The Research & Instructional Technology Consultants (RITCs) are a team of UCLA Humanities graduate students who work collaboratively to share their various disciplinary, pedagogical, and technical skills by assisting instructors with the best use of technology in research and instruction.
I worked as a RITC from September 2018 until my graduation in December 2020. During this time, I had the opportunity to assist with both research and instructional projects that have been very impactful at UCLA.
Instruction
I consider it very important to assist instruction at the college level. While Digital Humanities is often associated with Humanities research, it can be applied just as well toward improving the undergraduate classroom experience. I was involved in several digital projects during my time on the job. These are summarized below.
Moodle Best Practice Showcase Site – I took on one of the leading roles in the development of UCLA’s Moodle Best Practice Showcase site. This site is now accessible to all UCLA instructors and contains curated examples of how to employ the tools present on Moodle (UCLA’s Learning Management System) to their fullest potential. The site, which was first shown to the UCLA Language Alliance, is available at https://ccle.ucla.edu/course/view/moodle-showcase.
Demo – Wikipedia and Timeline Tools – In Winter 2019, I gave a demonstration of editing Wikipedia and the tool TimelineJS to the class Japanese 297A (Premodern Japan). Both Wikipedia edits and timelines that compactly show sequences of events are very helpful for teaching students and the general public about topics. The handout for this demonstration is available online.
Japanese Self-Placement Exam – I took the lead technological role in creating an online self-placement exam for UCLA’s Japanese program. Making use of (QB)^2, which aids instructors in quickly creating and uploading quiz questions to Moodle, I set up and proofread questions at multiple skill levels to aid students in determining which level of Japanese to start in.
Instructional Programming
I leveraged my programming abilities to assist UCLA’s Humanities Technology developers with debugging and feature additions for several apps.
(QB)^2 – Working with the lead developer and undergraduate student programmer, I added several major features and bug fixes to (QB)^2, a Google Sheets add-on described above under “Japanese Self-Placement Exam”. A new feature allowing the import of question banks from Moodle to the spreadsheet that I developed released in early 2020, while a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that I developed to ease instructor use released shortly after.
Digital Persian – I restored an old website providing Persian texts with pop-up vocabulary help for language learners. In particular, I implemented the interactivity between the database storing all of the texts, users, and vocabulary and the portion of the site that the users see. This is publicly available at digitalpersian.humanities.ucla.edu/ from mid-February 2020.
Faculty Research Projects
As part of UCLA’s DH Accelerator program, I worked with several faculty members to assist their research from a technology standpoint.
RomeLab (Funeral Visualizations) – In 2018-2019 and again in 2022, I worked on Professor Chris Johanson’s RomeLab project, focusing on novel visualizations of the Roman funeral. I have written extensively about my involvement with this project in the RomeLab section of this site.
Archive of Healing – In 2019-2020, I worked on Professor David Shorter’s Archive of Healing project. I worked as a consultant for web design and a tester and debugger for the site’s functionality. Working as part of a small team, I leveraged knowledge of CSS with knowledge of accessibility standards to improve the site’s visual aspects.
How We Narrate the Self – In 2020, I worked on Professor Whitney Arnold’s project “How We Narrate the Self: A Large-Scale Analysis of Autobiographical Texts”. This project focuses on topic modeling to examine patterns in 17th through 19th century autobiographical material written in English. Making use of HathiTrust (institutional access may be required to view the site) and Mallet, I worked with two other RITCs to examine a medium-sized dataset of autobiographical material. More information on this will be available soon!
Blog Posts on Technology in Instruction and Research
I made two blog posts on the UCLA Humanities Technology website for instructors and graduate students about technology in instruction and research. Links can be found below.
Fall 2018 – Textual Analysis and Word Clouds. This is a post about Voyant, a free web-based tool for analyzing and visualizing digital texts. In this post, I approach the strengths and weaknesses of Voyant from the standpoint of different languages.
Fall 2019 – Input Hypothesis. This is a post about Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis and using electronic resources to allow students to find listening and reading materials at their own level.