Description

This course offers students opportunities to engage in hands-on experience with digital tools and techniques available across JMU to answer questions in the humanities and social sciences. It provides a history of digital methods, projects, and techniques, and asks students to consider the impact of digital technologies as complex, socially situated, and political tools through which humans make meaning. This course is required for the Digital Studies minor, but is open to all.

Faculty

By design, this course is taught by professors from different disciplines. Each iteration of the course will be different because of this.

Course Learning Objectives

1. Become more thoughtful, critical, and reflective users of digital tools, technologies, and spaces by understanding that all technologies are complex, socially situated, and political tools through which humans make meaning.

2. Gain hands-on experience using digital tools and techniques to answer questions in the humanities and social sciences.

3. Learn about the history of Digital Studies in an overview of important projects, methods, technologies, and best practices.

4. Engage with the resources available at JMU to support work on digital teaching and research projects.

5. Evaluate the mediation and possible loss that occurs when analog materials, such as physical artifacts, text, images, maps, and film, are translated into a digital ecosystem.

Not all courses taught previously will be taught again.