MA Digital Media, Culture and Society / Course details

Digital media, software, platforms, and services have not only transformed the way we experience culture, conduct our social lives, work, or act politically. Even more profoundly, various digital evolutions – from pre-digital to computational, desktop to mobile, web 1.0 to web 2.0, and social network to platform – have offered us new approaches to understand the world, whether through the updating, and modification, of originally ‘non-digital’ methods (digital ethnography, mobile methods, mapping etc.) or the development of ‘digitally native’ approaches (app walkthroughs, cultural analytics, text mining etc.) that utilize the specific technical affordances of contemporary media and technology such as apps, software, and platforms. In addition, digital media have provided substantial challenges to the valuation of, and accessibility to, knowledge itself. This course unit will provide you with both an introduction to digital tools and methods - what they are and how to use them, practically - as well as key methodological and ethical debates, to help you to concretely examine and analyse contemporary media and their effects.

• To introduce students to digital methods and methodologies
• To offer an overview of current debates around digital methods and methodologies
• To provide a critical understanding of how to use digital tools, methods, and approaches

Students will be introduced to digital methods and the importance of methodological approaches to understanding digital media and their cultural, social, technical, and political entanglements. In the first half of the course unit, students will learn about different methods and methodological approaches across the digital spectrum, including methods/ologies that have a ‘pre-digital’ history (such as digital ethnography), to more ‘digitally native’ methods (such as cultural analytics). In the second half of the course unit, students will explore different methodological pathways – ways of engaging with case study material, topics, and settings – that might conceivably be taken in a research context. These pathways will invite students to think about how empirical work on, and with, digital media and data is devised and executed. The intention is that these pathways will help students to understand the partiality, contextuality, and applicability of digital methods and methodologies, and the way that certain approaches might surface or evidence different aspects of digital culture, offering the opportunity to evaluate their practical and ethical dimensions.  

The unit consists of 1.5-hour lectures, and 2-hour seminars. The lecture component will ordinarily consist of introductions to each digital method/methodology, as well as key practical, epistemological, and ethical debates around them. The seminar component will ordinarily consist of practical activities in which students will have the opportunity to use, explore, and experiment with different digital methods and methodological approaches. This seminar component will have a mixture of individual and group-focused activities, in which students are invited to collaborate on these practical activities, offering the possibility of critically thinking, designing, and working together. Lecture material, key reading lists, activity briefs, and links to digital tools, methods, and services will be available via the corresponding Blackboard course unit page. 

• Critically evaluate the use of digital tools, methods and methodologies in research into key questions about culture and society
• Determine how digital methods can be used to study culture and society
• Interpret and analyse how digital methods and methodologies have been developed and employed in different cultural contexts and for different purposes
• Develop persuasive arguments on digital methodologies through critical engagement and experimentation with digital tools and software
• Critically reflect on and compare the political and ethical implications of using different digital tools and methods

• Apply analytical skills to examine the uses of digital method and methodologies for studying digital media and culture
• Demonstrate awareness of critical debates on digital tools, methods, approaches, and methodologies
• Articulate and explain key digital methods and methodological concepts that help to understand digital media and culture in contemporary society
• Demonstrate awareness of broad scope of digital methods and methodologies, and their various advantages and disadvantages

• Engage in oral and written debates on digital methods and methodologies
• Learn to use digital tools, methods, and approaches
• Use digital and non-digital research materials and resources to support understanding of digital methods and methodologies
• Learn to work independently and collectively to select and evaluate relevant material, tools, and case studies
• Generate findings, results, and outputs through digital methods and methodological approaches

• Present information, ideas, and arguments to support the use of digital tools, methods, approaches, and methodologies
• Demonstrate use of digital tools, methods, and approaches in different contexts and settings
• Demonstrate critical evaluative and problem-solving skills in relation to digital methods

Ahnert, R., Ahnert S. E., Coleman, C. N., and Weingart, S. B. (2021) The Network Turn: Changing Perspectives in the Humanities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Association of Internet Researchers (2020) Internet Research: Ethical Guidelines 3.0. hhtps://aoir.org/ethics/.

Bode K., and Goodlad, L.M.E. (2023) Data worlds: An introduction. Critical AI 1 (1-2). https://doi.org/10.1215/2834703X-10734026

Duguay, S., and Gold-Apel, H. (2023) Stumbling blocks and alternative paths: Reconsidering the walkthrough method for analyzing apps. Social Media + Society 9(1): 1-10. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231158822  

D’Ignazio, C, and Klein, L. F. (2020) Data Feminism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Drucker, J. (2021) The Digital Humanities Coursebook: An Introduction to Digital Methods for Research and Scholarship. Abingdon: Routledge.

Fincham, B., McGuiness, M. and Murray, L. (2009) (eds.) Mobile Methodologies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gabrys, J. (2019) How to Do Things with Sensors. Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Gold, M. K. and Klein, L. F. (eds.) Debates in the Digital Humanities. University of Minnesota Press. https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/projects/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2019

Law, J. (2004) After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. Abingdon: Routledge.

Lury, C., Fensham, R., Heller-Nicholas, A., Lammes, S., Last, A., Michael, M. and Uprichard, E. (2018) Routledge Handbook of Interdisciplinary Research Methods. Abingdon: Routledge.  

Manovich, L. (2017). Cultural analytics, social computing and digital humanities. In Schäfer, M. T. and van Es, K. (eds.) The Datafied Society: Studying Culture through Data. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp. 55-68.