The MA and BA/MA programs in Digital Studies include three elective courses of the student’s own choosing in addition to the six core courses required for the degree. The minor in Digital Studies allows one elective course.
Students who have previously passed college-level courses in computer programming and/or statistics with a grade of B or higher may petition the Director of Digital Studies for an exemption from taking the core courses DIGS 20001/30001, “Introduction to Computer Programming with Python,” and/or DIGS 20002/30002, “Data Analysis I: Introduction to Statistics.” If the petition is granted, each core course from which a student is exempted will be replaced by an additional elective course.
Elective courses may be chosen from among the course offerings of any department or program in the University of Chicago, subject to the enrollment restrictions and prerequisites that may pertain to the course. At least one of the three MA electives must deal with digital computing in some fashion, whether or not it entails actual coding; and the one elective for the minor in Digital Studies must do so.
Students must obtain approval from the Director of Digital Studies to take elective courses that do not appear on the list of preapproved electives below.
Preapproved Electives
The following digitally oriented courses are preapproved for use as electives for the MA, joint BA/MA, and undergraduate minor in Digital Studies. These courses are subject to change and may not be offered in a given year. Some of them have prerequisites or enrollment restrictions that may prevent a student from taking them.
This list is provided as a convenient starting point for choosing electives that have a digital orientation. Students are free to inspect departmental course offerings and choose electives that do not appear on this list, subject to the approval of the Director of Digital Studies.
Students who are interested in textual studies are strongly encouraged to take DIGS 30031, “Digital Texts I: Corpus Building and Corpus Statistics,” in the Winter Quarter and/or DIGS 30032, “Digital Texts II: Advanced Topics in Textual and Linguistic Analysis,” in the Spring Quarter.
Students who are interested in AI methods for data analysis are strongly encouraged to take DIGS 30006, “Data Analysis III: Deep Learning,” in the Spring Quarter, which builds on the required core course DIGS 30004, “Data Analysis II: Data Visualization and Machine Learning.”
- ARTV 32502 Data and Algorithm in Art
- CLAS 35415 Text Into Data: Digital Philology
- CLAS 35922 Digital Humanities for the Ancient World
- CMST 25204 Media Ecology: Embodiment and Software
- CMST 27110 Digital Cinema
- CMST 27815 Introduction to Art, Technology, and Media
- CMST 27916 Critical Videogame Studies
- CMST 35954 Alternate Reality Games: Theory and Production
- CMST 37020 New Media at a Distance
- CMST 37803 Digital Media Theory
- CMST 37911 Augmented Reality Production
- CMST 37920 Virtual Reality Production
- CMST 67827 Politics of Media: From the Culture Industry to Google Brain
- CMST 67922 Data Driven Dystopias
- DIGS 10000 Approaches to Digital Humanities Using Python (Summer only)
- DIGS 30006 Data Analysis III: Deep Learning
- DIGS 30021 Digital Archaeology
- DIGS 30031 Digital Texts I: Corpus Building and Corpus Statistics
- DIGS 30032 Digital Texts II: Advanced Topics in Textual and Linguistic Analysis
- ENGL 19570 Text as Data: Interpretation in the Digital Humanities
- ENGL 25980 Technorelations: Intimacy, Bodies, Machines
- ENGL 25990 Always Already New: Printed Books and Electronic Texts
- ENGL 32250 The Printed Book in the West
- GEOG 30500 Introduction to Spatial Data Science
- GEOG 38202 Geographic Information Science I
- GEOG 38402 Geographic Information Science II
- GEOG 38602 Geographic Information Science III
- GEOG 38702 Introduction to GIS and Spatial Analysis
- HIPS 25205 Computers, Minds, Intelligence and Data
- HIST 25415 History of Information
- HIST 29523 Data History: Information Overload from the Enlightenment to Google
- HIST 35425 Censorship, Information Control, and Revolutions in Information Technology from the Printing Press to the Internet
- HIST 39530 Introduction to Digital History I
- HIST 39521 Introduction to Digital History II
- KNOW 32011 Data: History and Literature
- KNOW 32208 Posthuman Becoming
- KNOW 36065 Classification as World-Making
- LING 32880 Computational Models in Phonology
- LING 38610 Computational Linguistics I
- LING 38620 Computational Linguistics II
- MAAD 21111 Creative Coding
- MAAD 21500 Metamedia Design Studio
- MAAD 23631 Introduction to Internet Art
- MAAD 23632 Intermediate Internet Art
- MAAD 23640 Embodied Data and Gamified Interfaces
- MACS 30123 Large-Scale Computing for the Social Sciences
- MACS 31300 AI Applications in Social Sciences
- MACS 40400 Computation and the Identification of Cultural Patterns
- MUSI 26618 Electronic Music I
- MUSI 36630 Musical Robotics
- NEAA 30061 Ancient Landscapes I
- NEAA 30062 Ancient Landscapes II
- PHIL 29904 Ethics in the Digital Age
- PHIL 32962 The Epistemology of Deep Learning
