutorial for this tool, but it's not required. So it felt like there was more material available to me than I had the time to actually go in and learn, so it felt like a waste that I wasn't able to get everything out of this class. Instead I was going around trying to pick up all the pieces that my teammates didn't do for our project.

I was also the only DH minor in my group, so of course I was going to take and enjoy this class, but my groupmates were just trying to pass. Hope you get other DH minors who are motivated too.

Someone described this class as building Ikea furniture with no instructions and I 100% agree with them. If you have no background in coding, which you really don't need in this class, but would be super helpful, or data analysis this class may be difficult but is not impossible. I had no background in any of these subjects so it was a bit difficult at first. However, I did enjoy this class. Most of your grade is based on the group project you do over the quarter and the other assignments include 2 big data and map assessments, 2 discussion posts, and 2 concept maps. Overall, its not bad. It may seem hard and difficult at first but very rewarding

DISCLAIMER: Taken Fall 2021 Hybrid with no exams

If you want a class where you will probably get an A (I mean, just look at the grade distribution) then this will boost your GPA. HOWEVER, it is not a cakewalk. There is a significant amount of work and that can be made very bad if you have a bad group project team. The weekly assignments are pretty doable. The readings are generally not helpful at all or at least there is little incentive to read them because the class mostly revolves around the final project which you work on bit by bit each lab class. Occasionally there will be an assignment that asks about knowledge from the reading, but since it was hybrid and not timed, you could easily read the reading and then answer the assignment without reading all assigned readings.

The TA grades everything. Prof Sanders is really nice but you mostly are interacting with the TA. I recommend understanding the final project rubric and coming up with a good plan on tackling parts of it that are not addressed weekly. For Fall 2021, the biggest thing we had to tackle outside of an assignment was the timeline. For weekly assignments, try to always tie it back to your final project. For example, if asked to make any data visualization, just make one that you would make for your project anyways.

Putting everything on the website itself was by far the hardest part and it is not taught in class. You will already have something to put on your website by around Week 3-4. Try putting it on your website and messing around with the website tools ASAP. That way, if you are struggling, you can ask for help in Week 5 and not Week 10 when everyone else is too and also figuring out that website creation is no joke.

DH 101 has been one of the most enriching classes I've taken at UCLA so far! The tutorials and key concepts of the class are fairly straightforward and are great preparation for constructing the final project. Professor Sanders does a phenomenal job at balancing theory and practice in the lessons and tutorials, and she is incredibly understanding about meeting assignment deadlines. Professor Sanders and TA Diana Blanco were incredible resources, especially for discussing the data visualizations we created for assignments and how we could improve them during office hours.

As a planned DH minor, I really enjoyed the assignment of defining what the DH field is on our own terms, with a specific aim towards how we can answer this question in a job interview. It was also really cool getting to meet other students with much different academic focuses, though I wish we had had more opportunities to meet other students in lectures and discussions who weren't part of our project groups.

Even if you aren't taking this class for the DH minor, you can still pick up a strong introduction to project management, website design, and humanities research. Professor Sanders' teaching is phenomenal, and I would recommend their class to anyone.

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.

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.