Elective Courses

The curriculum for the one-year M.A. in Digital Studies includes three elective courses of the student’s own choosing in addition to the six core courses required for the degree. The undergraduate minor allows one elective course.

At least one of the three elective courses for the M.A. must deal with digital computing, in some fashion, whether or not the course entails actual coding; the other two may be on any subject of interest to the student. The single elective allowed for the undergraduate minor must deal with digital computing.

Elective courses may be chosen from among the course offerings of any department or program in the Division of the Humanities or the Division of the Social Sciences of the University of Chicago, subject to the enrollment restrictions and prerequisites that may pertain to the course. Students will not normally be permitted to enroll in courses offered by other schools or divisions of the University; however, students may petition the Director of Curriculum and Instruction of the Forum for Digital Culture for permission to take such a course.

Students who have previously passed a college-level course in computer programming or statistics with a grade of B (3.0) or higher may petition the Director of Curriculum and Instruction for an exemption from taking the corresponding core course, i.e., DIGS 20001/30001, “Introduction to Computer Programming with Python,” or DIGS 20002/30002, “Data Analysis I: Introduction to Statistics.” If the petition is granted, the core course will be replaced by an additional elective course.

Students must obtain written approval from the Director of Curriculum and Instruction to take elective courses that do not appear on the list of preapproved elective courses below. This requirement applies both to courses that deal with digital computing and courses on other topics.

 

Electives Courses for Specialized Areas of Digital Studies

Students who are interested in digital textual studies are encouraged to take DIGS 30031, “Digital Texts I: Corpus Building and Corpus Statistics,” in the Winter Quarter and DIGS 30032, “Digital Texts II: Advanced Topics in Textual Analysis,” in the Spring Quarter.

Students who are interested in digital media studies are encouraged to take DIGS 30041, “Digital Media I: Game Design with Unity,” in the Winter Quarter and DIGS 30042, “Digital Media II: Virtual Reality with Unity,” in the Spring Quarter.

Students who are interested in digital art and archaeology are encouraged to take DIGS 30021, “Digital Archaeology,” in the Winter Quarter.

Students who are interested in artificial intelligence are encouraged to take DIGS 30006, “Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities,” in the Spring Quarter. This elective course builds on the required core course DIGS 30004, “Data Analysis II: Data Visualization and Machine Learning.”

Preapproved Elective Courses

The following courses offered in the Division of the Humanities and the Division of the Social Sciences that pertain in some way to digital computing are preapproved as elective courses for the Master of Arts in Digital Studies of Language, Culture, and History, the joint BA/MA program, and the undergraduate minor.

This list is provided as a convenient starting point for choosing elective courses that deal in some way with digital computing. Note that these courses may not be offered in a given year and some have prerequisites or enrollment restrictions that may prevent students from taking them.

Students are free to inspect departmental course offerings and choose elective courses that do not appear on the list below, but they must obtain written permission from the Director of Curriculum and Instruction before enrolling in a course that is not listed here.

  • ARTV 32502, Data and Algorithm in Art
  • CLAS 35415, Text Into Data: Digital Philology
  • CLAS 35922, Digital Humanities for the Ancient World
  • 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
  • DIGS 10000, Approaches to Digital Humanities Using Python (Summer)
  • DIGS 30006, Artificial Intelligence and the Humanities (Spring)
  • DIGS 30021, Digital Archaeology (Winter)
  • DIGS 30031, Digital Texts I: Corpus Building and Corpus Statistics (Winter)
  • DIGS 30032, Digital Texts II: Advanced Topics in Textual Analysis (Spring)
  • DIGS 30041, Digital Media I: Game Design with Unity (Winter)
  • DIGS 30042, Digital Media II: Virtual Reality with Unity (Spring)
  • GEOG 30500, Introduction to Spatial Data Science
  • GEOG 38202, Geographic Information Science I (Autumn)
  • GEOG 38402, Geographic Information Science II (Winter)
  • GEOG 38602, Geographic Information Science III (Spring)
  • 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
  • KNOW 32208, Posthuman Becoming
  • KNOW 36065, Classification as World-Making
  • LING 32880, Computational Models in Phonology
  • LING 38610, Computational Linguistics I
  • LING 38620, Computational Linguistics II
  • MAAD 21111, Creative Coding
  • 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 31300, AI Applications in 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

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