The Digital Studies MA and BA/MA programs allow three elective courses, one in the Winter Quarter and two in the Spring Quarter, in addition to the seven core courses required for the degree. The Minor in Digital Studies allows one elective course among the six courses required for the Minor. Students who have previously taken a course in statistics may request an exemption from taking DIGS 20002/30002, “Data Analysis for the Humanities I,” enabling them to take an additional elective in the Autumn Quarter in lieu of DIGS 20002/30002.
Electives may be chosen from among the course offerings of any department or program in the University, subject to the enrollment restrictions and prerequisites that may pertain to the course. At least one of the three MA electives must entail computational methods or have a digital orientation, broadly defined; and the one elective for the Minor must do so.
MA and BA/MA students are encouraged to take elective courses that pertain to the topic of their MA thesis project. Students must request approval from the Director of Digital Studies for 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 in the Digital Studies MA, BA/MA, and Minor programs. 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, keeping in mind that only one of the MA and BA/MA electives is required to have a digital orientation.
- ARTV 32502 Data and Algorithm in Art
- CLAS 35415 Text Into Data: Digital Philology
- 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
- 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
- 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
- LING 32880 Computational Models in Phonology
- LING 38610 Computational Linguistics I
- LING 38620 Computational Linguistics II
- 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 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
- RLLT 34500 Digital Approaches to Text Analysis
