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Your Portal to the Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia

Media Studies

Content analysis is a fundamental method in communication and media studies, combining qualitative interpretation with quantitative data analysis. Content analysis enables individuals and teams to systematically transform a large collection of media artifacts into a set of standardized observations suitable for exploratory data mining, statistical analysis, and critical inquiry. This course combines practical training in state-of-the-art tools with a theoretical investigation of the conceptual underpinnings of the method.

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Computers are universal media. Our intimacy with computers shapes how we think about our communities, histories, cultures, society, and ourselves. Learn to program these "thinking machines" as an act of philosophical inquiry and personal expression, challenging your beliefs about creativity, intelligence, randomness, and communication. Students with no previous experience are especially welcome!

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Check back soon for a summary of the course

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Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9:30am - 10:45am in Ruffner 175.

Some undergraduate course offerings can count toward your elective requirement, but that depends on the department and professor. If you'd like to take this course, contact the professor to see if they would allow you to take it and what they would require of your work in the course to ensure it counts at the graduate level.

Computers are universal media. Our intimacy with computers shapes how we think about our communities, histories, cultures, society, and ourselves. Learn to program...

Course


Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:30-10:45 a.m. in Minor Hall

Today, nearly every adult in the U.S. uses the internet. Wireless signals silently fill our public and private spaces. In this course, you will learn how computer networks became a medium for interpersonal communication and community. We will “reverse engineer” the technologies and technical cultures that gave rise to the global information infrastructure. Along the way, you will explore unfinished systems, abandoned experiments, and other historical “dead ends.” This course takes a hands-on approach to media history...

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The Archaeology of Legal Definitions of Speech uses natural language processing to chart changes in the legal definition of speech and to place this language in its cultural and technological contexts. Drawing on a large corpus of Supreme Court decisions dealing with the First Amendment, the Archaeology identifies the terminology associated with speech in different historical periods, highlighting discontinuities in the way the law defines and delimits speech and drawing attention to the specific meanings of the concept in the past. It also seeks to place these different meanings in a...

Project


This course will introduce you to the theory and practice of database application design in the context of the digital liberal arts.  Beginning with the premise that the database is the defining symbolic form of the postmodern era, you will review critical and practical literature about databases, study examples of their use in projects from a variety of humanities disciplines, and engage in the actual design of a database application as a course project.  Topics to be covered will include data models, web-based database development using PHP and MySQL, interface design, data...

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“We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race.”
— Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

We live in a time of profound cultural change. One of the causes of this change is the transformation of our digital ecology from print and traditional broadcast media to networked digital media, characterized by the rise of database-mediated communication within a global sphere of information exchange. These changes in our media...

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