HUM 2010 - Introduction to Digital Culture Studies

Introduction to Digital Culture Studies offers students an introduction to digital tools, provides them with the necessary critical vocabularies for analyzing digital objects, and encourages them to test the efficacy of such tools and objects through experimentation, hands-on engagement, collaborative learning, critical reflection, and strategic play. The class situates the emergence of digital technology historically, within a rich and robust media ecology, and considers throughout the semester the way that computational networks, Command Line Interfaces, Graphical User Interfaces, authoring languages, hypertexts, data visualizations, and algorithms have emerged from a variety of historic antecedents. At the same time that we examine the history and cultural significance of digital technology, we will also be practicing how to read, write, design, and make with those same tools. For example, students will use Twine to create interactive stories, Tracery to compose ChatBots/TwitterBots, Voyant to analyze and visualize textual patterns, Python to create story generators, and R Studio for topic modeling. No technological expertise is required.