Digital Studies Minor

Effective Winter 2014-Fall 2014

Digital Studies encompasses new and diverse practices and methodologies immediately relevant to contemporary concerns. The field includes scholars who create digital archives, analyze on-line materials, and / or disseminate text, image, and video using new platforms and computational tools. Other academics study the everyday practice of digital culture in specific cultural contexts. Rapid technological transformations are altering our expectations for engaged citizenship and civic practices as well as scholarly research and publishing.

The Digital Studies minor is aimed at students with academic interests in the role that digital media play in U.S. culture, history, and media, and provides students with the methods and tools for studying, analyzing, and writing about their everyday engagements with electronic forms of community and culture in the U.S. The courses offer both humanistic and social scientific approaches to the study of all things digital.

Students can use the Digital Studies minor to supplement and make more coherent their understanding of the knowledge formed in a traditional discipline. As digital media use becomes ubiquitous and an increasingly important driver of the U.S. economy, as well as a cultural force in its own right, students in History, Women’s Studies, English, African-American and other Ethnic Studies, Political Science, Communication Studies, Sociology, and Screen Arts & Cultures find themselves attracted to the topic as a way to engage with their main areas of study. For instance, students with interests in digital media, history, and culture who wish to focus on topics not consistently covered in a traditional humanities or social science discipline can enhance and deepen their work in another major by taking a systematic supplement of courses in Digital Studies. An appropriate student for the Digital Studies minor may be putting together an ensemble of courses focusing on, for example, digital economies and intellectual property debates; digital labor, race, gender and identity in online spaces; algorithmic cultures and computing history; digital games studies; online communities; shifting distribution channels.

Students wishing to pursue a minor in Digital Studies must develop a specific plan for its completion in consultation with one of the department’s designated advisors.

Prerequisites to the Minor

None

Requirements for the Minor: 

A minimum of 16 credits, to be chosen from the following categories as stated:

1. Core Course: AMCULT 202 Digital Culture
2. Electives: Four additional courses at the 300-level or above:
   • AMCULT 301 Digital Histories of America
   • AMCULT 301 Topics in American Culture, section titled “Politics of Code”
   • AMCULT 334 / SAC 334 / COMM 334 Race, U.S. Culture, and Digital Games
   • AMCULT 498 Capstone Seminar in American Culture, sections titled “Numbers and Stories in American Experiences” and “Race on the Internet”
   • ASIAN 282 / SAC 282 / RCHUMS 283 Asia Goes Viral: Asian Pop Culture in the Age of Social Media
   • COMM 271 Communication Revolutions
   • COMM 315 Critical Approaches to the Internet
   • COMM 334 / AMCULT 334 / SAC 334 Race, U.S. Culture, and Digital Games
   • COMM 350 The Rise of Mass Culture
   • COMM 362 Digital Media Foundations
   • COMM 365 Visual Culture and Visual Literacy
   • COMM 418 Designing Web Research
   • COMM 423 Computer Mediated Communication
   • COMM 424 Race, Gender and New Media (effective Winter 2015, retroactive to Winter 2014)
   • COMM 425 Internet, Society and the Law
   • ENGLISH 280 Introduction to Digital Cultures (effective Winter 2015, retroactive to Winter 2014)
   • ENGLISH 403 Topics in Language and Rhetorical Studies, section titled “Digital Rhetorics”
   • ENGLISH 420 Technology and the Humanities
   • HISTORY 379 / RCSSCI 379 / SI 379 History of Computers and the Internet
   • RCHUMS 283 / SAC 282 / ASIAN 282 Asia Goes Viral: Asian Pop Culture in the Age of Social Media
   • RCSSCI 379 / HISTORY 379 / SI 379 History of Computers and the Internet
   • SAC 282 / RCHUMS 283 / ASIAN 282 Asia Goes Viral: Asian Pop Culture in the Age of Social Media
   • SAC 334 / AMCULT 334 /COMM 334 Race, U.S. Culture, andDigital Games
   • SAC 367 Introduction to Digital Media Studies
   • SAC 368 Topics in Digital Media Studies, section titled “Video Games as Culture / Form” and “Virtuality and Digital Identity”
   • SAC 376 New Media Theory
   • SI 379 / RCSSCI 379 / HISTORY 379 History of Computers and the Internet
   • SI 429 eCommunities: Analysis and Design of Online Interaction (effective Winter 2015, retroactive to Winter 2014)
   • WRITING 200 New Media Writing (effective Winter 2015, retroactive to Winter 2014)
   • WRITING 201 New Media Writing Mini-Course (effective Winter 2015, retroactive to Winter 2014)

3. Other courses as approved by the department advisor.