Transformations in Digital Cultures
This course is about how digitalisation has produced new interfaces between society, culture and doing social research. Using the theoretical framework “techno-moral change”, we discussed topics like digital participation, gender and technology, body and brain visions, and future imaginaries of digital technologies.
Research method: Qualitative interviews Skills: Blogging [Wordpress]
Real Virtualities
This course is about how media extend our senses and our engagement with the world (Marshall McLuhan). Here, we made sense of our mediated experiences using the concepts of aura, authenticity, telepresence, hyperreality, embodiment and more.
Research method: Phenomenology
Design Thinking and Maker Culture
This course is about the theories, methods and principles of Design Thinking and the ethos of Maker Culture. Design thinking helps us think creatively beyond logical and analytical approaches, so that we can address the wicked problems of today. In groups, we applied design thinking to a problem and created prototypes for our ideas; later, we pitched them through a podcast that we scripted, recorded and edited ourselves.
Research method: Ethnography, Design thinking Skills: Creating a podcast [Audacity]
Machines of Knowledge
This course is about the transformation of the web from an information space to a series of dynamic knowledge sites, as well as the accompanying opportunities and challenges. Each week addressed a different theme, including digital archives, digital narratives, public spheres, citizen science and participatory culture and data ethics. For the final paper, we came up with a research question aligned to one of the themes of the course, built our own corpus (from Twitter or Youtube comments), applied text analysis and reported our findings.
Research method: Distant reading Skills: Building a corpus, Text analysis [Voyant Tools]
Creating Digital Collections I
This course focuses on digitization of objects and reflecting on their digital materiality, object biographies, authenticity, affordances and aura. Here, we learned the basics of photography and photogrammetry, and had a chance to digitize one object for the class collection.
Skills: Photogrammetry, 3D modelling and post-processing [Agisoft Metashape, SketchFab]
Creating Digital Collections II
Continuing from Part I, we create a digital collection from everyone’s 3D models. Each object represents 21st century ideas / challenges / values and together all objects form a Virtual Time Capsule that encapsulates the first quarter of this century. In teams, we worked on the narratives of the objects and the collection, played with interactive elements and published our own pages. We also learned about curating digital collections, multimodality and the politics of collecting.
Skills: Project management [Trello], Blogging [Wordpress]