Welcome!

This is the website for the Introduction to Digital Studies class (Spring 2022) at the University of Maryland in College Park. Our professor is Dr. Catherine Knight Steele, and we meet weekly to discuss approaches to Digital Studies.

In this course, we are thinking through the histories of digital technology, situated within the cultural and social contexts from which it emerges; with a focus on critical analysis of platforms, technoculture, big data, networks, infrastructure, archives, and design thinking. We are strengthening social media analysis by understanding platforms and infrastructure. We pair big data analysis with ethical archival practices that consider the people and artifacts at the center of our work. In addition to studying content and form related to digital culture, we are learning computational tools that enhance textual, geospatial, and network analysis. This course introduces the histories, theories, and controversies at the center of the interdisciplinary work of digital studies.

If you are interested in any of these issues or just curious about Digital Studies, keep reading!

What is Digital Studies?

Digital Studies is an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship and teaching that offers graduate students a chance to combine the critical study of new forms of digital media and identity with creative and analytical practices utilizing digital media and the application of computational tools and techniques to traditional areas of humanistic study and critical social scientific inquiry. While it is often hands-on or applied, Digital Studies encourages—indeed demands—work that is primarily critical, theoretical, historical, or experimental in nature. Digital Studies is thus a critical, scholarly, and creative response to the widespread influence of digital media across nearly every aspect of contemporary life; more specifically, it recognizes that teaching, research, and scholarship cannot remain isolated from the networks, platforms, and new media all around us.

What can you find on this website?

Here you can find projects that we develop for the class, shared notes from readings that cover a variety of subjects related with the digital world, infographics that talk about specific issues from Digital Studies, games or experiments that we do during class and everything that we feel might help someone looking to learn a bit more about this.

Who is making this?

This website is being created collaboratively among all the students from the class. We are graduate students from UMD that come from different disciplines and backgrounds: journalism, performing arts studies, theater, literature, and more.