Objectives for the Program in Digital Media Innovation
This major is designed to creatively explore digital media in a way that can be applied to a wide variety of careers and across a large cross-section of disciplinary practices. New digital tools continue to reshape industries across the globe. The courses in this major allow students to develop a range of new digital skills that span social media, multimedia storytelling, information design, data studies, coding, and more. Developing a wide set of skills across media will allow students to emerge from the program ready to meet the needs of a flexible and changing global economy. The Digital Media Innovation (DMI) major offers students the hands-on opportunity to explore the way that digital technology and computing are changing social and cultural systems in commerce, the law, the arts, and the broader human experience.
The DMI program culminates in a capstone project that demonstrates the changing ways we construct narratives using data and make technologies and practices that reconsider the human experience in a digital age. The capstone project is geared around their scholarship and professional development, giving them an opportunity to develop professional portfolio pieces that will assist them in their careers.
The Digital Media Innovation degree is typically awarded as a Bachelor of Science (B.S.). The Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) will be awarded if the student has completed courses demonstrating advanced intermediate proficiency in a world language.
Requirements for the Major in Digital Media Innovation
The Bachelor of Science and the Bachelor of Arts degree in Digital Media Innovation requires 33 semester hours in its major requirements.
Program Curriculum Requirements
The program aims to offer Digital Media Innovation as a viable and appealing opportunity to students as a potential double major. To allow for double majors, particularly in English Studies, Communications Media, Game Design, History, and Geographic Science and Technology, students can count requirements that fulfill both majors for up to three courses. While a double major is not required, given the wide range of applications for digital media innovation skills, students will have credit hour space to explore specific disciplinary or profession specific manifestations of their work. That could be a second major, a minor, or otherwise strategic use of their free electives.
Furthermore, to ensure that students have wide exposure to a number of disciplines, we also stipulate that students cannot count more than five courses in the same discipline toward their coursework in the Digital Media Innovation major.
Pathway Requirements
Students must complete their choice of TWO 12-credit pathways from the three options:
- Storytelling, Narrative, and Design - 12 credits
This pathway emphasizes new approaches to storytelling, narrative, and design afforded by emerging technologies. How can technology allow us to craft new types of stories, and how might technology allow us to understand our past stories in new ways? Students will get hands-on experience with writing, recording, and designing using these tools.
- Data Studies - 12 credits
In this pathway, students develop the necessary skills to understand how data is being leveraged by companies, organizations, and governments to make decisions, generate profits, and persuade citizens. Students will have the opportunity to develop hands-on projects with data while exploring questions about how these increasingly quantitative practices shape our understanding of the world.
- Digital Culture, Heritage, History and Preservation - 12 credits
This pathway explores questions about how technology helps us record our present and interpret our past while considering the challenges the future poses from obsolescence to innovation. Courses could also consider material culture and media archaeology. This pathway offers hands-on opportunities to work on emerging digital projects.
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