The course provides a basic introduction to the application of computation in the research and practice of the humanities, arts, and social sciences. The class offers students entry to work with archival theory and practice; textuality and electronic scholarly communication; data mining, analysis, and visualization; the spatial and temporal “turns;” game studies and digital arts. The course offers hands on experimentation with software platforms available to create scholarly and artistic production and theoretical approaches to digital presentation. Students will complete assignments requiring conceptual, aesthetic, and practical approaches to digital engagement with cultural materials. While no programming knowledge is required, students will design and create an online project using tools and platforms that are considered standard practice in the field, and reflect critically on the utility of digital techniques in their dialogue with the humanities.

The central focus of this course will be the excavation of textual, visual, and sonic materials, obsolete or emerging. The archaeological metaphor evokes both the desire to recover material traces of the past and the imperative to situate those traces in their social, cultural, and political contexts. How does the digital age imagine backwards to the Industrial Age and vice versa? Is it true that virtually everything that is being invented now for a digital age had its origins in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century industrial age? (inventions of telegraphy and telephony, electricity, photography, cinema, the automobile, the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classification systems, muckraking and sensationalist journalism, celebrity culture, the skyscraper, the office, the typewriter, the Brownie camera). We will take a research approach that explores moments in which both familiar and unfamiliar devices have yet to emerge as significant or disappear as curiosities.

The course will examine various contemporary and global issues of digital citizenship and new ethical challenges raised by digital technology. The course will raise questions regarding how digital technology has changed citizenship practices: Who has access to full citizenship, and why? What responsibilities are entailed in digital citizenship? Themes may include the nature and value of digital technology; the relations between digital technologies and knowledge-making/meaning-making; the value of information privacy; the role of digital media in society and human interactions; issues arising from the life-cycle of new digital tools and data repositories; and questions broadly related to questions of accessibility, representation, and sustainability as applied to digital technologies. Topics may also include research ethics, piracy and file sharing, hacktivism, copyright and fair use, end-user license agreements, alternative news media, and participatory culture. Students will take up both broad ethical issues and specific professional codes and policy in diverse domains.

This is a one-credit seminar course that assists DHSS majors in their professional development and prepares them to locate and obtain co-ops and jobs in their field. It also provides a forum for DHSS majors to receive feedback on their own creative projects in preparation for their senior capstones. Faculty and students will also discuss emerging events related to the field of DHSS. Students may take this course repeatedly for credit up to four times.

The contemporary understanding of communication and narrative is quickly shifting in a world where media is ubiquitous. The "language of new media" is the thematic used in this course to discuss contemporary and historic forms of non-linear narrative. Students will explore the properties of non-linear, multi-linear, and interactive forms of narratives. This course will survey some of the possibilities, examining both traditional and new media such as oral storytelling, literature, poetry, visual arts, museum exhibits, architecture, hypertext fiction, Net Art, and computer games. Writers on communication culture, gaming, television, digital aesthetics, contemporary art and film, as well as synchronic narrative will be addressed. The focus is to develop critical tools to analyze contemporary media as well as a minimal level of practical implementation. Students will produce a final media project.

This course is intended for students in the DHSS program to produce critical and creative projects that apply digital technologies to a field of inquiry in the humanities and/or social sciences, while being guided by faculty advisors. Students will acquire a client (faculty member, not-for-profit organization, or cultural heritage site) and will be supervised by the advisor as they develop the research agenda, develop the project management plan, construct all necessary IRB materials, intellectual property documents, and copyright permissions, and develop a working prototype. This course will culminate in an online publishable project and a written rationale with theoretical grounding, as well as explanation of practical decisions and applications. It is expected that the project will be somewhat novel, will extend the theoretical understanding of previous work, and go well beyond any similar projects that they might have contributed to in any of their previous courses. The 6-hour course sequence is designed to be distributed over two consecutive semesters in order to allow for long-term, in-depth development of projects.